Whoa

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Within the last hour, the Mets traded Angel Pagan to the Giants for Andres Torres and Ramon Ramirez, signed Frank Francisco to a two-year deal and signed Jon Rauch to a one-year deal.

Whoa.

OK, a lot to digest here, and some more of that’s going to happen in the morning. The trade seems like a fair one: Pagan and Torres both enjoyed career years in 2010 then rough years in 2011, though Pagan seemed to endure some tough luck thanks to batting average on balls in play where Torres did not. When everything’s going well they’re reasonably similar players, but since Pagan is several years younger he seems a safer bet to bounce back. Torres, for what it’s worth, is under team control through arbitration for an extra year.

But the Mets get Ramirez as well, which balances out the age difference between Pagan and Torres. None of Ramirez’s rate stats jump off the page, but he’s doing something right: He has a stellar career 139 ERA+ over 364 1/3 innings of relief work. Someone will inevitably mention — as they probably should, and as I am now — that Ramirez has traditionally underperformed ERA estimators like FIP and xFIP, but the longer he does it, I suppose, the more reasonable it seems to guess that he’ll keep it up.

Francisco’s deal is reportedly worth $12 million over two years, which probably means he’ll be the closer. He’s filled that role in part seasons before for Texas and Toronto, and should be fine in it for the Mets. He strikes out a ton of dudes and allows perhaps a few more baserunners than we’d all like, but given the deal Heath Bell got, Francisco seems like a bargain at that rate.

Rauch is extremely tall and not especially good. He’s one of the aforementioned free-agent relievers that’s not obviously better than Manny Acosta. He has had nice seasons in the past and outside of a rough campaign in 2011 he hasn’t been awful, but with the additions of Francisco and Ramirez today he actually seems superfluous.

Maybe the Mets are planning on re-signing Chris Young and need someone to guard him in pickup basketball games. Either way, Rauch isn’t a huge mistake at one year and $3.5 million since he should be decent out of the bullpen, but it seems odd to invest anything in middle-innings relievers.

I suppose that leaves the bullpen looking something like: Francisco, Ramirez, Rauch, Acosta, Bobby Parnell, Tim Byrdak and, I don’t know… Pedro Beato? DJ Carrasco? Daniel Herrera? Longman McGee? I guess there’s no reason to settle on the 12th pitcher in December. Plus there’s a solid chance more trades will be made. Hell, at this rate there’s a strong possibility more trades have been made while I’ve been writing this.

Also worth noting: Defensive metrics sweat Torres hard. UZR is crushing on Andres Torres like a screaming, fainting girl over the Beatles in 1965. Pagan’s UZR dipped a bunch in 2011, so by Fangraphs’ WAR — which heavily weighs UZR — Torres had a significantly better season than Pagan. I don’t know if that’s the type of thing I’d expect to continue, though it certainly can’t hurt to bring in guys who rate so well defensively.

But more on all of it in the morning, provided the Mets haven’t made six or seven more moves by then.

Sandwich of the Week

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Meant to write this up earlier but then suddenly Jose Reyes was on the stupid Marlins.

The sandwich: Barbecue pork banh mi from Banh Mi Saigon, 198 Grand Street in Manhattan.

The construction: Pork (in little pieces, not quite ground but definitely not pulled) in some sort of sweet seasoning with a thin slice of Vietnamese ham, cucumbers, jalapenos, cilantro, pickled daikon and carrots on french bread. When I ordered, the man at the counter asked if I wanted it spicy. I said yes, as I always do.

Important background information: I can’t put a finger on exactly what I’m looking for in a banh mi, but I know I’ll know it when I taste it. It has become something of a white whale. Actually, I should amend that: I’m looking for a Southeast Asian-inspired sandwich that ranks among the inner-circle Hall of Famers reviewed on this site, if not necessarily a banh mi proper. I’m pretty sure I’ve had one in the past, from the now-defunct Lower East Side Cambodian restaurant Kampuchea, long before I reviewed sandwiches on the Internet.

(Whoa: A quick Google tangent tells me that the chef at Kampuchea now owns a sandwich shop with two locations in Manhattan called Num Pang that I’ve been meaning to get to. So that just jumped up my list.)

Anyway, I’m soliciting recommendations for great banh mi and banh mi-esque sandwiches. I know the one I’m looking for is out there somewhere. It is not at Banh Mi Saigon, but you’ll find out about that in like three seconds.

What it looks like:

How it tastes: Delicious, but I knew immediately that my banh mi hunt would continue.

The flavor here was nearly perfect: Whatever was seasoning the pork had a pleasant sweetness to it that jived with the tanginess of the daikon and the sharpness of the cilantro. And the bread was good too: Crusty, toasty, tasty, bready. fresh-tasting. The whole works. How you want bread to be.

And the single slice of ham, though barely noticeable, presented just a hint of familiar cold-cut flavor, something vaguely grounding: This sandwich reminds you that it is a sandwich. I’m for it.

It wasn’t particularly spicy though. I’ve found there’s a pretty massive variance in the spiciness of jalapenos, and maybe the lot on this sandwich just happened to be underwhelming. More on that in a minute.

And more than anything, I wanted it to be, well, wetter. It was unclear if there was any sort of dressing on the sandwich, and if the pork was in a sauce, not much of it made it onto the bread. Usually dryness is not a problem associated with any type of pork sandwich given the greasiness associated with that meat. And on a banh mi in particular you’d think some of the vegetables might make it almost soggy. Yet this sandwich clearly needed some sort of moistener.

There was a bottle of sriracha on the counter near where I ate, so I squirted a generous serving on the second half of my sandwich, and then whoa nelly. Something about the hot sauce amplified all the awesome flavors of the meats and vegetables, plus gave the whole thing more moisture and spiciness. The sauce catapulted the sandwich to obvious Hall of Fame levels, and the rest of the sandwich was devoured in delirious sandwich frenzy.

What it’s worth: That’s the other thing! This sandwich cost $4.50. That’s like the price of a Big Mac in New York City (Ed. Note: Is it? Has anyone ever had a Big Mac in New York City?), and for that at Banh Mi Saigon you get a huge, fresh, awesome sandwich.

How it rates: 91 out of 100. A deserving Hall of Famer, but not the no-doubt first-ballot inner-circle guy I’m looking for.

 

The new NL East

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This is the new NL East. The Mets are poor. The Marlins are rich. It’s a place where you put mustard in your coffee, and cream and sugar on your sandwich. But don’t get used to the Mets being poor. They’ll have gobs and gobs of money soon enough, regardless of who owns them. There are too many eyeballs in New York for the Mets to not make money.

And the Phillies leveraged their run of success into something more, becoming a brand, a thing, in a huge metropolitan area. Even though they’ve committed millions and millions of dollars to players in their 30s through 2015, they’re not going to start a fire sale soon. The Braves have never been wild spenders, but they’ve combined a peerless player-development operation with enough money to do most of what they want.

The NL East has become the super-division of baseball. Every division has a spendthrift in their midsts other than the East. It’s the first division where when Free Agent X hits the market, you can make an argument that every team in one division could be after him. The three-way scrum between the Yankees, Red Sox, and Rays has been wildly entertaining over the past few years, but there’s a chance that, one day, all five teams in the NL East will be involved in a crazy arms race, with mutually assured destruction always on the table for at least three teams.

– Grant Brisbee, SBNation.com.

Good read from Brisbee. But as he concludes, let’s wait until the Mets get rich again and the Marlins and Nationals actually get good before we go nuts with it.

If all goes (incredibly) well…

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I’m trying to find some silver lining today, which is difficult in the wake of Jose Reyes’ departure and especially while nursing a not-insignificant hangover. And anyone who has read this site or listened to the podcast with any regularity knows how thoroughly down I am on prospects in general, and on putting so much stock in guys who haven’t done anything at the Major League level.

But it has kind of come to that for the Mets. If this team is to be a legit contender within the next few years, it’s going to need its prospects to pan out. And if all goes incredibly well, we might start getting a glimpse of that this season. So there’s something. Hey!

My understanding is that the club would (understandably) like its pitching prospects to throw a certain number of innings above A-ball before they’re advanced to the Majors. I don’t know that it’s a hard-and-fast total, but I believe it’s between 100 and 150. Paul DePodesta has said multiple times that it’s important for pitchers who come up to the Majors to never have to return to the Minors, which always reads to me like a criticism of the way Omar Minaya and Jerry Manuel handled Jenrry Mejia.

Anyway, Jeurys Familia threw 87 2/3 strong innings in Double-A last year and Matt Harvey threw 59 2/3. If they both start off strong and stay healthy (huge ifs, of course), and guessing that the Mets want them to have about 130 innings of upper-level Minor League experience before they join the big club, it’s feasible we could see Familia with the big club by Memorial Day and Harvey by the All-Star Break.

Mejia should return from Tommy John surgery sometime during the season and could — again, if all goes well — join the Major League team by the end of the year. Zack Wheeler is likely ticketed for a full year of Minor League pitching, but if he stays healthy he should hit that ~130 innings mark in 2012 and be a candidate for a Major League rotation spot sometime in 2013.

So in a perfect-world scenario, there’s a chance the Mets could have four highly regarded pitchers under 25 contributing to their Major League club by early in the 2013 season.

Is that likely? Nope. It would take smart handling and an unbelievable run of good fortune. And maybe the Mets are due for that.

Screw everything, get Todd Coffey

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All normal hot-stove caveats should apply here, but I’m going to strap my blinders on and assume there’s something real behind the rumor that the Mets are interested in reliever Todd Coffey.

Coffey is utterly unspectacular. He has a career 105 ERA+, he allows a decent number of baserunners, he doesn’t really strike a lot of guys out, and he yields his fair share of home runs. Statistically, he’s really not any better than Manny Acosta has been for the Mets these past two seasons*. He just has more experience.

But what Coffey can boast that makes him so appealing is sport’s most thrilling inconsequential embellishment, no matter how awesome the Marlins’ new home-run thing will be (and I think it’ll be pretty awesome). When Coffey enters games, the bullpen doors open to the tune of the Ultimate Warrior’s entrance theme, and the red-bearded, barrel-chested Coffey sprints maniacally to the mound. It’s amazing.

Jose Reyes amazing? Oh hell no. But we’ve got to take what we can get at this point, no? Bring on Todd Coffey dammit.

*- This actually happens with surprising frequency: I look at some free-agent relief option and determine he’s not actually any better than Manny Acosta has been for the Mets over the past two seasons. I don’t know if this speaks poorly of the free-agent class of relievers or well of Acosta.

I was going to make the case that the Mets should pursue the former Leo Nunez/current Juan Oviedo if and when he’s non-tendered by the Marlins, but I was unable to convince myself that he’s a huge upgrade over Acosta. I guess it’s good to have several decent relievers regardless. Plus Acosta’s still operating in pretty small samples, and it’ll be interesting to see how his increasingly flyball-prone (and already gopher-friendly) game translates to the renovated Citi Field.

Also, signing a non-tendered Juan Oviedo might be too perfect an indication that the Mets and Marlins have switched places. The Marlins spend big and perhaps irresponsibly on high-priced free agents and the Mets take on their leftovers. MLB2K12.

Exit Jose Reyes

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Maybe free will really is an illusion, and all the choices we think we’re making are only the inevitable fallout of our nature and nurture: Neurons, developed through genetics and years of experience, programmed to fire certain ways in response to certain stimuli, fooling us into believing we’re in control of our decisions.

It’s one of those things we can debate and consider and turn inside out for hours without coming to any objective conclusion, and it doesn’t much matter. I believe such a thing as free will does exist, but I’m willing to amount that my belief could itself be merely the product of my own determined constitution. And again: Who cares? I’m going to go on making the decisions I think are best one way or the other.

Point is, if you wanted to or could opt out of being a Mets fan, I’m pretty sure you would have by now. You watched the Great Collapse of 2007 and the Epic Middling of 2008, and withstood the injury plague of 2009. You gasped in horrified disbelief at the 2010 Opening Day lineup. You sweated out talk of the 2011 fire sale.

And that’s just the big-picture misery. That doesn’t even consider the anecdotes: Omir Santos pinch-hitting from the bullpen, Luis Castillo dropping the pop up, Mike Pelfrey falling, Luis Hernandez hobbling around the bases, Alex Cora actually playing baseball, Daniel Murphy crumpling up in the fetal position in short left field, and too many failed and ill-conceived sacrifice bunts to remember now.

There’s the off-field stuff too, of course: Shirtless Tony Bernazard and the Binghamton Bro-down, and the he-lobby press conference that followed. Ownership’s Bernie Madoff mess, the investigations and lawsuits, the foot-in-mouth feature articles, the failed partial sale, the shrinking payroll, the $70 million loss, the empty stadium, the loans from the league, and probably a hundred other things I’m forgetting.

It’s a veritable bad-news symphony, swelling over five seasons to a frenetic crescendo, its cadence ringing out in the streets and on the airwaves and all around the Internet:

LOLMets.

And you’re still here. The day after Jose Reyes, one of the best and most exciting players the Mets ever developed, signed with a division rival over (we assume) a matter of money, you’re still here reading this purportedly Mets-focused blog. And I’m still here writing it. We’re in this deep.

I have, I think, an enormously high threshold for pain. Because pain-tolerance is also impossible to objectively understand, I can only guess this based on empirical evidence and the suggestions of a series of doctors who initially misdiagnosed various ailments due to my apparently atypical nonchalance. I once played two weeks of middle-school football with a broken rib. A gastroenterologist suggested I had acid reflux when it turned out I had Crohn’s Disease. An orthopedist once chalked up to bad posture the symptoms of Multiple Sclerosis.

I mention all that not to brag and certainly not to seek pity, but to provide context. Maybe I’m not the best person to be coaching or commiserating or doing whatever the hell this is, given the neglectful and ultimately often counterproductive way I normally approach pain. Besides, I am an employee of this network and it behooves me to have you reading this website and watching Mets games in 2012.

But it strikes me that life and fandom are a series of massive tradeoffs, ones that must come out in our favor or else we would choose not to endeavor them. They are marked by so many harsh infinitives we wish we could split: They are to suffer, to shoulder, to stomach, to endure. And we do, almost always, because the rewards – though sometimes few and too far between – are so grand as to make the neverending onslaught of awfulness worthwhile. There are fireworks and funk music and Jose Reyes rounding second. Balloon animals and fried food and the ref’s palms pressed together above his head after a safety.

Every winter 29 teams don’t land the prized free agent. Every year 29 teams don’t win the World Series. One does, and the hope for that combined with the distractions provided by all the more mundane marvels are enough to keep us plodding forward through the agony.

Jose Reyes is off to Miami, and it stings to think about Reyes hitting triples in Little Havana and firing bullets across the infield in the Marlins’ ugly-ass new uniform. And we can fret about its impact on jersey and ticket sales and the long-term ramifications for our Mets, and we can wonder about what would have happened if Reyes hit the market at a different time with the team in different circumstances. But he didn’t.

Sandy Alderson and the Mets need to do what they can to get the team back toward being a regular winner, and once that happens the asses will return to the seats and the revenue will return to the payroll, Reyes or no Reyes.

It’ll happen. Maybe not in 2012 or even 2013, but it will. Great new Mets will come along to soften the blow of Reyes’ departure and leave us only with hazy, pleasant memories of his triples and steals and smiles and dances. It sucks now, and if it sucks more than you can bear you’re welcome to join Reyes in that stupid new hat. But the upside to this — and everything — is that there’s always more awesome stuff on the way eventually.