Winning at What Cost?

How strange that I should feel tongue-tied. George Steinbrenner is dead. The National League finally won an All-Star Game. The second half is starting in baseball, and Carlos Beltran, heretofore my favorite Mets player, is coming back.

So many thoughts go through my mind, some of them not even coherent, especially with respect to Steinbrenner and Beltran.

We’ve heard, over and over, “all George cared about was winning, he was all about winning,” while acknowledging that he was a sonova bitch, usually followed by a story about some anonymous contribution that everybody seems to know about. I’ve seen sportswriters wax poetic and get tearry-eyed because he remembered their name.

When Steinbrenner came into baseball, I thought he was a jerk. Most people did. He didn’t do anything unless it was stupid. Later on, when he finally stepped back a bit to let baseball people run his club, he made sure to get his face and name back in the papers, usually by doing something outlandish and petty, something brash and mean and arrogant.

I’m sorry the man died, I truly am, and sorrier still that he was apparently gravely ill before his heart finally gave way. But I never liked him. I was sorry Yogi and he got back together. And I don’t think he should be in the Hall of Fame, not that that’s even all that important.

If I were ever a Yankee fan, I’d probably feel much different. But I was never a Yankee fan. It goes against my nature. I’m one of those champions of the underdog…always have been. And that is why I became a Mets fan, after having been a Dodgers fan before that.

I don’t believe in winning at all costs. Yankee fans do. George Steinbrenner certainly did. His every action was self-serving, at least his public actions. And self-serving meant Yankee-serving by definition. So I can understand Yankee fans liking him, even loving him. And that may be the only thing I’ll ever understand about Yankee fans, that, and their win at all costs philosophy.

If George had bought the Mets, and ran the Mets the way he ran the Yankees, I’d have become another team’s fan, probably a team like the Phillies or Boston, but not the Cubs or Kansas City. My team would have to care passionately about winning, but not at all costs.

There are examples of the Yankee avarice too numerous to mention but the most recent and heinous example was their attempted acquisition of Cliff Lee. The Yanks have Sabathia, Pettitte, Burnett, Vazquez and Hughes. That’s five very fine starters. That should be enough.

For anyone who cares about competitiveness, the Yankees were already loaded. They didn’t need Cliff Lee. But the Yankees don’t care about the rest of baseball. They only care about the Yankees, their storied history, their hallowed stadium, their rings, their monuments and on and on.

The Yankees tried to guarantee their World Series win. It wasn’t enough to have Arod and Jeter and Teixeira and Cano, Posada and even Swisher, and all those pitchers. That wasn’t enough surety for the Evil Empire. For Yankee management and fans, what fun is there in watching a good baseball game?

All of that now brings me to Carlos Beltran. Carlos was out of the game for most of last season and most of this season with a bone bruise of the knee. Not that I don’t believe he was really hurt. I do. But I know there are probably contract issues that entered into the situation.

Beltran has it made in the shade, if he can find any of that in Flushing. The Mets are 4 games out, have a nice pitching staff, some good young players and, as he will still be considered as recovering, there are no outlandish expectations of him. As he always has been a great player though, we can expect that he will provide some big hits, make some nice catches, and, in most respects, be Carlos Beltran. But he won’t be expected to carry the club.

What annoys me most is that he’ll be playing at someone else’s expense. In every case, that someone else has been a key player for the Mets this year, whether it’s Francoeur, Pagan or Jason Bay.

Once again, that brings me to my point about winning at any cost. As good as Beltran has been, I’d like to see him earn his way back into the lineup. But that won’t happen, it can’t really happen, it probably shouldn’t happen, as winning certainly takes precedence over some bruised feelings.

But it doesn’t go down easy for me as a Mets fan. This Mets club seems well-knit as a team. So I worry about chemistry. But I also enjoy watching every one of those outfielders, especially Francoeur and Pagan. From my standpoint, I’d rather see Bay sit.

But, for the same reasons as Beltran must play, Bay must play. It’s that crazy but true axiom in baseball that says players eventually find their level. It’s very often true. As hard as it may be for me to believe right now, the axiom says that Jason Bay will get hot, or even torrid. And Carlos Beltran will eventually hit .300, drive in 100 runs and score a hundred times in a full season.

But it’s those exceptions to the rule that grate the most on a fan’s patience and compassion. David Wright had his worst year by far last year. His power just disappeared and never came back. Recall the lean times of Carlos Delgado in years past before he went absolutely crazy at the plate to carry the club seemingly all by himself for about six weeks.

Mets fans have to hope for the best, that a club that finishes 4 games out at the half, with Francoeur and Pagan, can finish first at season’s end with Carlos Beltran, all other things being equal (which in and of itself is saying a mouthful).

Go Carlos!!

Fredi Finishes the Fish!

What a deal! It helps if your opponent’s manager is a grandstanding fool and Florida’s Fredi Gonzalez filled that role admirably yesterday. He conceded the winning run to our Metsies in the bottom of the 8th by not playing his infield in with the winning run on third base. Florida then got the double play but the winning run came trotting in. Thanks very much, Fredi!

Now I know his thinking was that he had the heart of his batting order coming up in the 9th and the Mets Ike Davis was likely to hit the ball hard, but c’mon Fredi, that heart of your batting order would be facing one of the top closers in the National League in the person of K-Rod.

And that 8th inning masterpiece of thinking was actually the second totally inane move Fredi made on the day. Fredi took out his best pitcher, Ricky Nolasco, in the 6th inning and replaced him with virtual nobody Tim Wood, who promptly gave up the hit the Mets needed to score two of those runners.

Nolasco was understandably beside himself. He had given up nothing but cheap singles and a bunt. If anybody on that field was capable of getting the Fish out of that inning, it was that guy standing on the mound, Ricky Nolasco.

But Fredi hadn’t seen enough of Wood in the 6th. So he sent Wood out in the 7th as well. Fredi still hadn’t seen enough of Wood after he walked Davis and gave Barajas a double. So Jeff Francoeur was only too happy to bang one over the fence for a 3-run homer.

Although Wood was only charged with the 3 runs he allowed in the 7th, to me he was responsible for the damage done in the 6th too. Of course it wasn’t all his fault. Fredi bears the responsibility for all of them.

This is the same Fredi Gonzalez who made such a big deal out of Hanley Ramirez’s failure to run hard after a Texas Leaguer popup he missed and then accidentally kicked, this after hurting himself in the previous inning. I know I watched the whole sequence of events and, given the circumstances, Hanley Ramirez deserved a break there. Only a grandstanding manager would have elected to take him out of the game.

Ordinarily, I would never excuse a player who didn’t hustle. But Ramirez had just finished hurting himself, then not only couldn’t catch up with the Texas Leaguer but kicked it as well. You could have made the argument that the whole muffed play was as a result of Ramirez hurting his foot in the inning before.

The brilliant Gonzalez then made Ramirez apologize to the team, thus furthering his embarrassment and deepening his bitterness over the whole affair. Mr. Ramirez doesn’t seem to play hard anymore and I don’t blame him. He’s close to free agency and it’s about 99-1 in my mind that he’ll re-sign with the Marlins. And, for those of you who may not be aware, Hanley Ramirez is one of the five best players in the game today.

Fredi seems to quite enjoy embarrassing his best players. What a management ploy! It’s a good thing Fredi is insulated by the relatively quiet media in the Florida market. If Jerry Manuel or even Girardi had done what Fredi did yesterday, there’d be all kinds of hell to pay.

Gonzalez is a grandstanding manager, much as Joe West was a grandstanding umpire before his official chastisement from the league. If I were a Marlins fan, I’d be screaming for his firing. Instead, he gets kudos for pulling a player who didn’t hustle, no matter the killer circumstances.

Now, maybe the Mets would have won in extra innings anyway, especially the way they’re playing. But Fredi Gonzalez gave them the game. It almost takes all the fun out of the win. Any other manager in the game would have won that game for the Marlins, first by leaving his best pitcher in the game, and second, by playing his infield in.

I congratulate the fine Mets broadcast team, Ron Darling and Gary Cohen, for pointing out the absurdity of both errors. They continue to call them the way they see them.

In my last column, I had pointed out that the “core” Mets were not performing well and provided some revealing statistics to accentuate my point. I was of course referring to Jason Bay, David Wright and Jose Reyes. After Sunday afternoon though, you have to wonder whether this Mets team really has anything you could call a core.

And that could be a good thing. I’d much prefer an even, strong performance from the whole team, which is closer to what we are actually seeing from this Mets team. It’s very often other combinations of players doing it for the Mets these days, either Barajas and Francoeur, or Pagan and Ike Davis, or even Castillo or Cora.

It helps them too, not having a fool for a manager. Although I’ve slammed Manuel for seeing things “far off” while not accepting the obvious, I surely appreciated his presence Sunday afternoon. His call for a “hit and run” with Bay at the plate and Pagan on first base was a master stroke.

Bay sometimes totally mis-manages his at-bats, but when forced to swing at a ball, there’s no better risk to at least make contact with the ball than Jason Bay. Bay did make contact, of course, and stroked a six-hopper through the left side of the infield, moving Pagan, who was running with the pitch, all the way over to third base.

Pagan scored the winning run, of course, on Davis’s double play after Fredi’s decision to play his infielders deep and let the winning run score without a challenge, with just one inning to play and facing arguably the best reliever in the game today.

K-Rod finished the Marlins, of course, but Fredi had actually lost it for them a little earlier.