By Jack McLoone

I thought I was finally free of Jay Bruce. I really thought I was done.

I was wrong.

Now Jay Bruce isn’t the worst thing to happen to this Mets team. It’s not the worst signing Sandy Alderson and company could have made. But it’s still a bad sign, for varying reasons.

My issue with the trade for Bruce in 2016 was the pretense leading to the acquisition: the Mets weren’t scoring runs, and at the time Bruce was leading the league with 80 RBIs. The problem is that runs batted in are a wildly misleading statistic, a product of luck (Bruce was batting .360 with runners in scoring position at the time of his trade) despite batting .265 on the whole. At the time, Alderson was quoted as saying Bruce was “not an absolute perfect fit for us,” and then-manager Terry Collins expressed consternation at fitting Bruce into the lineup.

While RBIs can be a measure of success, they aren’t an effective measure of skill, making trading for them a logical fallacy. Trading on the basis of a flawed stat bit the Mets, with Bruce batting just .219 in his 50 games with New York in 2016 and just 19 RBIs to boot.

The Bruce issues didn’t stop there, as his mere existence made the Mets consider sending Michael Conforto to the minors to start the season. Thanks to the ever-present Met injury bug, Conforto started the season with the big-league team and was looking like a strong MVP candidate until the bug caught him too.

In Bruce’s defense, he had a pretty good 2017 for the Mets, hitting .256 with an on-base percentage of .321 and 29 home runs. What did that net the Mets when they moved him at the deadline? Uh, Ryder Ryan, who sounds like a 90s coming-of-age movie bully with a soft heart and apparently softer fastball, since he had an almost 5.00 ERA at the time.

In a quiet offseason across the lead, the Mets did make another “move,” with quotation marks to indicate just how inconsequential the signing of washed-up first baseman Adrian Gonzalez to the league minimum is. Gonzalez was just traded from the Dodgers to the Braves as part of a salary dump. While the Mets were able to get him on the cheap in a relatively no-risk but also no-reward kind of deal, it stinks of a being an attempt at placating the fans instead of trying to be competitive.
It was only 2015 when the Mets were in the World Series, and they made the Wild Card game the year after. This was a young playoff team that looked ready to challenge the Cubs to represent the National League in the World Series year after year.

Ownership seemed to take this concept of “being on the verge” to mean “we just need our young players to continue to develop,” instead of adequately addressing problem areas like catcher and third base, trotting out the same lineup in 2017.

There’s a certain dissonance between the goals of fans and the goals of ownership in almost every sport. Fans will often criticize ownership, occasionally unfairly, for not spending enough to make a team competitive and choosing finances over winning. This generally results in a cyclical argument where these people are constantly reminded that sports teams are still a business, regardless of the way we treat them more as a part of our lives.

More often than not, these owners will hide behind the guise of being a “small-market” team, a culturally-accepted term that may actually mean nothing. In reality, “small-market” is an excuse for refusing to spend money to be competitive. Take, for example, the Detroit Tigers; as of the collective bargaining agreement that expired in 2016, they were the 17th-largest market. In 2016, their payroll was $192,307,500, good for fourth-highest in baseball. On the flipside, the Oakland Athletics had the seventh-largest market but the 26th-largest payroll ($80,613,332). In other words, every one who owns a team can afford to spend on talent. That is a simple fact of life; some just choose not to.

The Wilpons have chosen not to spend money, and have lately seemed surprised when other teams do. The New York Post’s Mets beat reporter Mike Puma had a scoop last month, saying that the eldest of the Wilpons, Fred, apparently “always seems surprised” when the Yankees make a move to add to their payroll and believes that they “can’t keep this model up,” despite the fact that the Yankees have remained on top of the payroll rankings for essentially generations.

As they are built right now, the Mets are set up for another disappointing season. Last year, it was mostly a product of injury that sunk what could have maybe been a promising team, albeit one that was fundamentally the exact same as the year before. Now, they are willfully shedding payroll, trading off pieces last season in exchange for salary relief instead of meaningful prospects and with no clear direction towards success.
But at least they signed Jay Bruce and the corpse of Adrian Gonzalez?