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<\/a>So, so long, Omar Quintanilla, and thanks for being the first No. Zero in 14 years. Your frequent and repeated DFAs have made you\u00a0a kind of Nelson Figueroa of Met position players, and I fully expect we’ll see you\u00a0again, especially if and\/or when this whole Wilmer Flores-to-shortstop experiment ends in a failure or injury.<\/p>\nThat this move\u00a0will also\u00a0likely test the limits of what we can accept defensively from a major league shortstop will be interesting in and of itself. Flores last time wore No. 4 and we’d expect to see that again tonight.<\/p>\n Elsewhere, I’m troubled to see the spate of recent articles and fan sentiment hovering around this absurd notion that the nascent\u00a0organizational turnaround under\u00a0Sandy Alderson is some kind of setback from the Omar Minaya Era, in which\u00a0the Mets appeared to possess no ovearching philosophy other than to create the illusion they were headed in the right direction by paying full retail for\u00a0other team’s players.<\/p>\n Joel Sherman, whom I usually like, today is trying to sell the idea<\/a> that Alderson has failed because Omar-acquired ballplayers remain\u00a0at the heart of his\u00a0club, conveniently leaving out the idea that the even bigger disasters of Alderson’s years until now were even more influenced by Minaya, and that any administration’s third year will still include\u00a0rubble\u00a0from the prior occupant’s closet (he may as well\u00a0have argued Minaya’s ineffectiveness given the\u00a0benefits he derived from Steve Phillips’\u00a0charges like Wright and Reyes). In reality though, several\u00a0Minaya\u00a0legacies\u00a0have failed Alderson\u00a0badly (Ike Davis, Ruben Tejada) and\/or were foolishly traded (Carlos Gomez, Joe Smith) and\/or\u00a0handicapped him with lardy contracts (Johan Santana, Jason Bay, Francisco Rodriguez) and\/or aren’t around to help when he could use them (Bobby Parnell, Matt Harvey). I’m not trying to bury Omar Minaya, whom I believe did his best despite being\u00a0frequently\u00a0overmatched at the trading and negotiating tables and too easily interfered with by the Wilpons and the press, but painting him as even a comparative success vs. the current administration is, um, bullshit.<\/p>\n In the meantime,\u00a0what was basically a gut-renovation of the system by Alderson\u00a0is turning\u00a0around opinions and results on the minor league level already, and other than it turning out to be an inviting target for lazy critics\u00a0and columnists, there ought to be nothing wrong with acting\u00a0in a manner of a club that’s\u00a0going to win 90 games if that is indeed the goal. If it were easy to rebuild a club while slashing payroll by 35% in an\u00a0inflationary market, everyone would be doing it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" You gotta have somethin if you wanna be with me. So, so long, Omar Quintanilla, and thanks for being the first No. Zero in 14 years. Your frequent and repeated DFAs have made you\u00a0a kind of Nelson Figueroa of Met position players, and I fully expect we’ll see you\u00a0again, especially if and\/or when this whole … Continue reading “Nothin from Nothin Leaves Nothin”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[166,641,509,642],"class_list":["post-2080","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-omar-minaya","tag-omar-quinanilla","tag-sandy-alderson","tag-wilmer-flores"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mbtn.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2080","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mbtn.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mbtn.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mbtn.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mbtn.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2080"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.mbtn.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2080\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2238,"href":"https:\/\/www.mbtn.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2080\/revisions\/2238"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mbtn.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2080"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mbtn.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2080"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mbtn.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2080"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}<\/a>Don’t get me wrong, though. I’m glad the Mets are trying this. Flores has a nice record as a minor league hitter, and he’s still very young, and the Mets need young position players who can hit.\u00a0And Ruben Tejada just isn’t getting it done offensively, the Mets aren’t good enough hitters otherwise to carry a bat like that, as though the last batch of games hadn’t illustrated that.<\/p>\n