Saturday, December 07, 2013

They Will Never Learn

Here are the reasons why signing Curtis Granderson for 4 years and 60 million is a bad deal:
1) Too many years. The Mets are buying Granderson's age 33 to age 36 seasons. The age at which most players start to decline is around 32. The best we can expect from Granderson is two decent years when the Mets suck, and when they start to be good (maybe), he will be a salary albatross and he will be taking at bats away from young players trying to develop.
2) CitiField is not Yankee Stadium. According to FanGraphs, Yankee Stadium inflates home runs by lefties by 14%, while CitiField is roughly league average in that regard. Granderson doesn't have drastic home road splits from his years with the Yankees but I feel guys hitting well at home tend to carry that confidence to the road, whereas guys from difficult home ballparks pack their struggles on road trips. Unscientific, but that's my impression.
3) The Mets are on the wrong side of the win curve. Unfortunately, with the injury to Harvey the Mets look like a 75-80 win team at best. Even 3 or 4 extra wins provided solely by Granderson will do nothing to help the Mets make the playoffs and likely add very little extra revenue, despite all the exhortations from the talk radio crowd that the Mets needed to do something to show their fans they're serious about building a winning team.

This deal is worse than the Jason Bay deal in several ways: Granderson is older than Bay was, is coming off an injury and the Mets are worse now than they were then.

Just because they don't have better options doesn't making doing the wrong thing right.

The Mets have decided to do the same thing they always do, and hope it works out better this time.

1 comment:

Damino said...

I am entirely with you on wanting the Mets to avoid high priced free agents, but I have to respectfully disagree about Granderson.

They desperately needed a power bat in their lineup, and 4 years at $15 million/year is pretty reasonable for someone with Granderson's track record. I don't expect him to hit 40 home runs per year in this ballpark and at this age, but if he ends up hitting 25 to 30 home runs for 3 years and is potentially part of a big winning team in 2015 and 2016, I'm all for it.

In the past, the Mets would've thrown 10 years at Cano or done something similarly asinine. I'm not completely in love with the Granderson move and you make many valid points, but overall I feel ok about this one and don't really think the Mets should get beaten up too badly for this.