Mets wrong to publicly criticize Johan Santana

I know the New York Mets have to do something to keep people interested, but picking a fight with the team’s ace seems like a pretty bad move.

Johan Santana, once again the ace of the Mets pitching staff after RA Dickey was traded to Toronto, came into spring training still trying to fully recover from the shoulder surgery that caused him to miss most of the last two seasons. I’m sure Santana didn’t expect to be criticized by his general manager Sandy Alderson for supposedly coming into camp out of shape. If Alderson had any problems with the way Santana handled his offseason training, or lack thereof, he should have taken it up with Santana and his agent privately rather than igniting a media controversy that pissed off his ace.

Sometimes managers, general managers or baseball owners will criticize players in the media as a way of motivating them. New York Yankees owner George Steinbrenner was a master at this as proven by his “fat toad” comment about a hefty Hideki Irabu or his condemnation of the relatively vanilla Derek Jeter for his supposed late-night partying. It’s unclear if Alderson was trying to pull a Steinbrenner to motivate Santana, a guy the Mets will need to pitch well if they have any chance of contending. If that’s the case, the criticism clearly had the desired short-term effect of getting Santana back up on the mound.

But I think public criticisms of baseball players tend to have a negative effect on the long-term relationships between ballclubs and players. Do you think there’s any chance Jeter has forgiven or forgotten the remarks by his general manager Brian Cashman during the negotiations for his last contract? If Jeter has another big season this year and declines his 2014 option, rest assured the Yankees won’t be getting the hometown discount that they’ll be looking for.

At least the Yankees don’t demand that their players play hurt. Unlike the Mets, the Yankees tendency is to hold a player back for his own good as they are now doing with Phil Hughes and his injured back. The Mets, for some reason, do just the opposite. They would rather a player go out and risk further injury rather than letting him take time to heal (they better hope Santana didn’t injury himself trying to prove his general manager wrong). The Mets would prefer to publicly criticize players who do not succumb to their demands. At least this time, Alderson put his name to the criticisms rather than engaging in an anonymous smear campaign. But it still seems like the wrong approach.

Judge deals Mets owners a major body blow

Just when you think things couldn’t get worse for the New York Mets, they actually do get worse.

Whatever positive vibes the Mets may have had with the start of spring training baseball and the return of Johan Santana to the pitcher’s mound have been completely wiped out by the crushing news that a federal judge has ruled that Fred Wilpon & Co must pay as much as $83.3 million to the trustee overseeing the recovery from Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi scheme.

The ruling is not a fatal blow for the Mets owners, but it is pretty damn close. Not only do they have to give back the fictitious profits they received, they will have to endure a trial to determine if they should have to pay the more than $300 million principal they invested. The only thing the Mets owners have going for them right now is that the judge expressed skepticism about the trustee’s ability to prove the owners were willfully blind to the scheme. But since he left room to be convinced that that is exactly what happened, the Mets are in real trouble.

The owners insist that they will prevail at trial, but they have mishandled this entire situation, namely by playing the victim card. Their arguments that they were just as much Madoff’s victims as the rest of the bunch didn’t hold water when you considered that they were net winners in the scheme, meaning they received more money than they invested. The actual victims were those individuals who invested their life savings or retirement funds with Madoff and lost it all. If I had been in the Mets inner circle, I would have pushed for a settlement right after the judge’s previous ruling went mostly in their favor rather than defiantly prolonging the court battle. They may ultimately win the trial, but the damage has already been done.

I feel very sorry for the Mets players right now. They are being forced to answer questions about a situation they know very little about when they would much rather be completely focused on getting into game shape. When all eyes should be on Santana, who pitched pretty well this afternoon in a major step in his rehabilitation, people are whispering, sometimes loudly talking, about this latest blow and what it means for the future of the Mets organization.

It looks like Fred Wilpon and his family are going to have to pay, in some way or the other.  

What is Sandy's plan for fixing the Mets?

I guess I have to pay attention to the Mets with the New York Yankees out of the playoffs.

There's a lot of work to be done in Flushing by new general manager Sandy Alderson and it starts with picking a manager. If you listen to all the media speculation, it seems like former Met player and minor-league manager Wally Backman is a top candidate. But Alderson gave no hints about who is on his short list for the job. He did firmly dispute speculation that he wanted a yes-man, which would have taken the feisty Backman out of the mix, and said the need for star quality will be a factor in picking the guy who will be largely responsible for turning around the disappointing Mets.

But Sandy is going to take his time finding the right guy to lead the team and I think that's the right move, especially since he admitted the Mets probably won’t be aggressive in the free-agent market. While Alderson said he won't make any hasty decisions on players, he made it clear that his hands are pretty much tied with $110 million in committed contracts for 2011. That means no Cliff Lee or Carl Crawford for the Metsies. But that may be a blessing in disguise. I think the Mets problems are so deep that even one star player wouldn't be enough to turn things around.

So how will Alderson fix the Mets with no payroll flexibility? He didn't give any real clues yesterday. The only thing he said about his plan is that there are no untouchables although the homegrown guys are less likely to be traded. But one positive Mets fans should take away from the Alderson hiring is that he seems to genuinely believe that the Mets should be a top franchise, not just in baseball, but in all of sports. And he also seems confident that the Mets can be competitive next year, even with the noose of the bad contracts for Oliver Perez and Luis Castillo hanging around their necks, the uncertain health of Carlos Beltran and Johan Santana, and the legal problems of Santana and Francisco Rodriguez.

"I by no mean am looking past 2011," he said. "I'm very optimistic about 2011."

If he gets the right guy to be his manager, Mets fans will be optimistic too. They just need a reason to believe.

Star status shouldn't protect bad Mets

The New York Mets and their fans need to stop looking the other way when their stars engage in bad behavior.

Just a few days after a woman filed a civil lawsuit against Johan Santana in which she accused the Mets ace of raping her, closer Francisco Rodriguez was arrested for allegedly assaulting his father-in-law at Citi Field. For that, he was suspended without pay by the team for two games. Two games.

"Ownership and the organization are very disappointed in Francisco's inappropriate behavior and we take this matter very seriously," said Mets COO Jeff Wilpon.

Not serious enough. Carlos Zambrano was banished for a month and ordered to undergo anger management classes before returning to the Chicago Cubs after a dugout confrontation with Derrek Lee. So I guess the lesson learned is that it's better to assault a woman or a family member than a teammate.

For me, this quote from Mets shortstop Jose Reyes about Rodriguez speaks volumes about how their teammates and the organization will happily look the other way because of Santana and Rodriguez's superior baseball skills: "One hundred percent we're behind him. I hope he comes out clean after what happened because we need him here."

Before I get accused of coming down harshly on the Mets because I'm a New York Yankees fan, let me say this: Yes, the Yankees are the poster team for steroids/human growth hormone use in baseball. I've written post after post calling them out for that behavior, which I truly believe has harmed and continues to harm the sport. But Yankee players aren't being accused of beating their in-laws or raping women and that behavior is much worse than cheating.

In Darryl Strawberry's memoir, Finding My Way, the former Mets outfielder describes in disturbing detail the culture of the Mets in the mid to late 1980s: all-night binge drinking before day games, players enjoying sexual favors from the same women. Strawberry even admits to beating his wives on more than one occasion. All this behavior was tolerated for years by the fans and the organization because the bad-boy Mets were winners.

It's clear that the Mets haven't learned anything from those years. If they had, they would have come down with a harsher penalty for Rodriguez. Unlike the he said/she said nature of the accusation against Santana, the Rodriguez incident happened inside their own stadium in full view of family members of other players and the Mets security staff, which reportedly had to pry the closer off of his father-in-law. Mets officials could argue that they didn't want to pre-judge the investigation, but their statement and two-game suspension makes that argument ring hollow.

Like Reyes, the Mets are hoping this all goes away as quickly as possible because without their two star pitchers, the season will be an even bigger disaster than it is right now.

Santana reminds Mets of bad-boy days

News surfaced this week that New York Mets ace Johan Santana was accused of rape last year. For a team that has cleaned up its image dramatically over the last decade, it's an ugly reminder of the legacy of the 1980s and 1990s teams when abuse of women was a defining characteristic.

Santana is not the first Mets ace to be accused of rape. In the spring of 1992, the team was rocked when Dwight Gooden, Vince Coleman and Daryl Boston were accused of sexually assaulting a woman at Gooden's home. The allegations were particularly scandalous not only because Gooden and Coleman were both married at the time, but the accuser was pitcher David Cone's then-girlfriend. Like in the Santana situation, the case was never pursued, but it left an imprint on the players and on the team forever.

I finished reading Darryl Strawberry's autobiography a few weeks ago and it was clear that the 1980s Mets relished their bad-boy persona, a key trait being the horrible treatment of women. For example, Strawberry openly admits to hitting his wives and having numerous affairs with other women, including fathering a child with another woman while married to his first wife. But he acknowledges he wasn't the only one engaged in this type of behavior, with other Mets players taking pride in sleeping with random women in each city they visited, ostensibly to play baseball, but in their minds to party hard.

Aside from Strawberry, Keith Hernandez was one of the bad guys on the old Mets teams. It's ironic now that Hernandez is in the broadcast booth and talking about how the accusation against Santana won't affect the Mets. That might have been true when he was playing for them because bad behavior was common among him and some of his teammates. But that's certainly not the case with the current Mets, who are choir boys compared to their predecessors.

The Santana situation is different in the sense that this is the only time that the renowned family man has been accused of a crime and mistreating his family. But for a team that has eagerly tried to shed its bad-boy image, it's an ugly reminder of a time not too long ago when this type of behavior was the norm.

Thanks to OlympianX, Andrew Klein via Wikipedia for the photo.