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Klapisch hatin' on the Mets again.

metsguyinmichigan Dec 01 2008 02:29 PM

http://sports.espn.go.com/mlb/hotstove0 ... id=3736328 This time he's dissing Pedro. Guess he doesn't think Pedro should start a game at Citi to hear the ovation fall on him like a soft rain.

TransMonk Dec 01 2008 02:37 PM

I've got no problems with Pedro's time with the Mets. Was he worth the money? It's not mine, so it's not for me to say. He did give the Mets respectability at a time when they had much less. ]...the Mets would prefer a more realistic re-enlistment -- say one year for $2 million, with performance incentives that could net Martinez $8 million to $10 million. If Pedro agreed to the above, I'd be happy to have him back in '09 as the 5th starter.

metirish Dec 01 2008 02:39 PM

Did the Mets get their money's worth with Pedro , I don't know, but should success be measured in rings and pennants?

G-Fafif Dec 01 2008 02:44 PM

Lost in Klapisch's larger point, that Pedro may have been overpaid versus his production, is that, well, Klapisch is an idiot. ]No doubt Martinez made the Mets respectable -- his arrival coincided with a 12-win surge from 2004-05 -- but the realists in the organization know Beltran's decision to sign with the Mets had less to do with Pedro than it did with money. "We were the highest bidders," is how one insider put it. Indeed, no one got close to the seven-year, $119 million deal the Mets dropped in front of Beltran. But even after he was entering the final round of negotiations, Beltran still wasn't sold; agent Scott Boras secretly told the Yankees the center fielder would accept less money if the Bombers would make an offer. So much for Pedro's recruiting powers. The driving force of the Mets' renaissance has been the Wilpon family's willingness to outbid the market for star players. That's why GM Omar Minaya is moving slowly on renewing ties with Martinez this off-season. Beltran only cared about money. Except he would have taken less money to go somewhere where he had a better chance of winning. Which is what the Mets became (at least versus where they had been previously) once they had Pedro. As long as Klap has an "insider," that insider must make Klapisch's conclusion du jour correct. Provided today is Monday, "so much for" the Pedro-Beltran storyline. Tuesday he might have a different insider and a different conclusion. And I like Boras "secretly" telling a team something when he's peddling his client. Are all aspects of all negotiations otherwise held in the public square? Wonder what Klap wrote four years ago.

TransMonk Dec 01 2008 03:05 PM

="G-Fafif"]Wonder what Klap wrote four years ago. [url=http://sports.espn.go.com/mlb/columns/storycolumnist=klapisch_bob&id=1945987]Klapisch from 12/14/04[/url] More of the same: ]Not only are the Mets getting an ace and a marketable star, Martinez's presence represents a personal triumph for Minaya, who'd spent the first two months of his administration chasing anyone and everyone -- from Shawn Green to Carlos Beltran to Sammy Sosa to Carlos Delgado to Pedro. Interesting that other than Sosa, Omar got all of the others on that list at one time or another. ]It's true, the Sox will miss Pedro and his 16 wins, but they're simultaneously relieved. Now Pedro and his mood-swings and his tardiness and his constant rule-bending will be the Mets' problem, not theirs. And the Mets, not the Sox, will have to deal with Martinez in the third and fourth years of his contract, when he'll be closing in on his 37th birthday. I don't recall any mood-swings, tardiness or rule bending from Pedro, but he was right on the third and fourth year of the contract prediction. One out of four is pretty crappy.

G-Fafif Dec 01 2008 03:16 PM

Thanks for finding that. I don't see in those excerpts any indication that Klapisch was swimming against the conventional wisdom tides or that insiders were tipping him off that this was a bad deal. The fourth year was commonly cited as a potential drawback. There was a ten-minute window circa 2004 wherein pitchers were never going to get mega long-term deals again, that three years was the norm, but you gotta make an exception for Pedro. I [Heart] Pedro in the upper percentile, but to say they got 2-1/2 good years out of him is fuzzy math at its fuzziest. All of '05, the first third of '06, one valiant month at the end of '07 and, charitably, a little here and a little there in '08 isn't even two years.

Gwreck Dec 01 2008 03:18 PM

="TransMonk":2q9cmtlu]I don't recall any mood-swings, tardiness or rule bending from Pedro, but he was right on the third and fourth year of the contract prediction. One out of four is pretty crappy.[/quote:2q9cmtlu] Don't forget that Pedro had a fantastic first half (or at least first two months) in 2006. It's more like 1.65/4. themetfairy Dec 01 2008 03:39 PM Pedro was much better behaved during his Mets tenure than he was as a Red Sock. TransMonk Dec 01 2008 03:42 PM ="Gwreck":1dstpth6] ="TransMonk":1dstpth6]I don't recall any mood-swings, tardiness or rule bending from Pedro, but he was right on the third and fourth year of the contract prediction. One out of four is pretty crappy.[/quote:1dstpth6] Don't forget that Pedro had a fantastic first half (or at least first two months) in 2006. It's more like 1.65/4.[/quote:1dstpth6] Oh, I agree. I was counting Klapisch's predictions for Pedro as a Met as crappy. Edgy DC Dec 01 2008 05:18 PM The Mets got more bang for their buck out of Pedro than ESPN will ever got out of Klapisch. John Cougar Lunchbucket Dec 01 2008 05:35 PM ="Edgy DC":41as8xke]The Mets got more bang for their buck out of Pedro than ESPN will ever got out of Klapisch.[/quote:41as8xke] That's pretty feint praise and probably accurate too. Pedro was not a help on the team this year, he wasn't much of one last and couldn't answer the bell when we needed him in 06. We could have gotten fractions of good seasons out of a lot of bums. Edgy DC Dec 01 2008 06:36 PM Yeah, I don't come to praise Pedro, but to flatten Klapish, who loads that argument with cheap un-necessary embellishments. You think the sidebar showing only Martinez's 2008 numbers was him or the editor's. metsguyinmichigan Dec 01 2008 07:20 PM I'd just like to see an article from Klap that didn't hate on the Mets. He just seems to have created a niche where he's the dark cloud looking for the negative and nothing else. We all get accused of that -- if I had a dime for every time someone says "You need to write more positive stories about the schools" -- but you don't see these level of negativity from Adam Rubin, who seems to do a fine job and still tells it like it is.