This week Noah Syndergaard signed with the Angels. I certainly wish he would have stayed. He’s definitely a guy you would rather have on your team and after a long two years for him in recovering from Tommy John, I’m definitely rooting for him to be OK.
But what frustrated me were the comments from Mets fans, and some others about the situation and him. I know he said he wanted to be a Met, I know he’s in the public eye and in a big city so there are lots of people who comments, and I know he puts himself out there on social media (and will push back on there as well), but I feel like things just went south with all that.
First, let’s just look at the situation… the Mets did no one any favors by taking a while to find a GM. That’s not all their fault, but still it contributed to the situation. Second, the Mets don’t have a track record for consistency with any aspect of their organization. I mean I like where we could be going, but I’ll believe it when I see it. Third, I really think that more than anything, the injury/surgery/recovery time situation worked against them.
With so much uncertainty you could argue that the Qualifying Offer was great for him. So why wouldn’t adding $3M more on top of that be even better for him. He has just as much uncertainty in all this or even more because it’s his body and livelihood. If he wasn’t injured he would need to max out what he could make, but there wouldn’t be the urgency. But with his situation now, he needs to max out more than he ever would.
I get being frustrated that he said he would want to be a Met, but do we really need to feel like the guy was a partner dumping us? We want guys to say they want to be part of our team and we love that, but can’t you learn to take all that with a grain of salt? And I saw someone say he was a “trash person”… really? I think that might be a judgement from social media posts and interactions, to which I would say that if that was the standard we go by then we are all trash people. How the hell do you know why kind of person any of these guys really are?
You can go ahead and tell me I’m naive, you can try to tell me I’m letting him off the hook, you can try to tell me that you are more of a fan of the Mets than I am because you are so offended by what he did, I really don’t care. Just like I’m trying to tell you to do in this situation, I think we need to do more letting go and I think we need to realize that we need to do more to not be so knee-jerk and well… jerks.
I’m not better than anyone else. I can still feel this stuff too (again, how do you know what kind of person I am?). I’ll just make a suggestion… how about next time you write the tweet, read it a few times, edit it, read it again, get those 180 characters just right… then click cancel. I’m telling you that right there feels so good.
Then we can have a discussion on what an interesting decision and situation it was. Interesting because of his previous statements, because of the Mets front office situation, and interesting because of the Angels situation (are they like the Mets of the AL West?). But I know ultimately very little people will read this and what do my words mean to anyone.
Have a Happy Thanksgiving!
“We should be careful of each other, we should be kind, while there is still time.” – The Mower, Philip Larkin
The Review
Here’s what happened on the blog last week:
- Monday: Will Clark
- Tuesday: Willie Wilson, UL Washington
- Wednesday: Eric Soderholm
- Thursday: Bobby Meacham
- Friday: Mark Parent, Card Thoughts: 1990-91 Upper Deck: Top Shelf
- Saturday: Dusty Baker
- Sunday: Floyd Bannister
It was a Royal #twofortuesday last week. That included one of my favorite cards ever and maybe one of the cards I remember most from my early days of collecting, the 1981 Topps UL Washington card. How can you go wrong with the toothpick. Not that I knew why, but I feel like even then that was interesting to me. I’m realizing now that I could have done a Yankees #twofortuesday and a Royals #threeforthursday, oh well. I also got yet another hockey Card Thoughts out.
The Preview
Here’s what I have coming up for this week:
- Monday: Howe do you do?
- Tuesday: He’s a Mason…
- Tuesday: Dwayne Wayne…
- Wednesday: Neon Dion…
- Thursday: Gotta go to Mo’s…
- Friday: Mean Gene…
- Saturday: Fancy Clancy…
- Sunday: Tanana Banana…
The #twofortuesday this week is going to all Rangers. The baseball Rangers, not the hockey Rangers. I know I’ve been posting a lot of hockey stuff for Card Thoughts but I don’t think I have that kind of backlog for New York Rangers cards. There will be another Card Thoughts post, but it will be football this week. Since I usually try to get those out on Thursdays and Thanksgiving is such a football-based holiday, I thought that would be better. Plus a break from hockey.
Other Notes
After a week where I had a bit of a dip to normal numbers, this week jumped back up. My new high for a week is 32! It was pretty consistent which was nice. There was one failure in there but I actually turned it right around because I think I just screwed up the house number on it. With the holiday this week I’m not sure what to expect but I would think I’d have around 20 with one less day for mail. Plus I would bet the coming weeks will get challenging with the mail expected to slow down. But with the way I send things out daily, I would hope it shouldn’t really matter.
No major stragglers this week. Trevor May at 188 days, Ernie Whitt at 182 days, and RJ Reynolds at 156 days were my longest ones this week. That’s not too bad as there’s always a few over 100 days in any given week. I would say my favorite from the week for various reasons are RJ Reynolds, John Wehner, Carl Banks, Ernie Whitt, Jim Lachey, Trevor May, Rufus Porter, Brad Arnsberg, Jay Bell, Cecil Cooper and Jim Breech.
I’ve updated my new page – Recent TTM Success. I said I would update on Sundays, which I’m doing… but I didn’t do it last week. I just need some time to get into the swing of things. Anyway, it’s updated now.
Have a great week!