Silly Money

By Mike McGann
Posted Thursday, November 16, 2006

It's been a strange and surreal time for Mets' fans since Carlos Beltran looked at a called strike three in the seventh game of the National League Championship Series.

The few that watched the Cardinals steamroll the Tigers felt an odd sense of displacement, a sense that a title was in grasp and slipped away. The opening weeks of the offseason haven't offered a respite from the sense that it is all like a dream gone suddenly mad.

Jose Valentin and Orlando Hernandez are back. Tom Glavine still hasn't made up his mind (or maybe, how to break it to the Wilpons) about coming back or returning to Atlanta. The partisans of "Free Heath Bell" have gotten their wish and former uber-prospect Lastings Milledge is looking more and more like an item on the "opened box" table at Best Buy.

And then there's the Red Sox.

$51 million bucks just to get the right to negotiate with Daisuke Matsuzaka — who looks to want a contract of more than $10 million per for three or four years. Basically, we're talking about paying $24 million a year (amortized) for a guy who never threw a pitch in the big leagues. Assuming, that is, that the Red Sox are serious and were not just overbidding to keep Matsuzaka from the Yankees.

But of course, here's the punchline: the Mets bid between $39 and $40 million — a nearly as insane amount of money, and about $7 million more than the Yankees, reportedly third in the bidding, were willing to go.

So the man derisively called "Freddy Coupon" by some Mets' fans with anger management issues made a completely insane, irresponsible and frankly nuts bid. $40 million just to get the right to talk to Scott Boras, Matsuzaka's agent.

And lost by $11 million.

So, if the Mets' bid was nuts, what do you make of the Red Sox?

If they really plan to pay out the money and sign Matsuzaka, they're nuts. In a market that rates Barry Zito as a $75 to $80 million pitcher over five years, does it make sense to sign a guy for at most four years and almost $100 million — a guy who has never pitched in the big leagues and is only known for pitching in the World Baseball Classic, pitching against very few players who were in midseason form.

Don't get me wrong, odds are that Matsuzaka will be a good pitcher.But he's thrown a ton of innings and Japanese pitchers, in part because of the slightly bigger ball, haven't done that well in U.S. baseball.

So maybe the Mets end the winter with Barry Zito (and loved Mets' GM Omar Minaya's love tap to Boras yesterday, noting that the free agent guys were all just stalling, so teams were probably going to have to make trades instead) and maybe a new left fielder.

But Mets fans may find themselves flashing back to that last sane moment, just before Adam Wainwright looked in for the signal and Carlos Beltran readied a swing that would never come. That moment might have been the last one for a while that will seem to make sense.

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