Zito Signing A Giant Favor For Mets

By Mike McGann
Posted Saturday, December 30, 2006

New Yorkers like to joke about how expensive it is to live in their city, until, that is, spending a bit of time in San Francisco. There’s a jolting dose of reality when they realize that the half-million dollar subdivision house found in Bergen County, N.J. or on Long Island ($150,000 or less in the rest of the country, mind you) costs $1.5 million within commuting distance of the Golden Gate Bridge.

So Mets fans can maybe appreciate better how big a favor the Giants did them in signing Barry Zito to a seven-year, $126 million contract this week. Had Zito signed with Texas for five years and $83 million, the much-maligned Fred Wilpon (you know, those Freddy Coupon jokes never get old) and Omar Minaya would have been shredded by the fans and the local media. Instead, virtually everyone (I understand some fans have taken up a collection to buy Prozac for Newsday’s Ken Davidoff, who appears to be the lone exception) sees that the Giants’ offer was, not to put too fine a point on it, the second coming of the Alex Rodriguez signing in 2000 (and this within an offseason full of crazy free-agent signings) and that the Mets were wise not to go head over heels for a pitcher they only “sorta” liked.

Sure, the Mets would be better with Zito. But let’s be honest, Zito, at age 28 in his prime, is Tom Glavine. Not the in-his-prime, Cy-Young-Winning Tom Glavine who pitched for the Braves, mind you, but the 40-year-old lefty who pitched for the Mets in 2006. And there’s no indication that Zito brings the leadership or mentoring to young pitchers that Glavine brings. Like Glavine, Zito needs guys who can catch the ball behind him to pitch well. Let me put three words close together that should make you laugh: Barry Bonds Defense. If you want preview of Barry Zito with the Giants of 2007, you might want to dial up a few Mets’ games from 2003 with Glavine on the mound.

Let’s be honest, the Mets’ braintrust was iffy about Zito at $15 million per for five years. They don’t think he’d be an ace (and he probably won't be for the Giants, either, with Matt Cain around), not a team-changing guy like Pedro Martinez. And I think, Mets’ fans know an ace when they see one: you don’t watch the likes of Seaver, Gooden, Cone and Martinez and not know that little tingle you get when the big guy is pitching. Barry Zito is a nice pitcher, but he’s not an ace.

So the Giants got them off the hook with almost everyone. That’s the good news. The bad news remains that the front of the rotation isn’t what it could be. With the Sunshine Boys, the afore-mentioned Glavine and Orlando Hernandez, at the front of staff, and a passel of kids and rejects at the back, John Maine, Oliver Perez, Mike Pelfrey, Dave Williams, Phil Humber, Jason Vargas and so on. Martinez might be ready by midseason, assuming his shoulder and fastball recover.

With most of the good, inexpensive options like Randy Wolf signed elsewhere, the White Sox having dealt their surplus of starters (worse, sending Freddie Garcia to the Phillies), the options are kind of limited. Sure, the Mets could deal for Randy Johnson, but the team has enough pitchers on staff already old enough to have seen the Beatles play at Shea Stadium.

Of course, there’s trades. Despite the public claims that Dontrelle Willis is not available, he is. Problem is, he’s not available for just Lastings Milledge and Aaron Heilman. Toss in Mike Pelfrey and maybe the Marlins’ ears perk up, I hear, but that might be too high a price to pay, although Willis is one of those guys, an ace. Being even more of a riverboat gambler than Minaya, I might just make that deal, knowing the value of having a Willis, one of the few truly “electric” pitchers in baseball and thinking about warm summer nights at Shea (and ultimately, CitiField) with him on the mound.

And while it might make sense to go to the wall and drain the swamp that is the Mets’ farm system to get a Willis, dealing Heilman and Milledge for a guy with injury issues or a nothing much more than a veteran innings-eater, such as has been discussed with Oakland, is probably a bigger risk. And just forget about Brad Penny as you can hear the laughter all the way from Flushing at that suggestion. Not making a deal is tricky, too, as the more Milledge plays in the big leagues, the lower his value seems to get. With Carlos Gomez and Fernando Martinez — and in my eyes, Martinez is going to special, while I’m less sold on Gomez, although he is clearly a special athlete — Milledge is expendable, but only if he brings back good pitching.

So can the Mets enter 2007 as constituted and win a title? Yeah. The offense will be better with the addition of Moises Alou and bullpen, with a healthy Duaner Sanchez, Heilman, Ambriorix Burgos, Jon Adkins, Pedro Feliciano, Juan Padilla and around Memorial Day, Guillermo Mota, available to set up Billy Wagner, it’s possible that this pen will be deeper and better than the 2006 version, which is saying something. The Mets could be the rare team that needs its pitchers to just keep them in games, rather than dominate. That concept, as seen with the Mets in 2006, works in the regular season, but is less effective in the postseason.

Even assuming Hernandez and Glavine stay healthy, a big assumption, the Mets will still need to find a big game starter. And while it might be Pedro Martinez, it’s impossible to tell whether he will ever be his old self again. John Maine showed he might be an option, but he seems an unlikely type to become a dominant starter. He struggles to maintain mental focus at times and lacks the sheer stuff to dominate day in and day out. Mets’ fans can also hope for a breakout by Pelfrey, who still needs to work on his breaking stuff, or Humber, still coming back from Tommy John surgery, but neither should be counted on beyond the back of the rotation.

And that, barring a trade, leaves the wild card. Oliver Perez. A very talented, hard-throwing lefty on a staff lacking fireballers, he looked like he was going to break out as a star early in his career with the Pirates. After a mix of dominant and poor starts in the regular season, Perez opened a lot of eyes with his performance in the league championship series, taking the ball in a pressure-packed Game Seven and pitching like a staff ace.

Can Perez be another Curt Schilling, a talented guy who couldn’t put it together with the Astros and Orioles and then became a dominant ace with Philadephia, Arizona and Boston? Maybe. And how aggressive the mets are in the next couple of months and what type of pitchers they target will offer some clues as to what the braintrust thinks about whether Perez, who is only a bit more than a year older than Humber, can become that kind of pitcher.

Maybe losing Zito in the dwindling days of 2006 will be looked back with the same dread that Mets’ fans still look back at July 31, 2004, but I don’t think so. Thinking back to missing out on A-Rod and losing Mike Hampton — both of which seemed disastrous, especially when it led to the signing of Kevin Appier. Even with Hampton, a bust with the Rockies who now pay him to pitch for the Braves, and A-Rod, the world’s most expensive mobile soap opera, it seems pretty likely that the 2001 Mets would have imploded anyhow and the collapse of 2002-2004 might well have been worse and much more expensive.

The Mets played this market right and it might be that waiting a year before unleashing big bucks on a free agent pitcher — Carlos Zambrano, anyone? — is the better plan for the long term. And even if the team needs pitching help sooner rather than later, the Mets will have a ton of budget flexibility to take on a big contract someone else is dying to get rid of and will do so for little in terms of talent in return.

After two years of holiday gifts to its fans, the Mets may have been wise to leave the stocking empty. Who knows what the Easter Bunny might bring?