Glavine is Back, and So Are We

By Mike McGann
Posted Monday, December 4, 2006

After a fast and furious couple of days of reworking things here, NYBC is back on the air.

While I'm not sure exactly what happened — this site is back. The hacki...uh, incident, gave me a kick in the butt to do something I've been contemplating for a while: losing the blog format once and for all. God bless bloggers, but I'm not really one of them, although it was nice to pop up and write some short entries. I'll continue to do that, but I need a more professional-looking framework.

In the coming weeks, I'll be working on restoring some of the old content, including a couple years' worth of my columns. And I'll tackle the gallery issue — I literally have thousands of baseball pictures and it would be nice to get them back up in some usable format. That, however, may not come before the end of the year, as I am furiously working to launch another commercial, non-sports site.

But while I'm here, I might as well weigh in on the whole Tom Glavine thing. Yeah, he picked the Braves. The Braves, though, were dubious about spending $8 million on a 40-year-old pitcher. Family issues aside, Glavine knew professionally he fit best with the Mets — a term of verge of winning a title, with a bevy of young pitchers he can mentor. The Braves have some serious payroll issues and really could afford to bring Glavine back — and with a team likely to get worse before it gets better, it makes no sense to add a veteran pitcher.

I do think the Braves should have done a better job of privately letting Glavine know the score — so he didn't look so bad or potentially disrupt his relationship with the Mets. Fortunately for him, the Mets had a pretty good idea of what was going on — and while they leaked some indication that Glavine needed to make up his mind before the Winter Meetings, they very much wanted him to come back.

Which brings us to the Winter Meetings. I don't think that either New York team will do a whole lot at the meetings — both teams are looking for pitching, but the market is tough. As you may know, the Mets want Barry Zito — having looked at the rest of the options — but are worried about getting sucked into a bidding war. So while talks continue with Zito's agent, Scott Boras, Mets' GM Omar Minaya is working on trade options.

Minaya has the combination of Aaron Heilman and Lastings Milledge to dangle in front of other teams — plus a number of lesser pitching prospects, so if Zito's price goes too high, Minaya can be more aggressive on the trade market. He might be shopping for a pen arm or two, but it is more likely that the Mets will again sign a bunch of guys off the scrap heap and hope that two or three emerge as reliable arms for the back of the pen.

The Yanks have made most of their moves already, although they will monitor Andy Pettite's situation closely. Yanks' GM Brian Cashman won't be dealing any of the young arms in the farm system for pitching help, preferring to save them to build a new staff by the end of the decade.

While Red Sox and Rangers figure to spend like drunken sailors, it seems unlikely that either the Mets or Yankees will go nuts at this Winter Meetings.