I Feel Really Awful For Mets Fans

Every morning I wake up I do a scanning of box scores.  Nothing big, quick once-overs just to get updated on west coast games that ended at 1am and shit like that.  But today I woke up to Mets Twitter having a full blown meltdown:

The truth is I fucking love Mets fans.  They’re carbon copies of White Sox fans.  We are the #SonsOfUribe after all.  Just a couple of smaller fanbases that nobody outside their immediate region gives a shit about. playing second fiddle in town, with an affinity for a very average 3B/SS’s massive hogpiece dangling between his legs.  No matter how bad the teams get, their fans will always possess a heroin-like addiction to them even though we know they’ll eventually lead to our early deaths.

So when I woke up this morning and saw KFC cuncelling da saeson, Frank the Tank losing his mind and Clem saying Brody Van Wagenen should be arrested, my heart dropped.

The latter is kinda what I wanna talk about.

What the FUCK were the Mets and more specifically GM Brodie Van Wagenen doing making that Cano/Diaz trade???  This isn’t like the 2016 trade the White Sox made for James Shields when they shipped off Fernando Tatis Jr.  It’s much, much worse.

Why?

Well first, Kelenic was a well-known commodity at the time.  Tatis Jr. was only 16, rail thin and not even really cracking top 30 international lists.  He was a wild card.  A wild card that turned into a superstar that cracked SD’s lineup at 19 years old or whatever, but a wild card none the less.  Kelenic was the 6th overall pick, had some 1-1 buzz, and signed for $4.5MM.

Kelenic is also a local kid, from about an hour north of Chicago in Kenosha, WI.  I saw him play 3-4x while he was a junior in HS and he was without question the most electric HS baseball player I’ve ever seen, and I’ve been to the Under Armour game at Wrigley Field and various similar showcases featuring a lot of draft talent.  I know for a stone cold fact there were scouts with the White Sox that wanted him at 1-4 in his draft and one of them told me they’d take him 1st overall:

Now the trade wasn’t exactly “Kelenic for Cano”.  It was

1. Bad contract for bad contract

Jay Bruce:

Robinson Cano

and

2.  Prospects for Edwin Diaz:

Jered Kelenic (6th overall 2018) and Justin Dunn (19th overall 2016)

for a closer with 3.5 cheap control years left

and two solid years with one dominant year under his belt.  On paper, it’s a fair trade probably.

But why in the FUCK are the Mets worried about a closer in a year they’re probably not really competing?  I mean the NL East is pretty fucking deep.  It’s going to be a juggernaut as early as next year.

It’s so fucking dumb.  Every good organization on earth right now stocks up on prospect capital as much as possible because it’s better to have really cheap, really young, really controlled players than really old, really expensive controlled players.  The Cubs do it.  The Astros do it.  The Yankees, Braves, Padres and yes, even the White Sox do it.  They do it because those players are the lifeblood of a successful organization.

And as you’d guess, both Kelenic and Dunn are both dominating right now:

Again, the kid is straight up electric with swag on top of it.

So yeah, I really feel bad for Mets’ fans.  I will give the White Sox a very undeserved benefit of the doubt with Tatis Jr. as again, he was 16 when they traded him and not *too* highly regarded but the Mets trading Kelenic (and Dunn) for a reliever when everyone on earth knows that relievers have the highest variance in performance from year to year makes me so mad.  Even the halfwit KFC called it:

Uhhh yeah, he’s underachieving.  I mean he’s been okay but he’s not doing something any other goddamn closer couldn’t do.  And I won’t even begin to talk about how it was actually Van Wagenen who negotiated Cano’s deal or how he’s already dealing with conflict of interests because I don’t want to rub it in on Mets fans.  They’ve dealt with enough.

And because I want the Mets to be good.  Their fans arguably suffer more than any fanbase in baseball with the Wilpons running the show.

It truly is sad.  They’re gonna kill off at least one of my coworkers eventually.