Late Tuesday night, as the Atlanta Braves celebrated their first World Series championship since 1995 in Houston — rejoicing, reveling, emphatically embracing — all the Mets faithful could do was sit back and wonder, when will we see this brand of unbridled joy unfold in Queens?
For a prideful fan base, time is of the essence. Thirty-five years is a long time to circle the airport waiting to touchdown on those runways of glory. For fans of a younger ilk, futility is all they know. That’s not gonna play.
In reality, the task at hand is a bit more intricate than simply decreeing that the times they are-a changing. Steve Cohen purchasing the team a year ago was a nice start to turning that long-awaited corner, but tangible progress has been sporadic, at best.
Foundational moves have been made, but not nearly at the pace we expected. Cohen’s three-to-five-year target of sustainable success feels like eons away at this point.
The team’s January addition of Ben Zauzmer from the Dodgers to head the organization’s research and development department has been hailed as a win. The proof will be in the pudding as far as the long-term effects of the hire, but the intent of the move was clear: the Mets are motivated to integrate data into their organizational decision-making process.
Great. Now they’ve just gotta fill out the rest of the front office depth chart with like-minded individuals and implement their new system. As we’ve noticed, this has been a challenge so far.
The team is reported to have an initial conversation with Boston’s executive vice president of baseball operations and assistant general manager Raquel Ferreira on the docket for this week. That’s a very nice start. Let’s hope it ends with a hire. She’s an ideal candidate.
Hiring a general manager would surely be next on the list. Dan Connolly and Britt Ghiroli of The Athletic reported on Tuesday that Orioles’ vice president and assistant general manager Sig Mejdal is “on the Mets’ radar”. A quick note on the 55-year-old:
Mejdal broke into MLB in 2005 via NASA (he was a biomathematician studying/optimizing sleep patterns of astronauts; wow), hired by St. Louis to develop the Cardinals’ newly-formed analytics department.
Mejdal created algorithms and formulas to evaluate potential draft picks and help predict injuries for the Cards. His work there led to his appointment as director of decision sciences for the Astros in 2012, where his STOUT system (stats and scouts) helped bring along Houston’s farm system, resulting in one of the more impressive homegrown cores in recent memory bubbling to the big leagues over the last decade.
Since 2018, Mejdal has been an assistant GM in Baltimore and, judging by the cache of talent stockpiled into in the O’s system over that span (Adley Rutschman, Gunnar Henderson, Grayson Rodriguez, Heston Kjerstad, to name a few; so many studs), it seems Sig’s methods are still producing terrific results.
Same as we said regarding Ferreira, this would be an outstanding direction for the Mets to be looking. They just need to get this train moving a little quicker. The GM Meetings begin next week in Carlsbad, California.
And lest we forget, before those festivities kickoff, the Mets still need to address Kevin Pillar’s option for 2022 and attempt to negotiate exclusively with any departing free agents they may have interest in bringing back (Javier Báez, Marcus Stroman, and Aaron Loup come to mind) before free agency begins on Friday and extend qualifying offers to Michael Conforto and Noah Syndergaard by Sunday’s 5 PM EST deadline.
In the carnival of my brain, all I can picture is Sandy Alderson running around an empty office like a chicken without a head at 4:47 PM on Sunday.
Then, once all of those boxes are checked and the front office is in place, all that’s left for the Mets will be filling their MLB-leading 11 roster holes vacated via free agency with the primary objective of turning a 77-win team into a perennial contender. Easy peasy!
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