Last night, in the fifth inning of tonight's game, Mets GM Sandy Alderson joined SNY to talk about the state of the team, during which he had the following to say about:
How he will go about judging 2012, which started great, but did not end well'
'We've tried to do it in a couple of different ways. Emotionally, if you will, just thinking about the kinds of things that might have had an impact. We're looking at it from a statistical standpoint, just looking critically at what did happen so we understand, performance-wise, what the differences were without necessarily knowing what the underlying causes were. So, we're spending a lot of time trying to assess that. Certainly, winning at home is important to us and finishing strong is important. We haven't done that for four years, and we have to figure out why.'
Why the team struggled so badly in the second half'
'If you just look first half second half, Johan Santana was a big plus in the first half, but we really didn't get much out of him in the second. That probably wasn't unexpected. We've had other players who performed better in the first half than in the second half. Is that related to anything specific? is that just the randomness of the game? One thing we can look at, from a personnel standpoint, and this somewhat of an indictment of me and our approach: we lost players in the middle of the year over the last several years ' certainly in 2011 we lost Carlos Beltran and Francisco Rodriguez ' and we didn't get an influx of talent or players from the minor leagues or from outside the system either. As a result, we don't get that push. That may be something psychological. That may be something strictly performance based that comes into play in the second half. But, it's something we have to look at.'
Why the team didn't trade for help in the bullpen earlier in the summer'
'Early in July, we had an issue in our bullpen. There was no question, we were looking for somebody we could plug in' not necessarily a closer, but somebody who could help us. By the end of the month, we had many other problems.'
Matthew Cerrone, MetsBlog.com
I'm glad that he admits some fault in how this season deteriorated, specifically as it pertained to the bullpen this past summer. To his defense, I will say, the more I learn about how that market played out, it's not surprising to me that he could not pull of an impact trade. However, as was pointed out endlessly during that two- to three-week span, any move might have helped (even if it was just promoting some people and cutting others, just to mix up the dynamic of his bullpen, which was a train wreck). I'm pretty sure he and his staff assumed the free-fall would eventually end, which would buy them time to get back to more reasonable negotiations, but that never happened' it just got worse and worse, and then Santana got hurt, and Wright stopped hitting, and then ' as he said ' the bullpen was the least of his worries.