As with most days I spent most of today thinking about the Mets and Sandy's off season sucess. I have been an advocate so far of not going after big name players because I didn't believe anything we did could make a difference in 2012. I decided to figure out what we could have done to contend next year.
To do this I am going presuppose a 2012 season that goes pretty much like the 2011 season. So the Mets win 77 games, to win the wildcard they need to win 91 and to win the division they need to win 103. Using WAR we will see how many free agents the Mets would have had to sign this offseason to make the playoffs next year.
First lets suppose the Mets re-signed Jose Reyes and his production was similar to last year. Now let's look at the biggest free agent of the year Albert Pujols, whose WAR was 5.1 which brings the Mets up to 82.1 wins, still well short of the wildcard. Now let's add in the other new Angel C.J. Wilson who had a 5.9 WAR, bringing the Mets up to 88 wins, getting closer. Jonathan Papelbon was also a major signing this year, lets say his 50 million dollar contract went to the Mets and added his WAR of 3.0 which brings us to...91, now we are tied for the wildcard and playing the Cadinals in a one game play off. All we had to do was sign three of the biggest free agents in baseball to get there.
Now lets just go nuts and see who we need to sign to win the division. Starting with the three we already signed we need to manufacture a total of 26 Wins.
Albert Pujols- 5.1
C.J. Wilson- 5.9
Jonathan Papelbon- 3.0
Prince Fielder- 5.5
Mark Buehrle- 3.5
Jimmy Rollins- 3.9
26.9!
And all we had to do was re-sign Reyes to a hundred million dollar contract then sign the six best free agents in baseball. My point here? Lay off Sandy, it's a rebuilding year. Their is no need to get upset about not making any free agent signings because no amount of reasonable free agent signings would have made any difference at all.
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