Wednesday, November 7, 2012

Goodbye Jason Bay



Jason Bay is gone and I have to say I am pretty pleased. Obviously it hurts that we are just throwing away 21 million dollars but at this point it was the most logical move and shows some real maturity on the part of the front office. Baseball logic often dictates that a team must start a player who they paid a lot of money too just to get the value of their purchase, even if that player is actively hurting the team. This appears to be what the Mets were doing with Bay over the last few years. A player owed 400k putting up Bay's numbers would have lasted about two weeks before being sent to Buffalo.

2010 and 2011 represented serious down years from Bay. He went from being a 30 homerun guy to hitting six and then twelve. 2012 was just downright awful. Bay was one of the worst players in baseball and posted a -.8 WAR, actually costing the Mets about a game through his poor play. Simply not having Jason on the team makes the Mets better.

In the next few days we are going to hear a lot about Bay and the way he was treated as a Met. People always say that fans are too harsh and that Jason was a great clubhouse presence and a hard worker. No one denies this. I am sure that on a personal level Bay is a very good guy but that does not separate the fact that he is an awful baseball player right now. I think we all need to understand that when we talk about ball players we are always talking about them in the context of baseball. Albert Belle is probably a nice guy, he was just mean on the field. Chipper Jones is not a bad person, I just hate him for beating the Mets. So keep in mind as we bash Bay in the next few days that we are bashing a poor performance  in relation to an amount of money paid for services and an expectation of what he would produce. Jason Bay does not suck as a person, just at baseball.

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