The instinct is always to laugh at the Mets, in one way or the other. There is more than one way to do this, although most everyone winds up doing it. There is the resigned to-keep-from-crying laugh of a Mets fan pondering another year climbing the sideways Escher staircases of baseball's most elaborately and relentlessly self-thwarting team. There is the jeering laughter of non-aligned observers who watch, disbelieving, as what should by rights be one of baseball's elite franchises continues its endless Sideshow Bob-ian progress across a parking lot full of rakes. There's nothing really funny about any of this, although there surely are some satirical notes. But the LOL in #LOLMets means exactly what you'd expect it to.
Michael Cuddyer is a Met, literally and figuratively
The Mets gave up the 15th overall pick in the 2015 draft to sign a 35-year-old who hits well, fields terribly, and has had a hard time staying healthy. They presumably have their reasons. Oh, Michael Cuddyer is a Met all right.
Doug Pensinger
And so there was the reflex to either stifle or not stifle a chuckle when the Mets signed free agent Michael Cuddyer away from the Rockies on a reported two-year, $21 million deal on Monday afternoon. Mets fans rolled out the first type of laugh when they remembered that Cuddyer -- a sweet-swinging if mostly sessile 35-year-old who has missed 206 games in the last three seasons -- would cost the team the 15th overall pick in next June’s draft. Other fans rolled out the other kind of laugh, and perhaps shook their heads in quiet wonder at the Mets’ calculation that the best thing for both Cuddyer and the Mets would be a late-career move out of Colorado’s offensive environment and an everyday spot in CitiField’s expansive outfield. Everyone laughs, because everyone always laughs.
That lost draft pick notably notwithstanding, though, there is nothing inherently unreasonable, or even hugely unwise, about the Mets signing Michael Cuddyer to a reasonable two-year deal. It's just that it's difficult to be reasonable about the Mets, after all these years of unreason and un-wisdom, and in the long shadow of a management culture that's alternately arbitrary, petty, opaque, and plain plug-ugly.
But let’s do our best, here. Cuddyer is, even as his body has worn down in recent years, a good hitter. He has, in fact, been a good hitter especially as his body has worn down in recent years. It doubtless helps a great deal that Cuddyer has played his home games in Colorado over the past three years, but Cuddyer’s .307/.362/.525 line over the past three seasons -- or the 280 games he was able to play in those three seasons -- is exactly what it is.
His home/road splits in Colorado reveal a player who hit like a star at altitude (.329/.393/.591 in 555 plate appearances) and hit like Michael Cuddyer (.286/.332/.463 in 584) everywhere else. Cuddyer will probably not repeat his 2013 National League batting title, and it doesn’t seem terribly likely that he’s become a .300 hitter after a decade spent mostly thirty-odd points south of there. But even a player that hits like Michael Cuddyer everywhere and all the time is, all things considered, a good hitter. No one is laughing at the Mets because they just gave up a valuable draft pick and $21 million dollars for this player.
Michael Cuddyer flails (Chris Humphreys-USA TODAY Sports). The laughter has more to do with the fact that the Mets gave all that up for a good hitter who is, by the numbers, among the worst defensive players of his era. Cuddyer can play -- or, at any rate, owns the appropriate gloves -- at first base and in right field, although he has never played either position terribly well, and has played both terribly terribly in recent years. Since 2000, only a handful of players have been worth less according to Defensive Wins Above Replacement than Cuddyer; Baseball Reference’s scores have him just above Ryan Howard and just below Manny Ramirez in that category, which ... is actually a nice place to end this paragraph. Yes, let’s leave this one here. Terrific.
But yes, Cuddyer can play some first base and spare all involved the unpleasant experience of watching Lucas Duda hit against lefties, although Cuddyer's outfield defense will likely recall Duda's past man-falling-off-riding-mower work in that area. He will miss either some or many games due to injury, and he will hit better than anyone the Mets had in the outfield in 2014. When Cuddyer's contract expires, the Mets will hope that prospects like Brandon Nimmo or Michael Conforto will be ready to assume his role.
There is, as hardcore fans know, an entire league that pays players with Cuddyer’s particular array of skills to hit without having to field, although that is not the league to which the Mets belong. And while the Mets can and likely will get some good baseball out of Michael Cuddyer -- who is, again, a pretty good baseball player -- there are all sorts of obvious and entirely reasonable questions about how much and what kind of good baseball they will get.
But, at some level, these considerations are just details, and almost beside the point. The question, and the hole through which that old uneasy Mets-ian unreason enters the equation, is whether Michael Cuddyer represents the beginning or the end of the Mets offseason improvement efforts.
Were the Mets owners able to support even an average major league payroll, Cuddyer would be, that lost draft pick aside, a helpful contributor in an offseason campaign to fill in the roster's notable holes. As a component of a calculated push for immediate improvement -- one that would involve trading some of the team's impressive minor league pitching depth for a well-paid veteran star such as Troy Tulowitzki -- Cuddyer makes a good deal of sense, especially at this price. He is, after all, a good baseball player and by all accounts a good dude, a personal friend of David Wright's and also good enough at card tricks to blow Denard Span's mind.
But Mets ownership has been neither willing nor able to support even an average Major League payroll in some time, and has been unwilling and unable in recent years to so much as give GM Sandy Alderson a sense of what his budget even is. And if Cuddyer is not a component part of a campaign, but that campaign’s centerpiece -- which, given the team’s perpetually parlous financial situation, with each year’s payroll pegged to the next nine-figure round of the Wilpons’ debt service -- then we are dealing with something much less reasonable, and much more familiar. That desperate organizational minimalism has, after all, been how the Mets have approached their last few offseasons. The results are right there to be laughed at.
This, finally, is the real power of the Mets. In the abstract, the signing of Cuddyer is nothing to laugh at or cry about. But in the shifting, smoggy upside-down context of the Mets -- a very public family business run with late-Hapsburgian flubbiness, a team that does not even know what its own budget is from moment to moment -- questions of relative reasonability become harder to answer.
If you’ll allow one more circularity, Michael Cuddyer is Michael Cuddyer; the Mets made the decision to sign him knowing what type of player he is and with a reasonable sense of what type of player he will be, and he is being paid accordingly. What the Mets will need Michael Cuddyer to be for them is a tougher thing to know.
There is, as always, the unsettling sense that even the smart people making the team’s baseball decisions do not know the answer to this, or the context in which their less-competent paymasters will allow them to figure that answer out. The best word for this way of being is “absurd.” The best and most human way of responding to absurdity is... well, you already know. Welcome, Michael Cuddyer. Welcome to the Mets.
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