The End
Personel The Mets finished their season on Sunday and finished with a worse record than Pirates and Tigers and only had one more win the Tampa Bay Devil Rays, who managed to not finish last for the first time in their existence. During the season the Mets soap opera was full of controversy surrounding Piazza's move from catcher to first and back again, the idea of Kaz moving to second base, a complete mismanagement of the team by Art Howe, suspect trades, Mets front office executives pointing fingers at each other, seemingly unfit to practice medicine team doctors, veteran players acting like 80 year gossiping old woman, leaking information to the newspapers by the front office personel, and a surprise hiring of Omar Minaya and shocking demotion of Jim Duquette. There were more, but those seem to be the most important things.
This season could be viewed as an unmitigated disaster, but I have a hard time viewing it as such. With a season that was so marred with injury there was really no way the Mets could have been expected to have that much success. At times the Mets had almost all of their key players injured in Reyes, Cameron, Piazza, Matsui, and Floyd as well as having people play through nagging injuries just about the entire year. Bright spots have came out like the emergence of David Wright, Todd Zeile's 2000th hit, Leiter winning 10 games for the seventh year in a row as a Met, Piazza taking the all-time record for home runs as a catcher, Mike Cameron topping getting 30 homeruns for the first time in his career, some early success by Victor Diaz, Braden Looper becoming a great value with his solid season, some promising young and hard throwing bullpen arms, Yusmeiro Petit becoming an uber prospect, Ambiorix Concepcion and Lastings Milledge emerging as two of the best five tool outfield prospects around, Gabby Hernandez pitching like a stud in his first introduction to pro ball, and Aaron Heilman starting to show some flashes of being a major league pitcher. The Mets late season antics of getting rid of Howe, bringing in Omar Minaya to work with Jim Duquette, and moving Matsui moving to second base are positive steps to doing a much needed major overhaul on this team that is really starting to show it's age.
While the Mets season was a no doubt disappointing campaign, there are still things to hang their hats on at the end of the day. The best thing they can do know is look towards the 2005 season with an all star combo of 22 year old players on the left side of the infield provided Jose can shake the injury bug finally. The Mets also have plenty of money to spend and plenty of people available to spend it on. As disappointing as the season was, there is light at the end of the tunnel. The Mets still have a good nucleus with some young starts and with the right moves this off season could field a team may play meaningful games past July 22nd.
"I have to go, see what this guy says," Reyes said. "He's going to give me a program to do this off season."
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