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.

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It's always depressing when baseball season is done. Now what? Football? My team, the Dolphins, have yet to notch a victory. The hot stove is always great and there is a few more weeks of baseball, but not for the Mets. They will officially pick ninth in the 2005 draft with yesterday's drubbing of the Expos at Shea Stadium. Montreal played their last game as the Montreal Expos as they will be moving the DC next season and fittingly played their last game in the exact place they played their first game. There were a lot of fans (maybe all 3,000 of them) that actually came down from Canada at the game yesterday and plenty of the looked really depressed after the game. I almost felt sorry for them, but with the current state of the team and their ridiculously low attendance, there is just no way the team could have continued to play there. They did not even have a TV contract up there. The Mets sent them off by finishing their season with a 8-1 victory. Tom Galvine pitched good for the win, John Franco pitched his last game as Met, and Todd Zeile hit a three run homer and caught in what is going to be his last game in the major leagues. "I'm glad I went out this way and somebody wasn't telling me to take the uniform off" Todd Zeile said. I'm a big fan of Zeile's, he's been a solid major leaguer throughout his entire career and it was a really great moment for him to finish the season like that. David Wright blasted his 14th homerun and his 38th, 39th, and 40th RBIs in just 69 games this year. He finished with a .293 batting average and although Jason Bay will win, there is no doubt in my mind that David Wright IS the rookie of the year no matter who is given the hardware. Victor Diaz picked up one more hit to end the year with a .293 average in 51 at bats in 15 games and I think opened some eyes in the organization. It was a great day to be at the game and it was a great game. The fact that the 4th and 5th place teams were playing in what should have been a meaningless game, it really did not feel that way.

Jose Reyes will be seeing Mackie Shilstone this off season. This is long overdue, but better later than never.

"I have to go, see what this guy says," Reyes said. "He's going to give me a program to do this off season."

Art Howe finished his Met tenure as the Metropolitan's manager with a record of 137-186. I wish him luck, but by no means sorry to see him go.

I'll be putting the off season primer up to give the low down on what the Mets face this off season and the options available.