An Organization Beyond Repair

I haven't had much to say about my beloved New York Mets, because, well, so many others have said it so much better -- and I'm talking about the gaggle of New York Mets blogs you'll find under the Baseball section in the left margin.

Whether it's SaberMets, the Eddie Kranepool Society or Flushing Local (accurate down to the color of the No. 7 train), you really can't go wrong when it comes to chatter about New York baseball's favorite underachievers.

And the folks who run the Mets ought to be paying closer attention. But they aren't, especially if this dispatch from the Rodent is to be believed:

[Mets General Manager] Jim Duquette made the [Victor] Zambrano - [Scott] Kazmir deal because Kazmir would not help Duquette's future whereas Zambrano very well could.

Didn't Duke fear the public opinion backlash of trading away the jewel of the minor league system?

Not at all.

That's because he had no idea how popular Kazmir was in New York. He woefully underestimated the backlash and he admitted as much on WFAN.

Jim said he was shocked at how the press and fans have been so vehement in their protests. The spinning of Kazmir's immaturity and questionable mechanics did not begin until almost two days after the deal, once the front office came to realize that they had a public relations nightmare to parry.

Surprised? If they were, they only have themselves to blame.

For years, the Mets had been touting Kazmir as the pitcher of the future, even going so far as to turn down a deal in the Spring that would have sent him to Texas in exchange for Alfonso Soriano (not like they could have used him this year).

Not surprisingly, Mets fans everywhere started placing their hopes on the kid -- something anyone who paid attention to any Mets blog or random message board could see in about five minutes of reading.

In other words, the Mets fed a story, right or wrong, to their fans, and the fans ran with it. And in the Internet age, any organization that thinks they can control the storyline is seriously mistaken. So by the time the organization started trashing Kazmir after the trade, it was simply too late. And in the process, the Mets front office shattered what credibility they had left with the fans that matter most to the team.

One lesson that I picked up on in Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point, and is being reinforced now while I'm reading Joe Trippi's The Revolution Will Not Be Televised, is that not all customers/voters/constituents are created equal. Instead, there are a number of unique "influencers" whose passion and expertise others rely to make their own decisions.

In the case of a sports franchise like the Mets, the effect is magnified tenfold, and they ought to be terrified at the implications. In this case, these Mets fans aren't just blind followers of the team, they're incredibly well informed partisans.

And when you ignore what they have to say, and go back on your word, the effect is sort of the moral eqivalent of a Democratic presidential nominee announcing he's changing his mind about the long-term future of Social Security.

Back in the Spring, I linked to a piece in the New York Times that profiled the team's two "superscouts" and how they seemed to eschew the tenets of stats-driven analysis, which led me to note:

[I]t was one thing to hire somebody to do statistical analysis, but it was quite another to change the culture of your organization. In light of this story, I'm afraid the Mets are merely paying lip service to the lessons learned in Moneyball, a mistake they're going to pay for, for years to come.

To paraphrase James Burke, the afternoon the Mets traded Kazmir to Tampa Bay was the day the universe changed for the team. And not surprisingly, Duquette and the Wilpon family weren't anywhere near ready.

From here on in, as long as the Wilpons own the team, the Mets will be playing catch-up. Then again, if they had just listened to their fans, it didn't have to be that way.

Eric 07:00 AM

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» BASEBALL: Despair and Rebirth from Baseball Crank
Eric McErlain has a couple of good posts, one lamenting how the Mets not only destroyed their credibility with their fans by trading Scott Kazmir but completely failed to anticipate or understand why people were so upset, the other discussing... [Read More]

Tracked on September 23, 2004 07:04 AM

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Posted by: at September 22, 2004 01:37 PM

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