Mets Are A Great Argument Against Competitive Balance Problem

If you listen to the owners, baseball has a competitive balance problem. Teams like the Los Angeles Dodgers  can spend their way to the World Series — oops, sorry, maybe not — and it’s not fair to the small market teams. This year’s World Series is a great argument against that, and then there’s the New York Mets. 

If you’re looking for a great argument against a competitive balance problem, look no further than the Amazins’. They finished last in the NL East despite having one of the largest payrolls in the game, and they make all the numbers that Evan Drellich and Eno Sarris compiled in their deeper dive into the subject irrelevant. 

Here are some of the reasons the Mets spent big and lost big, and they were all about incompetence and had nothing to do with competitive balance. 

Bad spending

The Mets were absolute masters of this. They spent $20 this season on infielder Jorge Polanco and another $20 million on outfielder Luis Robert Jr., and both were barely on the field this year. Another $25 million went to Marcus Semien, who couldn’t hit and didn’t show a lot of range defensively, either. 

It gets worse. In perhaps the worst move of all, the Mets elected not to sign first baseman Pete Alonso based on his poor defensive metrics, and Alonso proceeded to have a fine defensive season with the Baltimore Orioles as he had an MVP caliber season offensively. 

Superstar squabbling

Shortstop Francisco Alvarez and outfielder Juan Soto eat up a huge chunk of the Mets payroll, and they can’t get along. Lindor thinks it’s his team, despite the fact that he didn’t hit or field well this year, while Soto would apparently rather lounge in his couch down by the batting cage rather than join his teammates in the dugout. The one thing they did have in common was calf injuries, though, and the Mets are still struggling to quell the reports that they continue to be at odds. 

Poor managing and coaching

The Mets took forever to fire manager Carlos Mendoza after disposing of his coaching staff in the offseason, and the Mets continue to create layers of inept performance that prevent communication rather than enhance it. There’s no sign that this is going to stop any time soon, and in fact it could be getting worse rather than better with the offseason shuffling among the coaches and in the front office.