2011 Organizational Rankings: #21 – NY Mets
An organization in turmoil, the Mets nonetheless have the assets to make the turnaround on a short time frame. It’s hard not to like the new management in place, and a new stadium in that market with those resources – the pain can’t continue can it?
Present Talent – 78.33 (t-16th)
Future Talent – 65.00 (t-26th)
Financial Resources – 76.54 (18th)
Baseball Operations – 72.50 (t-16th)
Overall Rating – 75.79 (21st)
New York Met fandom, self-mutilation be thy name. There’s something about following a team that hasn’t won in a while that turns you against them in a strange way. Doom and gloom settle in, and cynicism abounds. New GM? Ah, he’ll screw it up. New manager? Well he’s not a true Met. New pitchers on the cheap? Yeah, they’ll be injured by May. New stadium? Oh, doesn’t matter if the team sucks. Money to fund one of the most expensive rosters in the game? Yeah, but for how long?
But aren’t some of the non-talent pieces in place? Sandy Alderson has worked his magic with the small market Athletics and Padres, and now is at the helm of a nine-digit roster for a team with a beautiful stadium in a large media market. There’s no reason that a team with those resources shouldn’t be able to spend smartly and find their way to contention. Even with a poor minor league system and an injury-riddled veteran roster, the light should be on the horizon.
Except for that whole Bernie Madoff situation. Cue a return to the cynical Mets fandom. With the newest clawback filings demanding more than a billion dollars from the Mets owners, their financial situation is suddenly cast back into doubt. That has led to the Wilpons offering up a minority stake in the team – but willing investors at that level seemed hard to find at first. Now that some are in town looking at the financials, many don’t like what they see. On the heels of the revelation that Bud Selig helped the team with a confidential $25 million loan earlier this offseason, this news doesn’t paint a rosy picture of the team’s cash flow.
All of this negativity comes despite the fact that Forbes magazine valued the team at $747 million, the fifth-highest in baseball. A closer look at Forbes’ list reveals the same fissures, though. The Mets were one of two teams that lost overall value last year, and they had baseball’s second-worst profit margin in their yearly budget. The Mets also have a 60% debt-to-value ratio. If you only actually own about two-fifths of your worth, you’re not quite rich. That’s one of the lessons of the last decade, perhaps.
So maybe a lot of the darkness among Mets fans is justified. Even with some bounce-backs from the present veterans like Carlos Beltran and Jason Bay, and maybe a step forward here or there from Ike Davis and Jon Niese, it’s difficult to move a likely third place team much further up than 16th in present talent. Even if you like Wilmer Flores and Jenrry Mejia a little more than some, the Mets system is not stocked full of top-end talent. And now it’s become obvious that even though the Mets have money in some respects, they also have money problems. Maybe Alderson’s small-market skills will come in handy after all.
One thing is for certain: It may not be hard, but it’s also definitely not easy being a Mets fan.
1
This seems fair to me. Of course it’s infuriating looking at the financial resources ranking when you know the team should be no worse than third, but under the current circumstances, that ranking is fair, maybe even generous depending on how things shake out.
With Alderson at the helm, though, I am optimistic. The team was basically a .500 team last year (+4 run differential) and they got better through subtraction. They’ll be an 84-ish win team, which I can live with, and with the dead weight of a lot of bad contracts coming off the books this year and next, they’ll be okay for long-run contention.
The financial resources should be top 5 easily, but yeah, with the current situation, it makes sense not to go crazy. I’m not sure if the Wilpons will ever recover from the mess they are in. The minority sale is just the beginning of the end as owners, if you ask me. If they decided to sell the entire thing, how does that affect the team’s future financial stability? It would surely benefit, no?
The effect of selling the team would remove the specter of the Madoff clawback from the equation. The team would still be highly leveraged (debt-to-value), and would need to improve the gate to make money on a yearly basis, but yeah, removing Madoff would give the financial outlook a nice bump.
If Jenrry Mejia isn’t rated in present or future talent, is he in limbo?
I guess he’d be in present talent.
Ranking the Mets 18th in financial strength is still pretty absurd. The Mets would have been 18th last year with a $72.5 million dollar payroll. It will be a cold day in hell when the Mets return to that payroll level again. The Wilpons will likely be gone by the end of the year, and even if they did stay on as owners, it would be an absolute PR disaster if they had a payroll that low with a market matched by the Red Sox and beaten by only the Yankees.
True, but they may have limited mobility right now to use those financial resources to re-tool. This is speculation to some degree, but there might be pressure to sell of expensive assets, including ones that it would be better to keep around (Wright). They certainly are more encumbered now in any attempts to re-sign Reyes than they would have been had they not found themselves in this mess. So while their payroll will certainly never fall back down to 18th, they don’t have much if any flexibility, and might not for a year or two until everything is settled.
The idea that there will be pressure to sell their star players is ludicrous. Especially in regards to Wright who will likely remain a Met his entire life, unless he gets sick of Citi Field’s uber pitcher friendly dimensions and wants to leave for a more hitter friendly park.
Most likely for the foreseeable future payroll will drop a little but not immensely. For example, expect a payroll of at least around 115-130 million next year. Still one of the largest in the game. Flexibility will come at the end of the year when the contracts of Beltran, Castillo and Perez come off the books.
The ranking of 18th for financial strength is too low, regardless of the Madoff situation, as the earning potential of the franchise is still enormous, even this year, especially with SNY in the mix.
There’s no way we can entirely rule out the possibility of a fire sale. If the Wilpons saw that their only way to hang onto the team was to drop payroll to $50m for three or four years does anyone here really think they’d sell the Mets rather than do just that.
I imagine that possibility was factored into the ranking.
Twenty one is about right. Teams that I think are overdue in this exercise are, Orioles, Mariners and maybe the Tigers.
Come on, the Mariners won 85 games two years ago! They’re definitely in the top half of the league!
That reasoning makes no sense
Adohaj, I think your sarcasm detector needs an adjustment. It should have blown up there.
JB,
That’s not “sarcasm” you’re smelling, it’s the scalded skin of butt hurt. Xeifrank is apparently on a crusade to beat everybody to the new #6org punch. Doesn’t matter, at this point, where the Mariners are ranked. It’s going to be a travesty to him and mock worthy.
Shit, they could have been 30th and he’d have had a cow.
#6org!
Sorry, just once more for good measure.
I’m sure Baltimore is coming soon, but they have decent current talent, their farm system is currently bottom tier, but their owner is wealthy and the market is reasonable-their GM is competent – they should be middle of the pack. They don’t have the all the Met’s dark clouds hanging over them and they should win about the same number of games as the Mets this year. The Tigers have a lot going for them (large payroll, good roster) – they could be top 15.
Both Tigers and Orioles have one of the worst minor league systems according to BP. Niether team has had much recent sucess, which is something I give some weight to that perhaps FG does not. Niether team is all that impressive on the number of games they win given how high their payroll is. Orioles have the 18th largest market cap and the Tigers 21st. Both teams rank in bottom 3rd in pretty much every category I would look at. Thanks for the thoughtful reply.
Exactly. Mets fans aren’t blindly loyal like the Cubs and Cardinals fans. If you don’t win, they won’t show up. The Wilpons are going to take a beating at the gate this year. If they turn around next winter and decide to go cheap, they will be setting themselves up to average 20,000 a game…if that. In New York City.
This seems too high of a ranking to me. The Mets ownership mess should be in limbo for another 2-3 years. The farm system has some nice depth, but there aren’t any real star position players on the horizon. They are in a very difficult division, with Phillies money and the Braves young talent. The team doesn’t appear to be able to go out and spend on drafting or latin american players (based on needing loans from MLB). If the horizon for this exercise is the next 3 years I’m very suprised the Mets weren’t one of the worst 5 teams.
Would have liked to have seen a little more actual talent evaluation instead of just re-hashing the Madoff thing. No mention of the fact that Alderson has upgraded the team at several positions already, including the bench and bullpen? No mention of Matt Harvey or Reese Havens, who if healthy could be their starting 2b next year? The minor league system is not that bad, there’s also Cory Vaughn and Aderlin Rodriguez, two potential power hitters, plus Ceciliani, who projects a lot like Johnny Damon. No mention that if K-Rod does not meet his games finished quota he’ll be gone. Subtract his salary, plus Beltran, Perez and Castillo’s next year and there’s a chance Mets could either sign Reyes or a top shelf pitcher for ’12, and still have a lower payroll. It’s not all doom and gloom.
Look back at the intro post: that was all covered in the previous offseason overviews (which would be why the links to the Mets’ season-preview and prospect-rankings posts are right up at the top of this one), so the posts in the rankings series are dealing with FO & finances.
Understood, but I can agree with his complaint. I think a few of these write-ups could use at least an explanation about how the writers feel about the the current/future talent to explain its ranking.
In this case, I wrote the team preview as well, and added a graph about the talent.. I figured maybe I’d covered it. I think the ranking really says it, in the end: there are things to like about present and future talent, but as a whole it’s a flawed collection.
I don’t see how the Mets, especially with their ownership situation, rank better than the Dodgers and Nationals.
The Nationals have a great market, decent ownership, and great upcoming talent with a poor 2011 team.
The Mets have a great market, probably the worst ownership situation in baseball, an average to poor farm, and a poor 2011 team.
The Dodgers are remarkably similar to the Mets – ownership question marks, weak minor league system, great media market – but the Dodgers have much better major league product.
The Mets do not have a poor 2011 team. At worst they are a .500 team, and likely more in the 85-win range. Also, despite the current woes, there’s no scenario where the Nats are going to be able to outspend the Mets. The Nats, meanwhile, have a trio of great prospects and a fairly mediocre farm after that.
I get the whole madoff/dark cloud thing, but 18th? Perhaps the salary dumps are coming at the deadline if they stink, but I haven’t seen a Marlins-esque firesale as of yet. This a team with a $135 million dollar payroll with as much as $60 million coming off the books at years end. Alderson has already said that if the team is in contention at the deadline that they’ll be able to add payroll (As another poster alluded to, us Mets fans show up if the team is good, so I believe him). The team also told 2 guys making $19 million combined to basically go home and not come back. I don’t care how awful those guys are, if the team was saddled that much from payroll perspective, that would never happen. They would have simply trotted those guys out there until a potential suitor surfaced. If the Royals can unload Yuni on someone I’m sure the Mets could have done the same.
“….it’s dificult to move a likely third place team much further up than 16th in present talent”
So using that logic, we should expect to see either Boston, NYY or Tampa in the middle of pack in present talent since one of them will finish in third, right? This is a team that for the last few years has been decimated by injuries and FO incompetance no doubt. That said there is no way I can look at the Mets roster and say that half of the league is more talented. This team won 80 games without Beltran for most of the year. They were without Johan and K-Rod for much of the second half. Reyes started the year on the DL and didn’t get get going until mid season. Bay was a disaster, as were Frenchy, Castillo and others who are now gone. I can easily see this team contending with a few breaks and less injuries.
Eno I love your work but I respectfully disagree with your assessment of their present talent and financial resourses. That said I actually agree with their composite ranking of 21st because of how poorly the organization has been run up until now. Common sense dictates that if you ranked them higher in terms of present talent and financials that they would be higher than 21, so it looks like I’m contradicting myself. But I actually think you were generous with their future talent and FO. They graduated most of their MLB ready talent last year (Mejia, Davis, Tejada) and the remaining high-ceiling guys are very young and a few years away. As for the FO, I’m super excited about the three-headed monster of Alderson, Riccardi and DePodesta but they are just getting started. All Mets like me feel more comfortable about the direction under those guys but you never know. Glen Sather built the legendry Oilers teams of the 80s but as the Rangers GM it didn’t work out so well (the hockey analogy was the best I could come up with, sorry).
#6org
Are people really so petty that they have to keep harping on this? Really?
Alderson, Riccardi and DePodesta… sounds like a three headed moneyball monster to me. And with the Mets resources, the future seems bright. I agree with the ranking, and I only expect it to rise.
The Mets financial resources being at #18 is an absolute joke. On the level of the infamous #6org Mariners. Yeah, the ownership is in turmoil. But they will still EASILY have a $100M+ payroll every year, and I would be EXTREMELY surprised if they went below $115M. And chances are, the Wilpons will either recover or sell sometime soon, and the payroll will go back up. The Mets should without a doubt be top 10 for financial resources, if not higher.
The present and future talent rankings look about right, and while I think they should be higher in baseball operations, I understand being conservative with such a new management team in place. But there is absolutely no reasonable explanation for the Mets being #18 for financial resources.
If that’s the case, I wonder what level the joke of ranking the Mets as #5org in 2009 was?
In 2009, the Mets suffered perhaps the most of any team this decade in terms of losses to the DL. There was no Madoff lawsuit at the time, nor a hint of one.
I think the ranking of #5 in 2009 was appropriate.
Supermets- 18 isn’t a joke its a DISGRACE. They have payroll of $133,145,000 as per cots. They lack flexibility? HOW!?!?! So what if the mess the Wilpons are in prevents them from adding a star player They have a ONE-HUNDRED AND THIRTY THREE MILLION DOLLAR PAYROLL. There are twenty there are 20 GMs who would trade places with the Mets from a finance standpoint in a MILISECOND. Assuming they prevent K-Rod from finishing enough game to trigger his option, they will have a minimum of $47 million coming off the books.
How many of the other 17 GMs, who’s teams are ahead of the Mets in your financial rankings have the wherewithal to add a guy with a large long term deal? The Yankees, Red Sox, Cubs and……. WHO exactly? The Phillies claim they are completey tappped, as do the Chi Sox after signing Dunn. Dombrowski said the Tigers “have a little bit flexibility” after signing VMart, Beniot and others. The Cards couldn’t sign Pujols, the Angels just took on Vernon Wells and his absurd contract and Washington just gave Werth an absurd contract. The McCourts and the Dodgers are a disaster themselves and they are spending $30. The Braves haven’t been that agressive recently (the Uggla deal not withstanding) and dumped guy like Vazquez coming coming off a huge year last offseason. Who am I missing? Texas is in a nice financial position. Seattle can probably support a payroll around $105 or $110 but that’s about it and they are already well over $90 mil with a crap roster. Once again I ask, besides the seven or eight teams who current payrolls are either higher or in the same neiborhood as the Mets wouldn’t want trade places with them. They have that high a payroll and as there is a reasonable chance that nearly half of that is coming off the books. So there are 17 teams that have more flexibility than that? Wilpon is either going to sell team if he gets clobbered in court or he’s gonna settle or win in court and it will be business as usual with a $130+ million payroll. If he gets killed in court then maybe there might be some payroll issues while the ownership change occurs but that’s the doomsday scenario for the Wilpons which means it unlikely to go down like that.
The Dodgers are spending $30 mil less than the mets on payroll is what I meant.
When I first read “16th in present talent”, I thought I’d have an issue with that. However, looking around at their roster and projections … that may be accurate and if so, the conclusion is “they’re screwed”.
They need more “rebounds” than the Miami Heat.
CircleChange11- They were basically a .500 team last year. Doesn’t it stand to reason that if they get a few of of those rebounds that they can be a decent team this year?
I understand the present and future talent rankings even if I disagree a bit. But 18th for financial strength? Even with the Maddoff situation if this team lets their payroll dip below $100M to save some money it would be countered with a drop in revenue.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/25/sports/baseball/25mets.html?ref=todayspaper
This makes the 18th rank in financial strength seem rather optimisitic if you ask me….
I agree with those who say the rank of 18th for financial strength is way too low. Despite the Madoff mess, the teams earning potential, even this year, is still one of the highest in the game. And it’s interesting that there is no mention of SNY in the column. How can you talk about a team’s financial strength when a regional sports network is not even mentioned?
The Wilpons own about 60% of SNY and it is considered a cash cow. SNY should still be very profitable as its primary revenues, cable fees, are not dependent on play on the field. The Wilpons routinely use revenues from SNY to support the team. So, given this, I think the Mets should at a minimum have been in the top 10 for financial strength.
I also disagree with the present talent being ranked 16th, especially in regards to the lineup. if they can avoid all the injuries they suffered the last two years, the team should be highly competitive in its division.
However, I can fully understand how perception is king here. With all the piling on of the bad press by the media the last few months in regards to Madoff, I’m sure this colors opinions and hence the rankings. The team’s finish the last two injury-riddled years also doesn’t help. Ultimately, it’s up to the team to prove itself on the field. If they stay healthy this year, they can go a long way toward doing just that.