[royals19]

Mets' Spring Training Complex
Willie's Office
Febuary 20th, 2013
8:00 AM

Willie stepped into his office, it was fit for a GM. Brand new desk, brand new leather chair, brand new laptop excellent view of the complex... It was almost too good to be true. He sat his backpack down at his desk and walked over to his mini-Fridge to grab a Gatorade. With his new role in the organization, Willie didn't hvae to take order from anybody. Essentially, Willie was getting paid $200,000 to do whatever the hell he pleased... as long as it was baseball related.

He walked back over to his laptop and booted it up. He typed in his password and opened up a Word Document, then he went right to work.

Quote:

"Willie Singleton's Mets' rebuilding Project"

Quote:

Step 1- Figure out if anyone other than David Wright, Matt Harvey and Ike Davis are potential building blocks. Establish this group as the core and infuse it with homegrown talent. Step 2- Redefine the Mets' draft strategy. Step 3- Supplement the product with international free agents and players that have value according to statistical analysis.

Sure, his document was a rough outline... a very rough outline... but it had quite a bit of truth. Outside of those three players, (Wright, Harvey and Davis) there really isn't much to build around. Jon Neise might be added to that list and so might Lucas Duda but they really need to show that they are on the same level as those 3 guys. The bottom line is, we need to define who our core guys are early so we don't accidentally sell players who can be of value to us... that's where the numbers game comes in.

As for the draft strategy, the famous novel "Moneyball" Outlines this fairly well. The past 2 seasons (plus Domonic Smith), the Mets have gone heavy with high school players. In all actuality, we should be targeting college players and junior college players that are refined. That isn't to say that we won't draft high school players because they typically will have the greatest potential and room for development. College players just have better skill sets and will move quicker increasing the time table for our rebuild and on top of that, not many will bust meaning that we should be able to find roles for them at the big league level.

We probably won't outspend teams on the free agent market but in the international market, we could find players that are young and have high ceilings. In this area, we hope to be targeting all markets, Asia, Latin America, the Caribbean, Europe and especially Cuba. We probably won't be able to field a 25 man roster with extreme talent top to bottom so it's crucial for us to use statistics when looking to add or subtract players. We could "Moneyball" this thing but we don't need to right now because of the talent in our minor league system.

It is going to take some serious time to clean up this mess.