Mets Failed To Maximize Potential This Offseason

It is mid-December, and the Mets have traded for two catchers and signed a third — which doesn't account for Yorvit Torrealba, whom they may or may not have signed last month. Everyone that anyone blamed for their scandalous September collapse is gone: Lastings Milledge, Tom Glavine, Guillermo Mota, Paul Lo Duca, Shawn Green, and Rickey Henderson. Ostentatious offers of everything short of home plate have been made to the Minnesota Twins for ace pitcher Johan Santana.

One might almost discern a hint of panic in all this frenetic motion.

To be fair, Omar Minaya is at the mercy of conditions. The Mets are a contending club, and this explains most of what he's done. The team simply has to have a real second baseman, and so Minaya overpaid in re-signing Luis Castillo, an adequate veteran who played well enough for the Mets. In a market that offered no good catchers, he at least came up with Brian Schneider, who can play every day and has some defensive skills. Minaya, by all accounts, has been aggressive about getting Santana. Assuming Minaya replaces Glavine, the Mets are better on paper now than they were at the end of the season.

Still, no one cares about the windows when there's a hole in the roof, which is what's happening right now. The success of the Mets under Minaya has been about talent: signing the best available free agents to the richest contracts, and making sure to get the most talented player in every trade. This is how the Mets landed Pedro Martinez, Carlos Beltran, Billy Wagner, John Maine, and Oliver Perez, the players who make the difference between a bad team with a really impressive left half of the infield, and a potential world champion.

Minaya and Willie Randolph now seem set on betraying this principle. It comes back to Milledge. Nearly two weeks after he was traded to Washington, he remains the symbol of everything that's going wrong for the Mets. In their inability or unwillingness to defend him, and in the way they got rid of him, the Mets were small-minded, in a way that recalls some of the least impressive moments of their recent past.

Milledge makes for a bad martyr. He isn't yet the ballplayer many imagine, and he may never be; talented as he is, he's equally undisciplined. Milledge can't yet hit the outside pitch for power, he doesn't understand how the score and the inning affect how much risk you can take, and on the field, he doesn't act with the reserve expected of a winning player. Many of the worst things his critics have said of him are true — he's a raw talent who's acted boorishly and unpredictably.

He is, though, a talent. Judgment can be taught; bat speed and coordination can't. Ryan Church, who will replace Milledge in the outfield, is a good ballplayer, better than he gets credit for, and there likely won't be much difference in what the two will do next year. Milledge, though, is capable of doing things that Church will never do. A team that can't or won't recognize that fact is one that accepts mediocrity, as is a team that refuses to take on the burden of teaching any young player who doesn't come to the major leagues preternaturally aware of what he's supposed — and not supposed — to do.

Milledge, like Mike Pelfrey, Phil Humber, and Aaron Heilman, among others, was thrown to the wolves, asked to do things in the major leagues that he had never been asked to do before. He was asked to learn on the job and grow under the most enormous pressures. Some young players can take that, and some can't, but to repeatedly put them in situations in which they can't succeed is absurd. The Mets, though, do it again and again.

Every time the Mets make a fetish of professionalism (and do so at the price of talent), they regret it, as they do whenever they make a fetish of experience at the expense of youth, or play for the next year rather than the next five. When they do all these at once, as when they traded Kevin Mitchell and Scott Kazmir, the results tend towards the unforgivable. But they do the same thing over and over again, never learning from the past and never changing. General managers, managers, and coaches are fired, and the players grow old and retire, but the Mets are always the Mets — never accepting risk, always afraid of failure, and never quite as good as they should be.

The Mets should be a great team, and they can be. David Wright, Jose Reyes, Perez, and Maine all met or surpassed expectations this year, and the best of the team's veterans still have plenty left. This is a team that can succeed, wildly, for years. But for that to happen, the Mets have to trust talent, at every level and in every signing and trade. Any competent manager should be able to patch together a catching situation, or get solid play out of spare parts and green kids in an outfielder corner. No manager can make anyone play above his gifts.

tmarchman@nysun.com