Three Offseason Questions for the Mets

A great team cannot be, of all things, aimless, but that is what the Mets have been this winter. While their purportedly hot pursuit of Minnesota Twins pitcher Johan Santana has garnered all the attention, the Mets have done little or nothing to remake a team that last year collapsed in epically improbable fashion. Letting Paul Lo Duca and Tom Glavine slink off as scapegoats and exiling Lastings Milledge wasn't enough to clean the air in Queens of the stench of failure, and nothing other than winning can do so. (Even acquiring Santana would set off an epic round of grousing about the quality of the prospects surrendered.) Three questions, then, about whether the Mets can make things right.

1. Are they going for it or not?

The Mets, it's true, missed first place by a game last year and will likely have the third-largest payroll in baseball this year. They also won only 88 games, in the weaker league. How willing are general manager Omar Minaya and manager Willie Randolph to compromise the team's long-term interests in pursuit of a championship this year?

If this isn't a question that has an immediately obvious answer, that's because it probably shouldn't. This is, on paper, perhaps the best team in the National League. They have an expensive, veteran-laden roster, and drew nearly four million fans to Queens last year. Of course they'll play to win this year. But the Mets are also a young team. Jose Reyes and David Wright haven't yet hit their primes, and Carlos Beltran is still in the midst of his. After this year, the team will be free of tens of millions in obligations to the aging Pedro Martinez and Carlos Delgado, while prospects Carlos Gomez and Fernando Martinez will likely be nearly ready for larger roles.

This isn't, in other words, a team like the 2001 Arizona Diamondbacks or the 2005 Houston Astros, teams on the verge of implosion that had to win before their oldest, best players fell apart, and it shouldn't be managed that way. Minaya and Randolph, though, are under great pressure because of the collapse. To them, a win this year is much more important than a hypothetical win in the future. This Mets team isn't faced this year with their last chance to win; the men who run them, though, may be. This is a potentially toxic dynamic.

2. How creative are they willing to get with the pitching staff?

Looked at from one angle, the Mets' rotation looks, at best, sketchy. As dominant as he was late last season, Pedro Martinez remains an unknown quantity. Neither John Maine nor Oliver Perez can be relied upon to pitch 200 innings. Orlando Hernandez, as he does every year, will miss at least a month. Signing Hernandez's brother Livan, as the team is expected to do, would provide stability, but there are plausible disaster scenarios looming here.

When there were holes in the rotation, Randolph and Minaya have had a tendency to go with really terrible pitchers such as Brian Lawrence and Jose Lima or really unprepared ones such as Philip Humber. Obviously the hope this year is that Pelfrey and Humber, who now have at least a bit of experience in the majors, will give the Mets a chance to win when they're given the ball. This surely represents improvement on the likes of last year's Chan Ho Park experiment, but the team could do even better with a bit of flexibility.

Maine and Perez both perform better on long rest, El Duque cannot make more than 25 or so starts in a season, and Martinez will presumably need extra rest; but none of this need be a problem. Assuming the Mets sign Livan Hernandez, they could put Pelfrey, Humber, or even Aaron Heilman a clear shot at a job by running a six-man rotation for a month or two at the beginning of the season, saving their best pitchers' arms for the stretch. Something like this could turn a weakness into a strength.

3. How patient will the team and the fans be with Willie Randolph?

If the biggest questions surrounding the Mets are structural questions about how well they can handle the tension between youth and age, or how well they can best use a talented pitching staff with some large and obvious flaws, that's probably largely because Willie Randolph hasn't always handled them well. The obvious greatness of Reyes and Wright made them immediate fixtures in the Mets' lineups, but aside from them, Randolph hasn't done a good job of handling younger players. Many pitchers have thrived during his tenure, but many have also been put in positions where they could do nothing but fail.

For the Wilpon family, who will ultimately decide Randolph's fate, the question of the maligned manager is ultimately about public relations. That puts his fate in the hands of the fans, and they will only be swayed one way or another by the standings. To the extent that those are dictated by decisions that weight the present against the future, and by how much pitching Randolph has, his job will be in Omar Minaya's hands. And that leaves us with a last question. Just how much does the general manager have invested in Randolph?

tmarchman@nysun.com