A Cespedes For The Rest Of Us.

       Right before yesterday's waiver trade deadline, I saw on the MLB Network crawl that the Mets had traded for Yoenis Cespedes.  In and of itself, this made me very happy.  As usual with the Mets, nothing is easy, especially happiness.

For a two month rental of the well-traveled slugging Cuban, the Mets gave up two prospects, one of them Michael Fulmer who is highly regarded, but not in the Matt Harvey/Noah Syndergaard way - though one could have easily said the same thing about Jacob deGrom last year.  This trade adds desperately needed power to a lineup that has trouble scoring runs in the same way Lindsey Lohan has trouble staying clean.  I would love to invoke the name Donn Clendenon, but the Mets have enough jinxes to worry about.

So why was this trade a relief rather than a celebration?  Because the Mets can't do anything right the first time, though somehow, they may have gotten things right in spite of themselves.  See, just the night before word that a trade for Carlos Gomez had blown through the social media. 

^^^ Empty Space? ^^^

The Mets being the Mets, the trade went around on Twitter before any actual confirmed reports had gone out.  And the Mets...being the Mets, they were going to give up Zack Wheeler, a fine young pitcher who they ought to hold on to.


And in the last stroke of the Mets folly/genius, the word of the trade spread through the stadium during the actual game and got to the other player involved, Wilmer Flores.  If you missed what happened then you must be living under a rock (and not a big fan of Tom Hanks movies). 

And then somehow the Mets found a way to back out of the trade at the last minute, claiming Gomez had medical issues with his hip (which were so bad, the Brewers immediately traded him to the Astros).  I have a sneaking feeling the trouble with the hip to the Mets wasn't medical but the size of the wallet therein and how much they'd have to fatten it next year.  So how do you come back from all that?  Well last night, Flores found a way to forever endear himself to Mets fans by hitting an extra inning, game-winning home run against the first place Nationals.  Funny how these things work out.  The Mets keep one of their best pitchers and the other player immediately wins the most important game of the season (so far) and they turn around and make a trade for a slugger, which is what they needed more in the first place.  If it weren't for dumb blind luck, the Mets wouldn't have any luck at all.

***

As for the title of this post, some might say I stole it from Jerry Seinfeld, and yeah, I did sort of.

Oh my god. @Mets I can't believe I can actually say this, but is it true that there is now "A Cespedis for the rest of us"? #mets #T7L

— Jerry Seinfeld (@JerrySeinfeld) July 31, 2015

But I remember making this joke back during the 2013 Home Run Derby and I doubt I was the first to make it then either.  Let's cross our fingers and hope we can all run this joke into the ground through October. 

Stopped Short.

       This morning I woke up to find out that the shortstop the Mets should have traded for at the beginning of the year was traded...


...for the shortstop the team never should have let get away in the first place.

*sigh* Can someone remind me again what it is like to not have incompetent management who is under the thumb of cheapskate owners? 

I Like(d) Ike.

       Ike Davis could have had it all.  Ike Davis should have had it all.  The son of a major leaguer, he was drafted in the first round by a team in New York and was fast tracked to the big leagues from moment one.  He looked good as a 23 year old rookie in 2010 and wonderful things lay ahead.  Instead, it all went horribly horribly wrong...

His sophomore year was over before it really began after he had a freak injury to his ankle during a collision with David Wright on a pop up.  The wonderful Mets medical team misdiagnosed him at least twice and he never got back on the field.  But he eventually healed and we were all looking forward to his 2012 season.  I insanely predicted big things for him.  He got off to a dreadful start, if by dreadful I mean nightmarish, and if by nightmarish I mean absolutely god-fucking-awful.  In the middle of June he was hitting a buck eighty with 6 homers.  The hitch in his swing that was supposed to be smoothed out by now was bigger than ever.  Then a funny thing happened...he got hotter than the sun.  The rest of June was a supernova and he bashed homer after homer.  He got his average up to .227 and finished with 32 dingers and 90 RBIs.  Now the question remained, which Ike was the real Ike?   Was it First Half Ike or Second Half Ike?

Sadly, we got our answer almost immediately in 2013.  Ike came out hitting a whopping .160 for the first two months and was demoted to the minors by the all star break.  All of our Mets fan dreaming of a homegrown power hitting Paul Bunyan first baseman were being dashed before our eyes.  The Mets even drafted the Next Big Thing at first in Dominic Smith in the first round. The dream was over for Ike Davis as a Met.

By spring training of 2014, the Mets had announced that he was going to be part of an unfathomable and untenable three way platoon at first with the immortal Lucas Duda and the incredibly terrible Josh Satin.  He was sadly third in a two man race.  He got into 12 games and got 30 at bats but it was obvious to anyone who has ever seen one game of baseball in their lives that Ike was on the outs with the Mets.  He did whack one last pinch hit walk off grand slam on April 5th to emphasize those saddest words of tongue and pen.  He was unceremoniously dumped on the Pittsburgh Pirates on April 18th for a middling middle reliever and the ol' player to be named. 

I collected all these Ike cards out of hope, not for profit.  I bought and traded specifically to get most of these cards and hoarded the ones I pulled.  I really had such high hopes for Ike.  I want him to do well with the Pirates, I really do.  But he is yet another in a long line of disappointments for the Mets in terms of developing power hitting prospects.  He's that girlfriend you wanted to move in with and make babies with but instead she flakes out and you just have a little pile of her shit in the corner of your apartment in a shopping bag, waiting for a day to get around to giving it back to her so you never have to see her again.