Seated in the front of the press room, owner Jeff Wilpon alongside him, midway through 15 of the toughest minutes you can imagine, Mets general…
Seated in the front of the press room, owner Jeff Wilpon alongside him, midway through 15 of the toughest minutes you can imagine, Mets general manager Sandy Alderson spilled an unfortunate truth about his team, and his own performance in building it.
“Well look, we signed, I dunno, five, six free agents over the offseason and really, not one of them has performed up to their expectations or probably ours, either,” Alderson said. “I think that’s, you know, that’s, one, it’s a bad result, but at the same time, I think it’s a commentary on the process. And I think that that’s something that, you know, one has to revisit.
“And anytime you make a series of decisions, they turn out well or poorly, it’s important to go back and try to figure out why. And so I think, that’s certainly not to say that those free agents won’t perform better as time goes on, but I wouldn’t call those mistakes in the sense that — but they certainly did not turn out as we had hoped, and this is a results business.”
Nobody will dispute Alderson’s assessment. Among Jay Bruce, Adrian Gonzalez, Todd Frazier, Jose Reyes, Jose Lobaton, Anthony Swarzak and Jason Vargas — who combined to make up the team’s free-agent haul last offseason — nobody has played well this year.
Bruce is on the disabled list after hitting .212 through 62 games. Gonzalez was released this month. Frazier was putting up a career-worst.695 OPS going into Tuesday. Reyes was hitting below.200. Swarzak and Vargas have both dealt with injuries, with Vargas currently on the disabled list. That totals up to about $89.25 million in mistakes.
It is far from what anyone would describe as a successful offseason, and as the Mets were mired in a seven-game losing streak, just a half-game in front of the last-place Marlins going into Tuesday, its impact stings even more.
“I think right now, we’re not playing up to our potential,” Michael Conforto told The Post just before Alderson made his announcement, “but I think we can score more runs than we have been and I think we can be playing more competitively than we have been.”
During Alderson’s tenure with the Mets, his record in free agency has been spotty at best.
Though Asdrubal Cabrera, Bartolo Colon and Curtis Granderson worked out, Alderson whiffed on Michael Cuddyer and Neil Walker. He let Daniel Murphy walk to a division rival right after a breakout postseason — a move that haunts the Mets 19 times per year — and let Justin Turner go unsigned before he started mashing with the Dodgers.
Yoenis Cespedes, his marquee signing, has seen his production dip since Alderson gave him $110 million before the 2017 season. There still is time left for Cespedes to turn it around, but before getting hurt last month, he slashed.255/.316/.474 and, at age 32, his prime could be past him.
“With respect to the future, I would say two things,” Alderson said. “One is, notwithstanding the good prognosis, my health is an uncertainty going forward. And secondly, if I were to look at it on the merits, I’m not sure coming back is warranted.”
