213 Miles From Shea

Spring Training hasn’t officially started for pitchers and catchers yet, but earlier this week there were over 60 players in camp (compared to slightly under 20 last year). At this point, the idea of official start to spring training has been thrown out the window with the idea of arriving at the reporting date as being late.

Naturally, both Ike Davis and Lucas Duda have arrived early to camp. Ike Davis has been photographed a lot with David Wright, has been working hard and probably has the inside track to the first basemen job since it was his job to start (and he may have the higher ceiling over Duda).

Lucas has been no slouch either. He has been in Michigan over the winter working on strength and conditioning with Tejada (among others). Duda has entered camp stronger, lighter and faster. As he has said, he has worked on his base running technique. Teaching base running technique is the way you can teach speed. (I never really liked that slogan, “you can’t teach speed” because you can always work on mechanics for individuals).

In other Ike Davis news, Terry is expecting to give him 80-100 at bats this spring, players usually top out around 60.

In other words, the games haven’t started yet this spring, and the official workouts haven’t started yet, but the anecdotal reporting is that both players are better than they were last year, which makes it seem like this spring will be competitive.

And hey, the Mets will have meaningful March games.

I found myself thinking the other day, “eh, maybe Stephen Drew isn’t worth a two year deal, he’s especially not worth a three year one.”

And then I stopped. Why was I thinking this?

I determined that I was being swayed by popular opinion, because at the start of the off-season, I was advocating signing Jhonny Peralta to either a 3 year 36 million, or 4 year 48 million if it meant over paying him to get him on the team. This contract seemed at the time more feasible than Drew. Back then it looked like Drew would be in line for the real pay day.

But the baseball off-season is odd and the first few major free agents that go off the board too early (Peralta was the one this year) get overpaid and the better talent, the perceived more expensive talent, especially in the time of the CBA gets more scrutiny over whether the playing ability is worth the financial and draft pick cost.

The Mets will be better next year, but as right now, just not good enough. There is a lot of uncertainty, players need to have breakout (d’Arnaud) or comeback (Chris Young) years to push us over. It isn’t a long shot for that to happen, but betting on hope isn’t helpful. Since the Mets will be better next year, it is difficult to imagine that they will find themselves in the position of a protected first round draft pick, like this season.

Stephen Drew will only cost a third round pick. He is going to be below market value from where he was at the start of the off season. MLBTradeRumors says he’s the 14th best player to be a free agent this year, 7 spots above Peralta.

In short, Drew doesn’t make us world champs, but he makes us better. He puts us in a better position, and allows our other pieces to provide depth. If the general consensus at the start of the off season was frustration for not signing Peralta, then why are we not shouting for Drew?

The baseball landscape has been stable since the Montreal Expos moved to Washington, DC.

Baseball also has 30 franchises, which is the same as the NBA and NHL and two behind the NFL who has 32. There is also the MLS as a fast growing league, which has 19 franchises growing to 21 in 2015.

There are three cities, two in the United States who have been on record recently wanting an MLB team: Montreal, Portland and San Jose/Fremont.

Out of the three only San Jose/Fremont has a real chance of happening since the move for the Athletics would be 50 miles at most and they wouldn’t be abandoning their market too much. This would be equivalent to the Baltimore Bullets moving to DC, if there was another NBA team just outside of Baltimore (representing the Giants in this analogy).

Anyway, there was an article recently on MLB.com that suggests Portland is ready for an MLB team to the point that they have plans for a 35,000 seat stadium and a market ready for entertainment. Montreal has been vocal over the last few seasons about wanting another franchise and there has been some slight criticism about the MLB being too American now.

So the question then becomes, where do these two teams come from? Does the MLB expand? Only if its economically viable. On a baseball side, expanding to 32 teams would cause a further dilution in talent, and would interfere with the 5 member divisions that have finally been equalized (AL West having 4 previously and NL Central with 6). For those reasons, but really more of the economic reasons, I would lean towards the MLB not expanding.

On the other side, expanding into Montreal and Portland would not interfere with current MLB markets.

As for internal moves, who moves? The Marlins would be a natural choice with limited attendance, but they just built a new ballpark, so that’s not going to happen, plus moving to Montreal would not necessarily increase attendance.

This would make Portland the most likely city for a team to move to (ignoring the Fremont/San Jose/Oakland situation), but who moves to Portland?