Mets Pre-Preview: Why I Won't Be Holding My Breath

It's pitchers and catchers soon.

Ironically, the Mets don't seem to have much of either and those that they do have are full of question marks; Puntos de Interogación Iniciales and Puntos de Interrogación Finales.

In other words, the off season was remarkably similar to the 2009 season; dollops of delusional, wishful thinking.



I think you definitely stand pat with last year's rotation. After all, Santana says he's better and we should always believe what the Mets organisation and willing athletes publically declare about their injuries. That means he'll probably win 30 games this season to avoid being thrown too far off track by last season's premature ending. Of course, he's a year older as well. And can we really believe his physical woes are over with a simple elbow surgery, bone chip removal surgery? His return has been almost too easy. You've got to wonder if the simple surgery was done to put off an inevitable, career-threatening surgery, especially considering he's a Met and that Mets physicians practice their trade playing that game, Operation.


Mets physicians table....

And Pelf, Maine and Oliver Perez?

Look, these are by and large, young guys. This trio combined for 20 wins last season. That's a nice round number for the meat of your rotation. Inspirational. Pelf has lost weight because weight apparently was the reason for all his failings, not his mental incapacities or dropping the mouth guard. So if you consider that he's young, that he probably pitched with sophomoric burnout most of last season you'll see that 10 wins can quite easily become 20 wins, especially with the 5.03 he sported last season. That's 50 wins just for the number one and number two starters. The entire team only won 70 games last year so we're looking at remarkable, tangible improvement and by god, the Mets management was right, there's no need to change anything about this rotation. This is the best rotation in baseball. If you're too senile to think straight or if your mind is already so rotted with drug and alcohol abuse.

As for Maine and Perez, these two combined for 10 wins. There's alot of room for improvement. For one, Perez was fat and injured most of the year and he's had surgery to remove scar tissue from his right knee so expect his win output to at least double from the 3 games he won last season. Or if we're crazy optimistic, we'll say 10 wins. On the other hand, he DIDN'T have any surgery to implant a brain or surgery that would prevent him from frequent bouts of inexplicable wildness so maybe optimism is not the way to lean here. I'll split the difference and say Ollie might be good for 5 wins this season. There will be at least 5 games in 2010 that make you say wow, what a great pitcher, why can't he do that all the time? That's just the way the Rollo Rolls.

Maine? Enigma. Is he healthy? Is he hurt? Probability over the course of his career says he'll be hurt. He's always hurt or recovering from being hurt. So you could say he'll pitch half his starts and win a third of those. Let's say 5 wins.

That's a total of 60 wins from the top four.