Homegrown

Thole, Davis, Murphy, Reyes, Wright, Martinez, Pagan, Niewenhuis, Mejia, Harvey, Dickey, Niese, Gee, Familia. That's a team of eight starting position players, five starting pitchers, and one closer of whom one did not begin his professional career as a Met, and that one is a guy who's career experienced a distinct rebirth of a categorical nature when he joined the Mets last year. It's also a team that I might think would be pretty good in, say, 2013. I'm thinking of this after seeing Fernando Martinez absolutely crush a ball in a crucial pinch-hitting spot in today's Mets-Astros game, and therefore being reminded that he's pretty good, at least when healthy. I sort of wonder when's the last time a team has tried to construct itself this way, with essentially all homegrown players.

Now, perhaps the Mets will not follow this route. 2013's a long way away; who knows what'll happen to any of these guys between now and then. Right now Josh Thole isn't necessarily giving us reason to think we'd be thrilled with him as our catcher, and I think that'd got to be the best spot to throw in a big-name free agent. Maybe you don't like Murphy as a second baseman, though I think I really do, but the Mets have lots of other middle-infielder prospects, like Ruben Tejada and Wilmer Flores. So I'm sort of confused as to why people say that the Mets' farm system is just pathetic: it's sort of on the verge of producing an entire high-quality baseball team within a few years. The Mets can be quite good indeed in 2013 by doing very little. They don't need to do very much beyond that to get really good. Abandoning Jose Reyes to get "prospects" would just be kind of silly.