As part of the tour of the team directly after of the season, today we move to the Outfield. I always have a weird feeling with the Outfield because sometimes I feel its could be one of our stronger assets and sometimes its very, very weak. Case and Point: On paper last year we had Alou, Beltran, Church, the ABC outfield that Beltran and Alou were going to drive in a boatload of runs and anything we got out of Church was going to be appreciated. It then became the Pagan, Beltran, Church outfield, which first seemed bad, and then seemed worse when Beltran started to struggle, but Pagan really provided and Church was looking like our MVP. Then Pagan got injured, then Church got injured. We started to rely on Tatis, Evans and Murphy. Who all ended up being nice surprises. What does that teach us? Sometimes we are actually lucky.
But it will take more than luck to win next year, because our bag of luck runs out in September (I wonder if anyone has pointed out yet that the Mets started to fall apart this year after Tatis went down on injury. He could have been a much bigger impact than we originally thought). The problem with the Outfield the last couple of years is that it starts out old, gets injured, and then we need to find solutions so here are my solutions, as of October 5th, because I know they will change as the free agent and trade market start to develop after the playoffs are over.
One solution is that we do not go out for extra peices, we take what we already have. Beltran is in, Church is in, all we need is left field. We could bring up Fmart and platoon him with Evans and possibly Pagan or between Church, Evans, Fmart, and Pagan we have a spring training battle to see who gets spots in the OF and who will be on the bench and who might have to go back to the minors. The competition will dip a bit with other solutions which involve trading Church for starting or relief pitching. Even though the OF gets banged up a lot, there are a lot of players in our minors system that can play, and could be called up, so trading Church, although a very well liked player, might benefit overall. That would make more sense to if we decide to resign Tatis, who might be worth a low risk contract depending on how his injury goes this offseason.
The next time I do the Outfield options article, it will be more focused on if we should do any trade bundles because the trade market will have actually developed by then, and we will know who is available and for what.
