All the nay-saying Mets fans are already flooding the airways. The baseball equivalent of Chicken Little claiming the sky is falling. Look, I’m not stupid. The Mets need some help in the starting pitching department. But if you think Omar Minaya and the Mets should have given Barry Zito more money and years than the Giants did, you’re crazy. This will become one of the dumbest contracts ever given. One-hundred-twenty-six million dollars guaranteed for seven years. There is also an option for an eighth year to boost the contract to 144 million. That is insane. In fact the contracts given to pitchers this off season including the one given today will come back to haunt these teams. In two to three years these clubs who have signed the Menches and the Zitos will be calling the Mets and Yankees for them to take these burdensome contracts off their hands. Can you say Kevin Brown and Mike Hampton? How did those contracts work out? Pitchers are way too fragile to be giving these kinds of deals. If you want to trash Omar and the Mets today, be my guest. But the Met did the right thing in not over paying for Zito.
The real question now is what do the Mets do? There isn’t much left on the free agent market. Trading remains a possibility but to get something good in return, the Mets are going to have to part with Milledge, Heilman, and Pelfrey or
