Delgado Gets E-3 for Picking Marlins

August 16, 200521 yr

On Baseball

Delgado Gets an E-3 for Picking the Marlins

E-Mail This

Printer-Friendly

Reprints

By MURRAY CHASS

Published: August 16, 2005

THE man made a mistake; it's that simple. Carlos Delgado said in January that he signed with Florida rather than the Mets because he thought the Marlins had a better chance of going to the World Series. He thought wrong.

Yes, with Delgado in their lineup, the Marlins have been better than the Mets this season, but barely. Today the Marlins are in fourth place in the National League East, two games ahead of the Mets, but there have been days, most recently last month, when the Mets were ahead of the Marlins. In short, not much space has separated the teams at any time this season.

What might have happened if Delgado had signed with the Mets? They don't get a chance to do it over, but his bat would have looked good in the middle of the Mets' batting order. And with his bat absent from the Florida lineup, the Marlins might have had an offensive shortage.

Delgado is hitting .293 with 22 home runs and 78 runs batted in. He has a .556 slugging percentage and a .394 on-base percentage.

Want to know what the Mets' first basemen have done offensively? Actually, you might not. It's so bad that squeamish adults should skip ahead a few paragraphs.

The Mets' first basemen - that includes everyone who has played first and what they have done with their bats when they have played there - have been the puniest hitters in the National League. Their batting average, according to Elias Sports Bureau, is .216, which is 31 points lower than the next-worst team.

Their home run total of 11 and R.B.I. total of 39 are also the league's lowest. They have a weak .348 slugging percentage and a .290 on-base percentage.

Moving away from first base, the Mets have one player with a higher batting average than Delgado, David Wright (.305), and one with more home runs, Cliff Floyd (26). Wright and Floyd are tied for the team lead with 73 R.B.I., 5 fewer than Delgado.

It's little wonder that the Mets have had difficulty winning games. They make too many errors, their relief corps gives up too many runs and they score too few runs. Two of their last three losses were by scores of 2-1. One was Pedro Mart?nez's spoiled gem in Los Angeles on Sunday (he allowed only three base runners), and the other was in the game in San Diego in which Mike Cameron and Carlos Beltran had their devastating head-on collision while diving for a fly ball.

The Mets' hitters and relief pitchers have not been kind to Mart?nez, preventing the team from getting full value from the remarkable pitcher. Not that the Mets haven't derived great value on and off the field in the first year of his four-year, $53 million contract, but they should be better than 13-11 in his 24 starts.

He left four of his starts with leads and twice departed with the score tied - 2-2 and 3-3. The Mets lost all six of those games. Mart?nez has sustained losses of 2-1, 3-2 and 4-3. A Delgado hit here or there would have come in handy.

All good pitchers suffer occasionally from the inadequacies of their teams' bullpens or batting orders - look at Roger Clemens's experiences this season in Houston - but if the Mets had won three more of the games Mart?nez started, their record would be 62-55, and they would be only one game from the wild-card lead.

Without Delgado or a hitter of similar productivity, the Mets have not been able to rise above the .500 team that they are. The outfield wreck won't help.

Beltran may escape surgery and could play with protection for his fractured cheek, but Cameron is out for more than a month, and might not be able to come back at all this season.

In their absence last weekend in Los Angeles, Victor Diaz and Gerald Williams hit well. Diaz, whom the Mets like as a hitter, had five hits, including two home runs, in 11 at-bats and registered a 1.000 slugging percentage. Williams, hitting above his ability, collected three hits, including a home run, in 10 at-bats with an .800 slugging percentage.

Still, the Mets' lineup would be a lot more imposing with Delgado in it, and his chances of reaching the playoffs would have looked better if he were in that lineup.

As it is, his decision to sign with the Marlins has left him open to being traded if the Marlins don't get a new ballpark and don't want to pay the rest of his four-year, $52 million contract. The Marlins didn't include a no-trade clause in Delgado's contract, whereas the Mets had offered to give him veto power over being traded to all but a handful of teams.

But Delgado made his decision, and he and the Mets have had to live with it. Both could wind up suffering because of it.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/16/sports/b...ll/16chass.html