Homer Award: Delgado’s Mets had “the best team”
“It was very disappointing because we know we had the best team. I believe that we still have a great team. The nucleus of our ball-club remains pretty much the same, we’ve done it before, we just have to go out and do it again, but we have to play six months. Actually we’d like to play seven months.”
Now in one sense I admire Delgado’s confidence in his teammates. On the other end of the spectrum, though, in order to have “the best team,” you really should make the playoffs first. As it has been documented over and over again this off-season, the Mets became the first team ever to blow a 7 game lead with only 17 games to play, as the succumbed to the pressure and lost out by one game to the Philadelphia Phillies on the last day of the season.
Delgado really is not in the position to be making such claims of “having the best team” in 2007. As a result, Carlos Delgado can, for the time being at least, be considered a Homer amongst Homers.
Filed under: New York Mets, _Homer Awards
I love Delgado, but yea, this does make him a Homer. If you’re the best team prove it, walk the walk Carlos!
Wow. How dumb does this guy sound? Best team? You had a historic COLLAPSE!!
C’mon now, lets be fair, its tough for a player or coach to knock their own team. He’s not going to come out and say “yeah we weren’t really that good”. To achieve a historic collapse, you had to have had a pretty good team most of the way. 7-10 stretches aren’t unheard of from good teams.
I think what he really meant is the Mets were better than the Phillies, which I think is still arguable. But the Phillies had a great run while the Mets had an awful one to end the season.
Either way, Delgado may have been right, he may have been wrong, but I don’t think its fair to call a player talking about his own team a homer. I wouldn’t have called Rollins a homer at the beginning of 2007 when he made his comments. Ballsy maybe, getting a little ahead of himself maybe, but not a homer. That’s how athletes engaged in team sports should think.
I don’t know, Mark. So what if Chipper Jones said the Braves had “the best team”? Or better yet, if Miguel Cabrera said it about the Marlins? The media would scoff at them…
Don’t get me wrong, I like Carlos Delgado. What he said was not off-the-wall, but after the collapse, those are things he should worry about proving on the field in 2008. He kind of sounds like a jackass now, considering how the season ended. They obviously did not have “the best team”. The best team would not have fallen apart like that.
Agree with Mr. Fleece here. Why even say anything about being the “best?” No need really. And if you’re the best, prove it on the field. Rollins obviously backed up his comments. His team did win the division, like he said, and he did also happen to win an NL MVP in the process.
Once again, make no mistake about it, I admire Delgado’s faith in his teammates. The Mets should have won the NL East last year, and top-to-bottom, they might have been the best team in the NL “talent wise”. Point being, after how their season ended, you shouldn’t be making homerish comments as such. Hopefully Delgado will be healthier next year and return to his 2005-2006 form….He is the one of the keys to the Mets’ success next year…outside of their starting staff’s production.
Like I said, I wouldn’t have called Rollins a homer going into 2007, I think his comments were even more out of line. I get where you guys are coming from, but what do you expect him to say? Its not like he was denying responsibility for the “collapse,” he was just saying he didn’t think his team played to its own standards. There’s nothing wrong with that.
If someone were to ask Derek Jeter about the Yanks struggles to get out of the first round of the playoffs, and he said they should because they’ve often been better than the teams they’ve played, no one would say anything to him. And I wouldn’t be mad about Chipper saying his team was best as recently a year ago (it’d be a bit of a stretch coming off back to back third places).
Trust me, if Derek Jeter made the same comment, we would be all over it.
(Although, I agree we’d probably be the only ones to call him out seeing how the mainstream media would let him get away with murder).
Fair enough. I just its more significant when some homer sportswriter talks about how great one team is and never gives any others a chance. When its a player, they can say what they want about their own team if its within some degree of reason. Delgado was still somewhat responding to his comments about being “bored” earlier in the season. A lot of the fanbase has really ridden him about that. I read those comments, and it was pretty much exactly what I expected him to say, and I’m sure to some degree management put him up to it. He has a rep as being too quiet in the media for someone expected to be a leader.
You have a valid point. But our point stems from the belief that Delgado could have taken two routes here:
1) Be a leader and say, “We blew it last year. We had all the talent necessary and blew it because WE WERE NOT the best team and I am determined to make sure this will not happen in 2008.”
2) Be a whiny homer and say, “We know we were the better team.”
As a Met fan, what would you have rather heard from Delgado? What would you rather have your young players hear?
I say Delgado’s homerism prevented him from being a good leader, hence the award.
I didn’t take it as being a whiney homer, he’s not a politician, he doesn’t have to say exactly the right thing. His point was he and the rest of the team felt they were better than they were. He WAS saying they blew it. He even went so far as to talk about how poorly he played. This was an admission that the team let themselves and their fans down. It wasn’t “we were better, we should have won, it wasn’t fair, we were cheated”. It was “We’re a better team than we showed, we know we’re a better team than we showed, and we need to prove than in 2008.”
were better than they played*
I guess part of my reasoning here is just that, even if he underplayed, Delgado has essentially been the epitome of class and professionalism throughout his career. He had a really rough season and the fans are letting him know they noticed. He was responding more to that than anything else here. I could see going to Delgado if you were struggling to find a good “homer” story, but I’m sure you could find one more significant.
I understand where you guys are coming from though. I’m assuming J-Roll would have been instantly placed into this category if you guys were doing it a year ago. But personally, I think its more appropriate to put guys like Michael Kay, Mike Francesca, Chip Caray, Joe Morgan, etc. Guys who are being paid to objectively evaluate talent and performance. Delgado isn’t being paid for that, he’s being paid to hit baseballs. I wouldn’t expect an impromptu analysis he gives of his teams season to be completely objective or perfectly worded. I think he made his point. The Mets played below their ability all season, and most significantly when it counted most. He himself never got into a rhythm. They were a team that expected to win and they didn’t. He just spun it in exactly the way his manager, Willie Randolph, would have. The whole “I trust my guys” thing seems to come from him and to have rubbed off on the clubhouse as a whole. He was saying the Mets would be in the playoffs all season, after every bad game in his press conferences, and no one around the Mets or even around baseball would have expected him to say any less.
Yes, it’s true that the announcers you mention and other media types are better fits for the Homer Award.
But in the MLB offseason, most of those homers go away and dream about their homer obsessions. For example, instead of talking on air about how Derek Jeter is God’s gift to mankind, right now Michael Kay is staring at a ‘Fathead’ of Jeter, crying, while drinking a cosmopolitan and telling “The Captain” that he misses him.
Likewise, Joe Morgan is somewhere right now trying to figure out how to spell “The Cincinnati Reds of 1975 would have taken down the Roman Empire.”
Unfortunately, we’re not there to witness that, so writing about it is a little unfair to Kay and Morgan.
That said, in the offseason, the players, agents, GM’s are more prevalent as they begin to talk about themselves and their teams, either in reflection or in future terms. So when we come across the alleged clubhouse leader (and I do respect Delgado as a person tremendously, by the way) of the Mets - a team that just went through an historic collapse - say that he still thinks the Mets had a better team, well, that’s got homer award written all over it. Talent alone doesn’t make you a better team. And Delgado fails to understand this.
Haha okay, I guess I can deal with that. Just as long as you rip Steve Phillips a new one when he rambles on Baseball Tonight about how great some player he signed/drafted is proportionately.