Today is Major League Baseball’s deadline day to tender contracts to players under team control for the 2014 season.
So far, the New York Mets have cut ties with five players.
Letting Jordany Valdespin and all of his drama go is one of Sandy Alderson‘s best moves of the off-season.
Scott Atchison, Jeremy Hefner, Omar Quintanilla and Justin Turner are all players who contributed to the Mets to the best of their limited abilities, and I’m sad to see them go.
MLB Trade Rumors’ Matt Swartz projected that Atchison would have made $1.3 million through arbitration, while Quintanilla would have earned $900,000 and Turner would have made $800,000. Neither Hefner nor Valdespin had reached arbitration eligibility, so the Mets could have paid each of them around $500,000.
Total gain thus far today: five 40-man roster spots and approximately $4 million.
Despite rumored meetings, I don’t think that’s going to help put Curtis Granderson in blue and orange next year. (And if an aging, one-dimensional player is going to require a three- or four-year deal, that’s not really a bad thing.)
But the 2014 Mets are no better tonight than they were this morning, and they’ve cut loose two players in Turner and Hefner that I did enjoy having on the team.
Meanwhile, the Washington Nationals were busy turning some of their spare parts into Doug Fister, a very serviceable starting pitcher.
Hopefully Alderson has a plan that goes beyond slashing payroll and drafting players who won’t reach the majors before Amazon’s delivery drones seem practical.
The next two weeks are probably the swan song for this blog. The domain renewal is coming up, and I don’t really feel the same enthusiasm for baseball that I did when I began.
I could still change my mind, but I’m having a hard time imagining what I might find to say about the 2014 Mets that anyone would want to read and other commitments will keep me from going to more than a handful of minor league games next season.
I do want to thank everyone who stops by to read Random Baseball Stuff, and I appreciate the friends I’ve made because of this blog.
PaulHadsall.com 
I hope that you keep it up, but I know how hard it is to maintain a blog daily. Even if you give up the blog, I still hope we can continue swapping autographed cards sporadically.
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Thank you – I’ve got to find time to sort through my cards and check for duplicates again. This summer was rough for me, and I don’t think I got autographs at more than 6 or 7 games this season.
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Tumblr is free. You could also shift to your FB page like I do
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Thanks for the suggestions, but if I decide to let the renewal go here, I’ll probably just look for another established blog willing to take an occasional guest post if I feel the urge to write about baseball again.
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