Mike Pelfrey Battered Around, Again

Mike Pelfrey was the starting pitcher for the Mets today, and once again, he failed. Get used to seeing that sentence because you will see it roughly 30 times during the season. That Pelfrey is still wearing a Mets uniform is another example that Sandy Alderson is not a particularly good general manager.

Pelfrey lasted four and a third innings against the Cardinals, allowing four runs on six hits — two of which were home runs. This mirrors his first spring training start last week against the Marlins — four runs, six hits, but in two and two-thirds of an inning.

“I felt like I was a lot better from last week,” Pelfrey inexplicably told Mets Blog. “I wasn’t very good last week, so, I don’t know how much that says. But I was better today, so after the next start I’ll try to get better again.”

Pelfrey apparently has a loose definition of the word “better.”

We shouldn’t even be hearing the name “Pelfrey” this spring or reading these dumb quotes; he should have been non-tendered after his truly awful 2011 season, which featured such gaudy numbers as a 7-13 record to go along with a sparkling 4.74 ERA. Yes, he is an “innings eater,” perhaps the stupidest phrase in all of baseball. If the quality of the innings is poor, do you really want him eating them?

Instead Alderson decided to keep Pelfrey and pay him $5.675 million of the Wilpon’s dwindling cash supply. The Mets were watching every penny this off-season and decided to pay Pelfrey a relative king’s ransom when they could have picked any pitcher off of the scrap heap for a million bucks and get the same results.

This is why I question Alderson’s competence. With very little money to spend he used it on Pelfrey, the bullpen (where he jumped the gun and overpaid when he could have waited and gotten better talent for less money) and mediocre bench retreads. Alderson was billed as this genius baseball man. So far there is scant evidence to back that up.

He does deserve credit for turning Carlos Beltran into the promising Zack Wheeler and for getting anything for Angel Pagan (hey, maybe Alderson should only deal with the Giants!). But other than that, he has done absolutely nothing to make this team better.

He got his much discussed salary “flexibility” this off-season when $50 million came off the payroll, and while the Wilpons’ financial situation forced Alderson not to use most of it, the money he was allowed to spend was not spent wisely. That is on him, not ownership. He needs to be judged by the performance of this team, because whether he and the media want to admit it, this is indeed Alderson’s team. Yes, he inherited most of the players, but he had the opportunity to reshape this team, and he decided to basically stand pat. So no more free passes for this “genius.”