With the news that Rays pitcher Scott Kazmir was having elbow discomfort, underwent an MRI and will miss the next two weeks—-ESPN Story—-one can’t help but wonder how closely members of the Mets hierarchy are following the progress of their former first round draft choice and if there’s any subconscious hope that he eventually does get hurt.
Even though the Mets have moved on sufficiently since Kazmir, there has to be some remaining embarrassment at how poorly the decision to trade him has turned out. Given that one of the main reasons given for trading him (other than their bewildering desire for Victor Zambrano) was pitching Czar Rick Peterson’s assessment of Kazmir’s mechanics and the numbers of how long it takes for a young pitcher to be ready for the big leagues, etc, it’s human nature for there to be some faint hope that they’ll eventually turn out to have been right. This is in no way to suggest that there’s an overt hope that Kazmir gets hurt, but it would certainly end the mere mentioning of his name in Mets circles at every solid Kazmir performance and every poor performance by a Mets starter who is presumably in the rotation because Kazmir is not.
Hindsight is 20/20 and it’s easy now to think that it was a mistake to trade Kazmir; I don’t necessarily think that it was a mistake. Peterson wasn’t just pulling those numbers out of his posterior; but the mistake the Mets made was trading Kazmir for Zambrano. After that 2004 season, it would have been realistic to think that the Athletics would have traded Tim Hudson to the Mets for Kazmir and a couple of other players rather than to the Braves for Dan Meyer, Charles Thomas and Juan Cruz.
That works both ways though; had the Mets held onto Kazmir instead of his trade being a watershed moment for the franchise, it’s a good possibility to think that they would have limped along continuing to do business the way they had been to continuous misery with no relief in sight. In fact, it has been argued that had the Mets not made the Kazmir trade, then Omar Minaya wouldn’t have been hired late in the 2004 season, Pedro Martinez and Carlos Beltran never would have been pursued, let alone acquired, and they would have gone on being a last resort for free agents and a rest home for veterans like John Franco and Al Leiter getting severance contracts for what they were in the 90s rather than what they were in 2004.
No matter how successful the Mets become now, it’s natural for those that were a part of the organization in 2004 to still want some measure of vindication for the Kazmir trade. They’re not hoping that he gets hurt, but it’s human nature to want to be able to get beyond the trade once and for all and if that means being right about Kazmir’s physiology, so be it.