Despite fan outcry, Mets don't need Manny fix

The Mets would be a better team with Manny Ramirez. Absolutely, they would be.

So would the Dodgers, the Giants, the Tigers, the Phillies and. .. yes, even the Red Sox.

The Sox obviously aren't going to sign Manny. Neither are the Tigers or the Phillies and neither, it sure appears, are the Mets.

Instead of going after Manny Ramirez, the Mets bolstered their bullpen. (AP)

Some Mets fans can't understand that, but they should. Some Mets fans are so mad that they're willing to stand in the cold and protest, calling on the Mets to bring Manny to Queens.

They shouldn't.

Unlike the Dodgers, who don't look like a championship team if they don't find a way to sign Manny, the Mets already have a team that could win. They went into the winter with a desperate need to fix their bullpen and a real need to sign a starting pitcher or two, and they've done it all.

"We got everything that (general manager Omar Minaya) planned to get coming into the offseason," Jeff Wilpon, the Mets chief operating officer, said at a press conference Tuesday. "We addressed the needs that we had."

It's been a strange winter for the Wilpon family. They were caught up in the Bernie Madoff mess, reportedly losing hundreds of millions of dollars. They've seen the problems of Citigroup, one of their biggest advertising partners.

Even Tuesday, as the Mets announced the signing of starter Oliver Perez, Wilpon had to defend the decision to keep Citigroup's name on the Mets' new ballpark, a deal that will bring the Mets $400 million but has brought them Congressional scrutiny.

With all the financial woes, the Mets easily could have been one of the teams cutting payroll this winter. Instead, the Mets were one of the teams willing to spend money to fill needs.

The needs were obvious. The Mets would have been 24 games over .500 last year if games ended after seven innings. The Phillies would have been 11 games over.

Many Mets officials still believe that they would have made the playoffs if Billy Wagner hadn't gotten hurt. They have every reason to believe that their rebuilt bullpen, with Francisco Rodriguez and J.J. Putz at the end of games, will be enough to push them past the Phils.

"Both those teams are certainly playoff caliber," said one National League East scout who watches the Mets and the Phils carefully. "Really, last year, both of them should have been in the playoffs. Maybe this year they will."

Mets people have been careful when answering the Manny questions, but they've also been careful not to let anyone believe they're going to be involved.

They'll tell you that they can fully understand the Wilpons' reluctance to spend any more money. They'll tell you that while they have some concerns that Carlos Delgado and Fernando Tatis won't repeat their 2008 numbers, they also believe that David Wright and Jose Reyes could get better.

They'll also tell you that they like the idea of having Daniel Murphy in left field, and that they see him as the Paul O'Neill/Scott Brosius type player that was so important on the Yankee championship teams.

Mets people will also repeat what all of us should already know. They had to fix the bullpen, and they responded by getting both their first and second choice for a fix. They had to sign a starting pitcher, and in Perez, they got no worse than their second choice (behind Derek Lowe).

They wouldn't go back and give up any of those players in order to afford Ramirez.

And they shouldn't have to apologize for it.