WSJ: Mets Affiliation with Las Vegas a Match Made in Hell

Top prospect Zack Wheeler has already allowed more home runs this season, while pitching in Las Vegas, than any other year of his career. Image: Steve Mitchell-USA TODAY Sports

Brian Costa of the Wall Street Journal has an excellent piece up today detailing how exactly the New York Mets came to find their Triple-A home with the Pacific Coast League’s Las Vegas 51’s.

Only a handful of team-affiliate agreements expire each year, and if one of them isn’t renewed, it creates a game of musical chairs. Las Vegas is the chair no team wants.And the Mets have become the fanny no chair wants.“They’re undesirable,” said Dave Rosenfield, a longtime Norfolk (Va.) Tides executive. “Nobody wants them.”

The Mets held a decades-long relationship with Norfolk before Jeff Wilpon became more heavily involved in the day-to-day operations with the Mets, putting a strain on communication with Norfolk, according to Rosenfield. In the seven seasons since their relationship with the Tides was severed, the Mets have bounced from New Orleans to Buffalo and now to Las Vegas. It was Buffalo who opted to end their four-year run as a Mets affiliate in favor of an agreement with the Blue Jays — who were leaving Las Vegas.

Costa’s piece certainly doesn’t paint a pretty picture of the Mets organization, but it downright trashes Cashman Field, home of the 51’s, and the environment in which baseball is played in Las Vegas. Current Mets reliever Greg Burke called it “the worst pitching place imaginable,” and the piece goes on to detail how the arid climate leaves the ball slick and the infield slicker and turns routine fly balls into home runs.

Not only are the pitchers faced with a climate vastly different from the damp Northeast that the Mets call home, but so are the hitters and numbers, both offensively and on the mound, become greatly inflated making it more than a little difficult to accurately evaluate the players.

Additionally, Cashman Field is poorly maintained, according to the article. With only two groundskeepers, the field often goes unwatered and the city of Las Vegas, who owns the 30-year-old stadium, does little to make improvements. The field doesn’t even have an indoor batting cage, forcing players into the 100+ degree temperatures for extra hitting work.

“There are two types of amenities: player-development amenities and fan amenities,” Don Logan, Executive VP of the 51’s  said. “And we’re lacking in both.”

For the players, working in such an environment can be just as much a mental challenge as it is physical. The Mets have instructed the pitchers assigned to Las Vegas to ignore results, but that’s far easier said than done. As Burke noted in the article, there are times when a pitcher might work for a strikeout instead of trying to induce a ground ball, simply because of the speed of the infield and likelihood that ball will get through.

No matter the challenges faced by the teams that wind up finding a home with the 51’s, it’s a situation that’s not entirely unique to Las Vegas. Several PCL teams has similar climates and even thinner air with some higher-altitude cities such as Colorado Springs and Albuquerque hosting franchises within the league as well.

While the atmosphere of playing in Las Vegas may not be ideal, especially for a parent club that plays in the Northeast, things certainly can be improved. Costa’s article notes that a new ownership group would like to build a new stadium for the 51’s in a nearby suburb of Las Vegas. That plan, however, requires some degree of public financing and even if approved would take at least three years to come to fruition.

If nothing else, a new ownership group and new stadium should be able to bring the 51’s franchise to the same level in terms of amenities and desirability, as their PCL brethren.