Giants 4 Mets 2

Did you expect the Mets to be one game over .500 at the All-Star break?

Per the official New York Mets website on MLB.com, Francisco Rodriguez has ditched agent Paul Kinzer for Scott Boras.

I don’t know how this can be good for the Mets.

As we all know, K-Rod is only 21 finishes away from the pot of gold — the $17.5M option for 2012 that automatically vests when Frankie finishes his 55th game. The cash-strapped Mets, of course, need to find a way to avoid paying $17.5M to a closer next year. They can’t keep him from finishing games or the MLBPA will be all over them. So the alternative is to trade him to another team — presumably one that needs him as a setup man, since it’s unlikely there are any teams out there who want to pay a closer not named Mariano $17.5M, either.

I’m not smart enough to know exactly how the Boras factor will play into the Mets’ ability to deal K-Rod, but my gut feeling is that somehow this will affect the dynamic of shipping him elsewhere. Who knows, maybe it could be a good thing. For example, maybe Boras can find a team that will take Rodriguez as a closer while simultaneously dropping the option and giving him a 3-year extension. Certainly, there are a few teams in the hunt who can use a lights-out closer.

What are your thoughts? Is the Boras factor a good thing, bad thing, or will he have no effect at all on the Mets’ ability to trade K-Rod? Let me know your thoughts in the comments.

NOTE: This is a guest post by Joe Spector, whose work can be found on Metsmerizedonline; you can also follow him on Twitter @Joe_Spector. Enjoy and please direct your comments to him.

Part of being a fan of Baseball, or in our case the Mets, is the fact that as fans, we’re granted the protection from the responsibility of any half-baked, cockamamie, pie-in-the-sky fantasies involving the team we’ve come to love so much. It’s a responsibility so intimately seductive and often practiced here on blogs and bars all across the five boroughs by us fans – the fanatics – where all of us know exactly what’s right for the team, 5 shots of Tequila in. Fortunately our fanaticism shields us from the realities that men like Sandy Alderson deal with dispassionately and with no semblance of protection on a daily basis.

For someone like Alderson, there is no room for

Giants 3 Mets 1

Give The Freak three runs, and he’ll win 92.6% of the time. Those are tough odds to overcome.