Mets fans are like a beaten puppy. They keep coming back for more because they've nowhere else to go.

My friend informs me that the Mets are signing three time Cy Young winner and probable Hall of Fame pitcher Max Scherzer for a three-year deal worth 130 million dollars. Scherzer is 37 years old, and the last time he threw 200 innings was 2018. Assuming that he will pitch 540 innings over the next three years, he is getting paid $240,741 per inning, or a little more than $80,000 per out. Assuming that he can throw 90 pitches to get 18 outs, that would be about $16,000 per pitch.

Bill James once said that baseball careers are like watermelons. First you have to cut the rind into sections and maybe clean out the seedy part in the middle, and that's a mess. Once you do that, though, you can get at the heart of the melon, the best and sweetest part. After that comes the part of the melon closest to the rind, and that's sometimes sweet, but there's a lot less taste to it. Finally comes the rind itself. The job of the general manager, he said, was to eat the heart out of the watermelon. So you let somebody else bear the expense of training the player and getting his feet wet in the big leagues. Then YOU get him on the cheap, and the heart of his career. Then you unload him to somebody else, at a very high price.

Who knows? It may work out for the Mets. But I think it's more likely to be a millstone round the neck. People always pay too much for somebody's past glory. Sure, there are exceptions. Tom Brady comes to mind....