Farewell, Jose Reyes

That Jose Reyes has left the Mets isn't all that surprising -- the team is deep financial trouble. Nonetheless, it was still startling to open the sports section one morning last week to see he'd signed a new contract with the Miami Marlins. Reyes had been the team's most exciting player for some time now, most especially after Carlos Beltran aged and David Wright's power dissipated. He's one of baseball's few players whose at-bats are always worth watching and is routinely thrilling on the base paths.

In many professions, including sports and urban planning, there's a constant debate between which approach proves the most transformative: incremental, homegrown accretion or large, high-profile splashes? The Marlins, for the past several years, had opted for the former, accumulating a good if unaccomplished collection of young players, which was largely dictated by financial constraints. Now they've abruptly switched to the latter, with a new stadium, new name, new logo and color scheme, and three new large contracts for free-agents, including Reyes'. (What changed about their financial position to allow this isn't clear to me.) Yet, most successful baseball teams during the past 15 years have grown over time from within. Even when the Yankees were vilified for spending obscenely, their best years came when their core consisted of homegrown talent and shrewd free agent signings.

Reyes and the Marlins will be interesting test cases this year. The former because as wonderful as Reyes is, his contract, at six years and $106 million, may be too handsome. He's been susceptible to injuries his whole career and even after his best year, he's not baseball's best leadoff hitter (that's Jacoby Ellsbury). The latter because the Marlins hope the new contracts will finally make the team relevant -- aside from the two years when they won World Series championships, they never really have been -- but they still haven't addressed a systemic problem of Miami pro sports: Too many Floridians are transplants who root for their former hometowns' teams. Lasting change starts at the bottom with a large group of people who actually believe, not only three people, and the Marlins have missed this important point. They want the quick fix, but often those two words don't fit together.

As for the Mets, it's hard to understand where they sit as a franchise. Three subpar seasons are now fruitless because as bad as those were, they're now worse, and they don't seem to have much of a plan or an opportunity to improve.