After soaring through their first four games, the New York Mets hit a wall. It wasn't because their luck ran out, but rather, David Wright fractured his pinkie -- preventing him from playing another game. More importantly than subtracting Wright and his .583/.647/.833 line so far, it left the Mets with Ronny Cedeno to pick-up the scraps.
While Cedeno has been known as a terrific fielder (6.8 UZR/150 in 1050.3 innings at SS in 2011), his bat is equally as infamous-but in the opposite way. In fact, Cedeno has just been worth 1.3 fWAR over the course of his entire career due to his lackluster lumber. The Mets inability to replace Wright's presence with at least league-average production most certainly played a role in the two subsequent Mets losses. But that begs the question-how important is bench depth?... click here to read the rest of this article.
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Quality bench help? How about quality starting-lineup help?
Have you seen what the Astros, for instance, are running out there every day? It's a triple-A ballclub. It takes a lot of chutzpah to charge big-league prices to watch a team whose best player is Joe Altuve.
Getting back to bench players, you know things are thin when even a big-budget, well-run organization like the Phillies, with their number-one slugger on the DL long-term, has to resort to replacing him with the ancient husk of the shell of the shadow of what used to be Jim Thome. There was a time when a well-financed contender in the same boat could go out and get themselves a first baseman who doesn't have an AARP card without too much difficulty.
Interesting that the article ran with a photo of the '86 Mets bench. Davey Johnson had guys like Teufel, Hojo, Dykstra or Wilson, and future MVP Kevin Mitchell sitting there every night hoping for an at-bat. These days, even the elite big-money teams don't have anything remotely comparable.