Capital New York’s Howard Megdal takes a dim view of the New York Mets’ penchant for burying their own personnel, citing the sort of innuendo circulated about the likes of Carlos Beltran, R.A. Dickey, Ike Davis and most recently, Ruben Tejada. Should Jordanny Valdespin feel dissed, or what? Former Mets utlity guy Justin Turner, currently in Dodgers camp, tells Megdal, “nobody takes responsibility for what they say.”
“You’ve seen that with Tejada over the last few weeks,” Turner told me as we chatted in front of his spring training locker. “ It’s all ‘a source said that they’re not happy with him.’ It’s like, you know what? If you’re gonna come out and gonna attack a guy’s character, and his work ethic, be man enough to put your name on it. Don’t say, ‘This is off the record’, and then off the record means they’re gonna write it anyway.”
It was puzzling when the Mets not only non-tendered Turner in December, but a “Mets official” leaked to Adam Rubin that the reason the Mets had gotten tired of Turner not running hard. It was the kind of story easily dismissed by anyone who’d watched the Mets play, and SNY’s Kevin Burkhardt, for one, took to Twitter to do just that
“All I can do is say if I was running an organization, in charge of it, I would look at all my players as assets, and want to build them up. So even if I didn’t want them to be on my team, they would have value. But for some reason, I don’t know, that’s not the thought process over there.