Injuries and depth critical for NL-East

Update, 12PM - the excellent MetsBlog has noted that Carlos Beltran, Damion Easley, Jose Valentin and Ben Johnson have all yet to play a game this pre-season, in addition to the aforementioned Luis Castillo and Endy Chavez. These players, along with the concussed Ryan Church, are painting the picture of a team not quite ready for the season, and panicking a bit. Without any reasonable replacement for first-basemen Delgado, the Mets are now scrambling to fill the gap. Also, if Beltran is going to back up his statement that his Mets are the team to beat in the NL-East, he had better be on the field opening-day.

Also, the Mets have given Daryl Strawberry a job with a partial job description of "community outreach." I love the idea of Daryl Strawberry providing community outreach. See here for a nice story about Strawberry's tax status.

I am also entertaining the possibility that Marlon Anderson suddenly felt some strong sense of allegiance to his former team and deliberately took down Ryan Church. Just saying.

An AP article on ESPN has reported that Ryan Church, who collided with former Phillie Marlon Anderson in shallow right-fileld in the Mets' Saturday bout with the Dodgers, will be benched for a few games until he stops displaying concussion symptoms. This on its own is no reason to sound the alarm, but Ryan Church is joined on the injury list by Luis Castillo and Endy Chavez, among others. Plus, Delgado has returned to New York for an MRI on his right hip.

This is the kind of news every Phillies fan should secretly be hoping for. Injuries are an inevitable aspect of professional sports and therefore teams must plan accordingly by establishing good depth at crucial positions. For instance, one of the biggest weaknesses for the Phillies organization during the Lieberthal era was their consistent lack of depth at catcher. That has since been remedied by the drafting of Jaramillo and the increasingly more surprising and better performance of Carlos Ruiz (and not forgetting Chris Coste, either). Even past catcher, the Phillies, through the likes of Jayson Werth, Greg Dobbs and So Taguchi, have established sufficient and good depth all around the diamond.

On the other side of that spectrum are the Mets. They have a roster full of free bus-rides (Moises Alou, etc) and plainly injury-prone players. Former Twin, Luis Castillo put up excellent numbers last year both in Minneapolis and New York, but underwent knee surgery after re-signing with the Mets. He hasn't played yet this pre-season and isn't expected to until later this week.

At the moment, the Mets can appear unstoppable with their "certain win" every fifth day with Santana, but it is important to realize that injuries will happen. No team goes any year without someone getting hurt and the Mets will be no different. It is a team's resiliency in response to these injuries that determines who plays in October and, ultimately, who is the better team. That resiliency cannot be purchased or signed and only comes from good coaching and a good clubhouse atmosphere, both of which the Phillies have in trump. If the Mets stay healthy, they just might be the better team, but I am betting we'll being seeing some new faces in blue and orange before too long.

For a good evaluation of why the Phillies have that resiliency, see Jayson Stark's excellent article.