Met fans are disgusted. Phillies fans are disgusted. MLB, is keeping a close eye on the Mets, and right now all you can see is failure. Phillies fans want the Mets to be a good team so the rivalry that was building can continue but right now it’s downright sad.

The Mets are now a “small market” team in the biggest market in baseball. Forget about competing with the Yankees, right now they can’t compete with the Trenton Thunder.

I’ve been a fan of the team since 1969. I remember meeting Joe Christopher at Walt Whitman Mall in Huntington, New York when I was a tike. From that point on I was hooked. Tom Seaver was my favorite player and still is after all of these years. I used to go to Ticketron in that same mall, look at a Mets schedule, and map out when his home starts would be. Then my parents would purchase accordingly. The Mets were everything great about baseball in my eyes. They had won two championships, the second in ’86 when I was in my 20’s.

I lived through the M. Donald Grant era, and I’ve seen a lot of bad teams and a lot of great teams. The one thing a Met fan can spot a mile away is the fact that the franchise is no longer competing. We have all seen that before and now that time is back. You expect franchises to go through ups and downs but the downs now are as bad as the team has ever experienced. Players are speaking out anonymously because it hurts them to see what Fred Wilpon is doing to the fans to hold on to his business instead of selling the team.

Even when the Mets were “choking” a few years ago, it hurt, but not as much because they were trying. Players know they can play their best and this team will still finish close to the basement. That’s hard for a professional athlete to swallow.

The Mets will have a lot of stories this season. The worse the Mets are the more the media seems to cover them, yes you can include me in that list. They will be awful to watch, but the off the field stories will be abundant I can guarantee you that.

The Mets seem to be stuck in a 5-year downslide that started last year. When a team is in the midst of a slide like this the team HAS to invest in young talent and draft well to come out of it. So far we haven’t really seen any evidence that this is taking place. When the Mets released Daniel Herrera that told me they “dumped” K-Rod when they traded him to Milwaukee. So now Adrian Rosario is the other player who still remains from that trade. The worst feeling in the world, for a fan, is to trade a player who has good value, and find out down the road that you have nothing left from that deal. Rosario has to make the club or that’s yet another player the Mets got nothing for like Jose Reyes (forget the draft picks for a moment).

Fernando Martinez is gone, ok; sometimes draft picks don’t pan out. Was he rushed, probably but let’s see what he does in the future. In the meantime the Mets have some good prospects but they all seem to be a few years away so for now fans will have to look at a mish-mosh lineup and dream back to the days when they were actually competitive.

Oh, and about the MLB All-Star game, yes the one that’s supposed to be at Citi Field, it could be in jeopardy if the team continues to have their financial situation drag on. That’s not set in stone but the clock is ticking on the 2013 mid-summer classic. If they lose this game it will be yet another black-eye for the organization.

* a picture of my recently departed dog Rey, who was named after Rey Ordonez.