It’s just three short days until pitchers, catchers, and David Wright report to Port St. Lucie to start their work. What a glorious time to be alive! The expectations for the 2008 season might be higher than any I’ve experienced in my 24 spring trainings as a fan. This is a Mets team that is supposed to win the National League, and is supposed to have an excellent chance of taking the whole damn thing. Wow.Some might say that nothing short of a World Series win can be considered a success for this club. It’s true that a championship would be the ultimate accomplishment, and gratify us as fans for years to come. After all, none of the teams I root for, in any sport, has won a championship since 1986—and even if they had, I would trade any number of victories in the lesser sports for just one more New York Mets World Series championship. Having said all that, I disagree that nothing less than a championship will do. I tremendously enjoyed the 1999, 2000, and 2006 seasons. Sure they were bittersweet in the end, but they were great rides while they lasted.

How much better is it, then, to have not just a great ride, but a title to go with it? I mentioned in my last column that it’s hard to evaluate how good a trade is from a fan’s standpoint, because we don’t really have a metric for measuring fan gratification. Indeed, most of the analysis of the Johan Santana trade fell into two camps: “Yeah, we got Johan!” or “Boo, we spent way too much to get Johan.” In my view, neither camp has it quite right. The “Yeah!” camp overlooks the idea that it might be tougher for the Mets to compete in the future because of the Johan trade and signing. The “Boo!” camp overlooks the idea that Mets fans don’t care if we paid a little too much to get Johan, so long as we still have money to spend, and so long as Johan brings us a championship.

The fans mostly only care about what happens to the product on the field, not what it cost to put it there. To evaluate the Johan trade in terms of dollars doesn’t really make sense. It would make more sense to evaluate the trade in terms of what it brings to us, as fans. In an attempt to come up with a measure to accomplish this feat, I propose the following totally arbitrary point system for fan gratification:

World Series championship: 1,000 points
LCS win: 50 points
Divisional series win: 50
Division title: 100 points
Wild card playoff appearance: 50 points
Regular season win: 1 point

The championship is the mother lode, but getting to the playoffs is still far better than not, and winning a playoff series enhances a fan’s enjoyment that much more. The 1999 season is far more memorable to me because of Todd Pratt’s walk-off homer in the divisional round, and the 2000 season would sit far differently in my mind without John Franco’s strikeout of Barry Bonds, or Mike Hampton’s complete-game shutout against the Cardinals. Also, even if you don’t win a playoff series, getting to the playoffs as a division winner is better than getting in as a wild card. (The clinching celebrations in 1986, 1988, and 2006 seemed far more warranted than those of 1999 and 2000.) To fans, getting to the playoffs matters, how you get there matters, winning playoff series once you’re there matters, and winning world championships matters a lot.

Based on this system that I just made up, here are fan gratification point totals for some Mets seasons.

2007: 88 points
2006: 246
2005: 83
2003: 66
2000: 244
1986: 1,258
1969: 1,250

The two championships are each more than five times better than any other season in our history—as it should be. 2007’s dismal ending made it only about a third as gratifying as 2006, but still 33% more gratifying than 2003, when we won a mere 66 games. If we ever do win a World Series in the current playoff system, it will likely be more gratifying than the championships of 1986 and 1988 because of the extra playoff series involved. This seems right to me. It’s a lot tougher to win three playoff series than two. Also, even though we got to the World Series in 2000, that season scores about the same as 2006. The playoff run in 2000 was great, but so was the regular season/division title of 2006. The scores reflect this fact.

The system isn’t perfect; for example, Robin Ventura’s grand single is nowhere accounted for, and that ain’t right. But while it’s not perfect, and while I completely pulled these numbers out of…the sky, I like this system that I’ve invented. If someone could tell me accurately what our chances of winning a title, a division championship, a playoff series, or a playoff berth were before and after the Johan trade, and then do that for every season of Johan’s contract, I would feel comfortable applying my own system to form an opinion about the trade. Without that information, however, I think I might’ve just wasted some time playing around with numbers before the season starts. Oh well. I guess the point I was really driving at is this—let’s win the World Series this year, shall we?