All you need to know is #bob to get this one. Love him, hate him, or scratch your head at most of his tweets, Bob Nightengale seems to have it out for the New York Mets in one way or another. The USA Today columnist sent out a tweet on Friday praising the Arizona Diamondbacks and their acquisition of Tommy Pham.
Let’s go back to our childhoods for a moment. Remember those games where you’d see a picture and have to find everything wrong with it? They did something like this on the pilot episode of Malcolm in the Middle to test how much of a genius he was. You don’t need to be a member of MENSA to see how inaccurate this tweet is.
Praise Tommy Pham, don’t take down the NY Mets with it
The Pham trade might be one of the better ones this summer and praising the Diamondbacks for it is perfectly acceptable. Nightengale’s first mistake was to say he was ignored by the rest of the league. On the same day Nightengale tweets this, Ken Rosenthal of The Athletic reported multiple teams had interest in Pham at the deadline.
It does almost feel like a shot at Rosenthal’s reporting. Is Nightengale this petty? I think we’ve experienced him enough to know he’s just not social media savvy.
Where Mets fans are more interested in turning red is with the claim the Diamondbacks won the trade. Maybe so, but a 17-year-old prospect like Jeremy Rodriguez hitting over .400 in a handful of games after the trade begs to differ. He wasn’t in their top 30 prospects for a couple of reasons. One is because he doesn’t have the experience. The other could be because the Mets were never going to acquire a particularly highly-rated prospect from someone anyway. Rodriguez may never turn into anything. It seems far too premature for this to become an LOLMets moment.
Pham ended up hitting two home runs for the Diamondbacks and Friday and is now slashing .250/.295/.467 with 5 dingers for them post-deadline. His OPS was actually much better with the Mets where he was at .820. In Arizona, it’s .761.
Pham has helped give the Diamondbacks a much-needed bolster of offense yet he has also seen multiple statistics of his drop off. Good thing the Mets are paying half of his contract which was already less than $3 million remaining at the time of the trade.