He out-lived the purge that swept through the Mets clubhouse, but there was little sense of relief in Roger Cedeno’s voice yesterday as baseball’s trade deadline came and went – perhaps because he knows that if he were any better, he may have been traded like so many of his former teammates.
Cedeno has become Public Enemy No. 1 at Shea, partly because there’s nobody left to boo from the Steve Phillips Era, and partly because he’s been bad enough all season to have successfully scared off any potential trade partners.
“Are you shocked that you’re still on this team?” he was asked.
“I just try to go out and do my job,” Cedeno said. “I can’t think about that stuff because I don’t have any control over it.”
Even as interim GM Jim Duquette worked the phones with an “Everything Must Go” attitude, Cedeno out-lived just about every one of the Mets’ worst underachievers. The others – Robbie Alomar, Armando Benitez, Jeromy Burnitz and even Rey Sanchez – are long gone, shipped off in the last month as part of a housecleaning to trim the fat from a last-place roster.
And yet, Cedeno remains in blue and orange.
“I wear a Mets uniform, I’m happy to be here and I just want to do my best,” he said, with another two years and $10 million remaining on his current contract.
In yesterday’s 4-3 loss to the Brewers, Cedeno went 0-for-4 with a walk. He reached on an error in the eighth and later scored in that inning, but struck out in the ninth with Joe McEwing on first and only one out.
With each trip to the plate, the reception from the home crowd deteriorated, as it will for the remainder of this lost season. Could you imagine what it would be like if Cedeno, by all accounts a nice guy, was a rotten person?
“You know, they’re disappointed,” Cedeno said of the legions of player-haters at Shea. “We disappoint them. The way everything has gone this season, everybody is disappointed. I’m disappointed myself at the way that I’ve been playing.”
But perhaps they’re just disappointed that Cedeno is still roaming the outfield for their team. Then again, if it weren’t for Cedeno, they would have nobody left to boo.
