Last week, after Jose Reyes was designated for assignment by the Colorado Rockies, the Mets said a reunion with Reyes was a long shot. Then the Mets got swept by the worst team in the National League over the weekend, and now all of a sudden every news outlet and Twitter mook is saying that the Mets are softening their stance and will consider signing Reyes. Today on Facebook, it was rumored that Jose Reyes posted the above picture with him in a Mets uniform and it read, “Thank you God for everything”. Obviously that turned out to be completely fake, and Jose doesn’t even have a Facebook account. But the point is the rumor is hot. It’s boiling hot. Mike Puma of the New York Post said a baseball official close to Reyes said “he desperately wants back with the Mets, hasn’t been happy since he left”. Ummm of course he hasn’t been happy since he left. He never wanted to leave. Who would want to leave the biggest baseball stage in the universe and spend the next five years playing for three different teams and watching their skills drastically decline? Nobody.

Jose Reyes is a bad choice purely from a baseball perspective. He doesn’t play second base or third base. He’s a shortstop. We’re gonna convert Jose Reyes to new positions, but we won’t try that for Neil Walker or Asdrubal Cabrera? We’re going to play Jose Reyes over Dilson Herrera who’s crushing Vegas pitching? Plus Jose Reyes is the most injury prone player I’ve ever watched in a Mets uniform. Travis d’Arnaud has won three consecutive Jose Reyes Hamstring Memorial Awards or “Hammys” as we call them. And he still hasn’t collected as many as Reyes did in his Mets career. Reyes would be on the DL in less than a month. The guy is a walking injury plague, and although that fits the theme of our current roster, it’s not a theme we want to reinforce.

The bottom line is I have one Jose Reyes related regret as a fan. I regret that the Mets didn’t ship him off at the trade deadline in 2011 for a boatload of prospects that would have helped speed along the rebuilding process of our crummy team at the time. Instead, the Wilpons kept him around to sell tickets down the stretch as he chased a batting title. Then they pretended they were going to offer him a big contract, and once the season was over they never even made an actual offer. That’s the only regret I have. If we bring back Jose Reyes knowing that he threw his girlfriend into a glass door in Hawaii and assaulted her, then the team will have another thing to regret. There are plenty of roster options out there that don’t involve signing a violent criminal. I don’t care that his girlfriend dropped the charges or got paid off or whatever. We all know what happened.

The Mets should find some other way to improve the team. The Yankees bring in violent criminals like Aroldis Chapman. They force their players to shave their beards and cut their hair and they overlook criminal acts. The Mets should do the exact opposite. We let our players grow out their beards and have wild free hair. And we should also stay away from jerks like Reyes.

P.S. It’s the least surprising thing in the world that Jeff Wilpon is reportedly the biggest proponent of bringing back Reyes on the cheap. He owns the baseball organization that is consistently involved in the most public relations nightmares, he has personally been involved in a sexual harassment lawsuit, and still he’s ready to welcome a domestic violence offender into his team’s starting lineup. He’s such a moron. 

P.P.S. We should bring back some version of Speaking Spanish with Professor Reyes. We can just use Yoenis Cespedes in the modern version. Reyes was injured so often as a Met. That jumbotron thing was basically the only way you could see him when you came out to Shea Stadium.