Mack Ade – Chris Sale

Good morning.

The Boston Red Sox trade yesterday of receiving all-star starter Chris Sale for four untested minor leaguers is the kind of trade that frosts my ass as a Mets fan. Sure, Yoan Moncada is the top prospect in baseball and baseball pundits rave about the potential of Michael Kopech, but that’s all they are right now. Neither is a time tested all-star that has already delivered 74 wins in seven seasons and will still pitch 2017 only as a 28-year old.

The Red Sox just added 223 strikeouts to their pitching staff.

The Mets don’t make trades like this. We always tell other clubs that our top prospects are untouchable, rather than tell them come at me and tell me what you are offering for them. There are clubs out there that just want to rid themselves of committed long-term contracts and want an organization of mostly minimum paid minor leaguers. Look at San Diego. They don’t have a single ballplayer left in their organization that has a contract past their ARB-1 (currently undetermined) commitment.

Plus, if the Mets traded for another front end starter like Sale, you would have guys like Robert Gsellman, Seth Lugo, and yes, even Steven Matz, immediately become available for future deals.

Yes, we do sign quality free agents. Yoesnes Cespedes speaks of this. But teams like Boston wouldn’t let their prospects stand in their way of strengthening an already strong rotation. I remember when the Washington Nationals had what was considered one of the strongest rotations in baseball. Did that stop them from securing the service of Max Scherzer? I think not.

If Boston didn’t want Curtis Granderson and Jay Bruce in their outfield, they wouldn’t be there. Both would be long gone by now in deals for the best prospects they could get at the time.

If Boston wanted to replace the loss of Granderson and Bruce with one quality right hand hitting outfielder, they would package a couple of these newly secured prospects, along with guys like Amed Rosario and Tomas Nido (I’m holding onto Michael Conforto and starting him this upcoming season in Queens).

And if Boston needed a quality relief pitcher to add to the back end of their pen, I would have plenty more prospects to throw at a team that wanted a couple of quality, minimum salaried prospects.

(There’s a couple more things that I do need to say. Our system is quite depleted right now. It’s from a combination of all the pitchers we gave up to teams to build a team two years ago to get us to the playoffs and, two (as we discussed yesterday) we just don’t draft as well as other teams do. We just don’t.

Another thing the Mets don’t do properly is sign International prospects. Yes, we have signed what seems like 5,345 shortstops, none of which have still turned into anything of any quality.)