Mike's Mets - The Mets' Remarkable 180-Degree Turn

 

By Mike Steffanos

The Mets' trade deadline "repurposing" of assets was even more stunning than their massive winter shopping spree. What happens next will decide how this is all ultimately viewed.

I must admit that I didn't foresee most of what happened with the Mets at this trade deadline. I knew David Robertson would be going and strongly suspected that Tommy Pham would be dealt. I was surprised when the Mets were willing to include so much cash in the Max Scherzer deal. I was less surprised when Justin Verlander was traded, although I had questioned whether owner Steve Cohen would invest millions more in acquiring more prospects. I am finally getting to the stage where I will no longer doubt the Mets owner's will to go to extraordinary lengths in doing whatever he feels needs to be done.

In my post from last Friday, I mentioned the meager returns the club received when trading away closers Jeurys Familia and Addison Reed back in the Wilpon era. The previous owners' unwillingness to take on much salary of players the Mets were unloading was always a limiting factor in the returns these trade pieces brought back. The stark contrast between that cheapness and Steve Cohen's seeming complete disregard for writing those large checks is mindboggling to someone like me who has followed this club for so long.

Even clubs with owners who aren't as cheap as Fred and Jeff would follow a more standard deadline playbook of including some money in these deals — certainly much less than Cohen and the Mets did — and taking better but still lesser prospects in return. The idea was to shed the salaries and long-term commitments. Then there would be some lean years while the club "retooled." Clubs that were actually trying would try to sign some veterans on short-term deals that made attractive trade bait at the deadline while also finishing low enough in the standings to acquire some high draft picks. I'm glad we Mets fans don't have to live through 4 or 5 years of that.

GM Billy Eppler insists the Mets will field a "competitive" team next season, but all the talk is about the Mets targeting 2025 or 2026 to make a run. Honestly, whether they executed the strategy they did in this deadline or mostly held onto their best players, I think the end result would have been the same, possibly even worse. Nothing I saw from Scherzer or Verlander this season gave me any confidence that they would be pitching at a high-level next year. The Rangers and Astros are powerful offensive teams that don't need these two to be Cy Young candidates, although I'm sure they'd be happy if they returned closer to that form. The Mets, on the other hand, have struggled offensively and are not well set up for next season. If the Mets stood pat, I think the best they could hope for in 2024 was a Wild Card run. With some intelligent management, there's no reason they couldn't do that anyway without those two guys.

We'll talk more about next year during the remainder of 2023, as there seems very little chance of anything happening over the last two months of the season that we'll want to pay close attention to. For now, my thoughts on the trade deadline is that the Mets did about as well as they could have given the cards they were dealt. I'm not concerned that most of the prospects acquired, and indeed the better ones, were position players. Positional redundancy among prospects gives a club the best chance of creating future Major Leaguers. Some will fall by the wayside, others will be traded for other needs — including pitching — and hopefully, some will someday be wearing orange and blue and helping to hoist the next Mets World Series trophy.

To finish reading this article on Mike's Mets, please click here.