Reese Kaplan -- Time Is Not On the Mets' Side

Gather a group into a room who are concerned about the New York Mets in the present and in the future after a fairly recently stomach turning past that lingered over into the beginning of 2024.  Get the owner, Steve Cohen, the POBO, David Stearns, an assortment of your favorite media scribes and a large contingent of excited, frustrated and disagreeable Mets fans.  Let them see what’s before them as the Tuesday trade deadline looms very near with not much time to do anything else. 

First, what has been done?  Well, the planned additions of veteran relievers Phil Maton and Ryne Stanek may not be the real headline generating mega moves people hoped to see happen, but every person in that room would acknowledge that improvement in the bullpen was priority number one. 

Now many in this assembled motley crew of Mets opinion holders would advocate that the club needs to be bolder and bring in much more impactful players with All Star pedigrees to keep the club’s recent good fortunes rolling and to bolster the team’s hold on an October baseball position.  Word then came down that Jesse Winker was coming to the Mets.  Well, he did once make an All Star team but this past season settled for a rather minor contract with the Nationals.  Still, it’s a step in the right direction.

For a moment let’s think back to the summer of 2015 when the Mets made several late July roster transactions.  They saw that John Mayberry was not what they had hoped and cut him loose, replacing him with a AA outfielder by the named of Michael Conforto.  They knew their bench was not getting it done and added veteran role players Kelly Johnson and Juan Uribe.  Injuries continued to make a big impact on the club with countless folks missing a lot of time due to medical issues, including David Wright, Jerry Blevins, Travis d’Arnaud, Michael Cuddyer and others. 

So the question facing the club right now is whether or not the combination of Maton and Stanek add up to the value of Tyler Clippard and if these types of incremental improvements are all that is necessary?

Well, back in 2015 they thought they needed a middle of the order bat to push the team to the postseason.  Then they brought in a supplement to the relief corps in Tyler Clippard.  Of course, at the eleventh hour having passed on the medically fragile Carlos Gomez, they then added Yoenis Cespedes by giving up future rookie of the year Michael Fulmer and Luis Cessa.

So it seemed back then to improve a club you needed to reinforce what was working in small ways, fill the gap in the bullpen in a big way and then make a World Series level transaction bringing in the bat that carried the team into October. 

Earlier in the year it appeared as if the Mets would be holding a house cleaning sale in July as nothing was going right.  It was time to dump the expiring contracts and free-agents-to-be in order to fortify the minors as they did in 2023.  Things changed and moved the club from sellers to buyers.  How much are they willing to buy?  Remember the payroll tax factor in adding salary so despite Cohen’s coffers it may not be quite as simple as taking on some other team’s $25 million player salary. 

Everyone applauds the small changes that have been made, but with the IL holding the likes of Starling Marte, Kodai Senga, Christian Scott, Drew Smith, Reed Garrett, Sean Reid-Foley and others, many are wondering if they haven’t yet done quite enough.  There’s still time until the end of the day...