Reese Kaplan -- The Ice Is Getting Thinner and Thinner

After the painful grand slam loss to the Diamondbacks on Wednesday evening it seemed as if the Mets had hit the proverbial crossroads.  Dedniel Nunez was hurt again, Luis Severino looked as if he might be hurt and Edwin Diaz was partying like it was 1999.  The Mets are soon in danger of being a double digit number of games out of wild card playoff contention.

To a great many Mets fans it is time to throw in the proverbial towel, release veterans not due back in 2025 and bring up the kids for a look at how they fare against the best of the best in the game of baseball they’re chosen for a career.  Everyone is well aware of the slumps, injuries and whatever else has conspired to bring the July winning Mets into a skidding halt.

Then there are others who feel that as long as it is still mathematically possible for the Mets to play October baseball then you don’t give up.  They seem to take their collective inspiration best summed up back in 1978 by John Belushi as Bluto making his appeal to his fellow fraternity brethren in “Animal House”:

The truth, of course, lies somewhere between these two extremes, but the longer the club goes spinning its wheels, the less likely they are postseason bound.  Towards that end it’s probably worth taking a month-long look at folks who may or may not be wanted back and others who are projected for future roles on the big club but who have not yet shown what they can do in the majors. 

Personally, I hold the ten game margin as the bellwether of when you officially give up on the 2024 season and look forward to 2025.  With fewer than 30 games left to play the Mets would have to go something like 20-8 for the final month of the season to hold out any hope and frankly the Las Vegas odds on that happening are about as long as picking a winning lottery number. 

For now it is critical for the Mets to make a buy/goodbye decision on several players.  Sean Manaea will likely want to exercise his opt-out and the Mets needs to figure out how much they would pay to lure him into sticking around.

Behind him you have Luis Severino on a one-year deal who has been healthy which is actually more important than the 3.60 or thereabouts that he has delivered from the mound.  Nowadays a pitcher offering that level of performance could get a lot more money than Severino took in his bounce back year so the Mets have the same decision to make.

Harrison Bader, Tyrone Taylor, Jesse Winker, Jose Iglesias, Pete Alonso, Jose Quintana, Luis Torrens and most of the bullpen are in the same buy/goodbye situation.  Everyone would agree Iglesias needs to be brought back as does Luis Torrens.  The others are not quite as crystal clear. 

Then there are the buy-down candidates to shake up what’s not been working.  Jeff McNeil, Starling Marte and perhaps even Brandon Nimmo are in this group.  The latest member may turn out to be Edwin Diaz who has not pitched in 2024 anything like he did in 2020 through 2022.  He’s a Met through 2027 assuming he exercises his player options and the Mets would have to wait until 2028 to buy him out. 

David Stearns is really going to have to earn his paycheck regardless of how the Mets wind up in the won/loss column.