Reese Kaplan -- What Happens if Mets Season Ends in September?

In response to one of my recent columns Mack made an interesting comment regarding how the 2025 Mets will evolve based upon how the Mets finish in 2024.  Everyone who is a Mets fan would love to see the improbable happen and have the Mets enter the wild card race and push their way towards the fall classic.  This past group of games in which the Mets wound up losing 4 in a row kind of tapped the brakes hard on that sprint to the finish, however.  Therein lies the content of what Mack had written.  He mentioned hearing that a major tear-down could happen if the Mets don’t play October baseball at all or exit very quickly from it. 

Before we delve into the “What would that look like?” aspect of the question, a few moments of polite applause for not beginning this process at the end of July.  Yes, it was unlikely that the Mets were going to vault over both Atlanta and Philadelphia to overtake the NL East, but the surge in the team made it look remotely possible and the enthusiasm it generated in the fans and media suggested that the Buyer mode option was the correct one to select.  After all, had they gone all Seller then they were pulling the plug on the 2024 season in the hopes that the returns obtained would eventually amount to something.  Think how you felt as the door closed on Justin Verlander, Max Scherzer and others last July.  The big difference, of course, is that team was not on the fringes of playofff contention and everyone knew that selling made sense so that the future could indeed be brighter. 

The dismantling of the current Mets would obviously involve free agents and short term expiring deal contract players to all walk away.  It’s quite a list.  Pete Alonso.  Harrison Bader.  Ben Gamel.  D.J. Stewart (out of options). Luis Severino.  Jose Quintana.  Reed Garrett.  Sean Reid-Foley.  Tylor Megill (out of options).  Ryne Stanek.  Phil Maton.  Brooks Raley.  Drew Smith. 

On the in-between group you have just one but a pretty significant decision in Sean Manaea.  His player option for the 2nd year of his contract may get invoked or the Mets could offer to up the money in-house to keep him around.  At this point it’s not clear but with so much pitching leaving it would seem a known and healthy commodity is important. 

Then you have the buy-them-out category which would include Jeff McNeil and Starling Marte.  In both cases I’m not suggesting simply cutting them, but paying down a reasonably large chunk of remaining money due to let another club take them on for their futures while the Mets go elsewhere for replacements. 

Whew!  That’s quite a lot of prospective personnel turnover, but then again David Stearns wasn’t brought in to put band-aids on what wasn’t working.  He wanted some short term fixes to help and while the season started off miserably between the players and the very green manager, the club is in mid-August and still over .500.  So that aspect worked.  The short term deals enabled him to enjoy skills without saddling the team with long term dead money.  That worked as well.

The issue now is how do you replace them?  “Play the kids!” is an oft-repeated concept but the Mets in AAA have not exactly been setting the world on fire with their would-be rookie players making their first ever trip in uniform to play in Queens.  Yes, there is some THERE there, but it may not be in 2025 between poor outputs, injuries and late recoveries.  Consequently the team needs to decide who is worth keeping who is currently in the minors and who might become part of trade packages to land controllable assets from elsewhere. 

How would you all feel about a massive tear down and corresponding build up?