Reese Kaplan -- The Question No One Wants to Ask

In 2020 and 2021 Major League Baseball ramped up its efforts big time to try to stop the apparent uncontrolled spread of Performance Enhancing Drugs (PEDs) which allegedly give players who take them an increase in their speed, strength and ability to recover from injuries.  While many of the anabolic steroids have been well publicized for a few decades, the newest candidate to draw attention is dehydrochlormethyltestosterone (DHCMT), an East German PED developed to help Olympic athletes and appearing on MLB’s list of banned substances.  The drug is also known as Oral Turinabol.  

Since starting the policing of DHCMT there have been quite a few players nailed for its alleged use.  The actions began with minor league players in 2015 but branched over to the major leagues with recently promoted players who allegedly took the drug while working their way up the ladder to the majors.  Thus far suspensions include Cody Stanley, Boog Powell, Chris Colabello, Daniel Stumpf, Paul Campbell, Tres Barrera and Kent Emanuel. Stanley’s suspensions were particularly bad as he had become a three-time alleged loser and now has on his professional resume the same dishonor granted to Jenrry Mejia, a lifetime ban from baseball.

What makes this one especially aggravating for the players is that the amount of the drug detected isn’t even sufficient to qualify as enhancing.   Furthermore, in their defense several of the players have hired doctors who demonstrated something they refer to as pulsing, an action wherein the drug can reappear many years after ingestion.  One of the players suggested he took some supplements while in high school which predates the Major League’s time period for control over what players use, but the courts didn’t accept that explanation.  The best anyone’s gotten thus far is a negotiation that a full season’s suspension could be the 60-game 2020 season instead of a 162 game season.  

While no one is defending what these players may or may not have done, the whole issue of PED abuse very much should be on the front burner of the New York Mets management team because Robinson Cano is serving a highly conspicuous year without pay in 2021 but is due back for two consecutive full years with pay in 2022 and 2023.  That pay is not trivial.  Between what the Mets pay and the Mariners share he’ll get $24 million per season.  

Now a great many people are advocating that the Mets fight hard to invalidate his contract since he’s obviously violated the league policy multiple times.  That move would kick Cano to the curb and free the Mets from a $48 million payroll obligation over the next two seasons (assuming Cano can stay clean during that time period).  However, a PED-abuse situation has never before exempted a player from earning his signed contract dollars.  

So, if the club is going to be obligated to pay Cano his money, then what should they do?  Sure, it’s easy for us to declare to the team’s billionaire owner that locking the clubhouse door to him would send a message to other players, but then that money isn’t coming out of our own pockets.  Actually, inevitably it would as the Mets would have to recoup the $48 million somehow and that could correspond to increased ticket, food, parking or souvenir prices, or it could mean spending less on other aspects of running the ballclub which could keep them out of contention.  

Consequently, the alternative no one wants to discuss is the prospect of Cano playing the field in a Mets uniform for the next two years.  Everyone remembers that his initial foray into Citifield was not a good one.  He had his career worst year and finished with a flourish to get his numbers for the season up to just .256/13/39.  By stark contrast during the strike-shortened season of 2020 he was hitting .316 with 10 HRs and 30 RBIs in well under half the number of ABs.  Not coincidentally, it was after the 2020 bounce back season that he was flagged for his PED abuse and given the 162 game suspension.  

So what kind of player would Cano be upon his return?  For a frame of reference, he’s a .306 career hitter who in a typical year would provide 24 HRs and 94 RBIs.  Those kinds of numbers are indeed gaudy, but you would also expect some decline both due to age (2022 season being completed at age 39 and 2023 at age 40), and perhaps due to refraining from the substances that apparently fueled his offensive success.  Suppose he puts up another .300 season with 23 HRs and 75 RBIs.  Would that level of production be considered adequate?

Those numbers appear because in 2019, the last full season of baseball, Jeff McNeil provided exactly that and people were already planning to enshrine him in the Mets own Hall of Fame.  However, if you look more closely at McNeil’s resume and you find that the HR and RBI numbers were an outlier, though the high batting average has been expected since he broke into the majors in 2018.  A typical year according to baseball-reference.com would be .309 with 18 HRs and 71 RBIs.  The problem is he’s not doing that in 2021 which has been interrupted with injury, nor did he do it in 2020.  

So the difficult question facing the Mets front office and Mets fans in general is whether the club is better off with a combination of Cano and J.D. Davis, Cano and Jeff McNeil or McNeil and Davis at 2nd and 3rd respectively with Cano being the wealthiest benchwarmer in baseball?  Me, I’d at least listen to offers on both McNeil and Davis right now for solutions to propel the club into October baseball because like it or not, it would appear that Cano is a part of the Mets future.