Reese Kaplan -- Let's Consider How They Do Whatever They Do

For a moment let’s shift away from the names of the players in question who may or may not be traded by Monday at the 6:00 PM deadline for midseason roster transactions and instead look a bit at the process itself.

For purposes of this exercise, forget baseball, it’s entertainment focus, the fight for pennants and the questions about payroll.  Instead, let’s consider the approaches that could be taken and what it means for the returns given in prospective trades.

Think for a moment about a produce market where you arrive to a bevy of tempting treats of all kinds available to the first taker at whatever high price the seller chooses to demand.  The advantage here is hard to define.  The buyer gets his choice of the best of the best but acknowledges that by doing so he’s agreeing to pay an over-market price to ensure his top choices don’t go anywhere else.

Now instead think of the buying and selling process more like residential real estate in a planned housing community.  The early buyers here often get bargain prices knowing that they will have to live with construction noise, full facilities not yet readily available and a lot of uncertainty.  By contrast the late buyers get properties fully finished, streets, parks and other amenities all ready to use but the prices have skyrocketed to pay for the move-in conveniences ready to use. 

Now let’s circle back to baseball and think a bit about the process in place.  We’ll leave out the early deal sending David Peterson over to Chicago as it is not really deadline relevant as much as the still yet-to-be-made deals will be.  Instead, let’s focus on the August 1-3 period of roster activity and how it will impact the Mets for better or worse.

In this scenario it would appear that David Stearns is more in the real estate mode of late buyers and sellers than the produce market model of being rewarded for going first.  If, for example, a team needs a healthy starting pitcher to help propel them into October baseball and the Mets are sitting on both Freddy Peralta, Sean Manaea and Kodai Senga as possibilities, the longer the buyers wait to make a deal it would seem that the higher the prices would go for these players as there is a diminished market of alternatives readily available.  

This approach could be justified for that reason alone.  You could add in relievers A.J. Minter, Brooks Raley and Huascar Brazoban for pretty much the same reasons.  Waiting on Clay Holmes is more about him proving his health before he vaults towards the top of the readily available and desirable list.  When there's very little left prices tend to get higher.

Then there are the wholly less desirable pieces who clearly no one is advocating being a part of the team’s future.  This group could include Marcus Semien, Luis Robert, Tyrone Taylor and Jorge Polanco.  You could do the “take whatever you can get” approach simply to make the change and potentially relieve payroll obligations.  Trading away pending free agent Tyrone Taylor for a prospective bag of balls is not desirable but it would be understandable.

For the other three in this list it could require extensive creativity to push transactions to happen.  One obvious route used in the past such as the summer of 2023 is to pay down future payroll obligations to entice another club to embrace a less than ideal solution at a relatively less onerous price.  This approach does not make the accountants happy in Metsville but it does open the door to moving otherwise unmovable pieces.

The other approach to take which is less often done successfully is to tie the most desired players on the roster to unwanted ones in order to make the trades actually take place.  In this case you could say to a new team, “Do you want Clay Holmes and his 2.39 ERA?  Well, you can have him but only if you accept Luis Robert as part of the trade.”  

Now for opposing clubs, a two month rental with no further obligation is not that big a burder to swallow, but for the Mets it gives them an option to rid themselves of roster underperformers by tying them at the hip to the players most desired by other clubs.  You can work this same type of exercise on any of the others in the Mets top list.

Finally, there’s the buyer’s side of things where he has to decide as the clock ticks down whether a bounty of questionable prospects is an acceptable return on whomever the other team desires in order to set up the Mets for theoretical success in the future.  With over 700 prospects moved and the VAST majority of them never cracking the majors this approach is certainly risky.  Still, making changes is in itself a public relations reward even if the returns are not guaranteed.

In the interim, we simply sit, wait and ready our analysis when actual deals take place.