The Mets, as we know, aren’t close to clinching anything great. However, if they sell now, they will have clinched the real all-time title, “Worst Team Money Could Buy.”
Congrats to esteemed authors John Harper and Bob Klapisch on their fun book about the colossally disappointing 1992 Mets. But if these Mets either sell, which guarantees 2023 failure, or continue on their current path, there’s no doubt which team is the worst money could buy.
That ’92 team spent the princely (at the time, but paltry now) sum of $45 million, or just about what these Mets are spending on each of their co-aces (dubbed Just-Max here to denote their names/salaries). Let’s face it, when this year’s team committed to spending close to $500 million — that includes the Steve Cohen tax and other various taxes — to borrow a poker phrase, they pushed all their chips in. No sense removing those chips now.
Fangraphs still has the Mets with a 13.2 percent chance to make the playoffs. While that seems nutso from here, I will assume their computers are operable and not being fed misinformation by Mets fans. So, to paraphrase Jim Carrey, you’re saying they have a chance.
The Mets are certainly preparing for a possible sale, and as Joel Sherman pointed out, their decision to reconfigure the rotation to get Justin Verlander an extra start before the Aug. 1 deadline suggests at the very least that they understand selling is a very real possibility. Nobody does more due diligence than them. I get it. But a sale is not the move. Not now.
We have been over this before, but any Mets sale, while intriguing, especially if it includes those co-aces, Verlander and Max Scherzer, would be little more than a time waster. To make worthwhile trades, a team needs to dangle players with “excess value,” meaning players worth more than their contracts. Removing from that equation young players such as Francisco Alvarez and Brett Baty (who haven’t yet reached arbitration and are paid almost like regular people), here are the Mets who have excess value in my estimation, and after talking to several rival executives.
1. David Robertson.
2. Brooks Raley.
3. Pete Alonso.
4. Maybe Tommy Pham.
5. Maybe Mark Canha.
6. Maybe Brandon Nimmo.
They aren’t trading Nimmo, who’s showing nice power lately, as they surely remain pleased they locked him up to that fair deal, which one other team might have given him (likely the Giants). And they almost surely aren’t trading Alonso either.
At this point, with Alonso having an OPS below .700 over the past couple months, they probably couldn’t get the haul you’d think for him, anyway. And then, how do you replace his 40-plus homers next year? The Mets don’t hit enough homers as it is.
More vitally, Cohen definitely did not spend $2.4 billion on this team to be booed in his hometown. So forget trading Alonso.
Pham is having a solid season, and with only $2M to go, they might be able to get a long-range flyer for him. Canha, same thing, with about twice that much money left. Raley is a nice lefty reliever, and you could probably get a team’s top-15 prospect for him. Robertson is beating time once again (I’d like to know that secret) so you could probably get a team’s top-10 prospect for him.
That’s it. Two prospects inside a team’s top 15 is not worth killing the season over. Certainly not now.
The other issue is that Cohen is planning to hire a new person to lead baseball operations. Putting aside how recent trades have turned out (the Raley one was the best one since Chris Bassitt), shouldn’t David Stearns be the one making these big calls? And when I say Stearns I mean Stearns or whomever they target for the big job (but we know they are going to target Stearns).
The one other thing the Mets could do is offer to pay the co-aces’ contracts down by half or more. Rival execs estimate they could probably deal the two future Hall of Famers if they lowered the financial obligation by $20 million or $25 million. But if they did that, and want to win next year, they’d have to turn around and spend that savings on top free-agent pitchers to replace them, anyway. Someone suggested the Astros for Verlander, but in winter they only wanted to give him a one-year deal.
Cohen is willing to spend, and even lose money (sources suggest he’ll be dropping about $200 million this year), and at some point, if they paid enough to be rid of the future Hall of Famers, they could overpay to the point of buying a prospect or two. But is anyone really surrendering a blue-chip prospect to spend tens of millions on pitchers just because their résumés are fantastic.
Both all-time greats have full no-trade provisions, too, meaning they could direct where they’d go, if anywhere. Recall that when Scherzer was traded last time, he approved only the Dodgers (and maybe the Padres). So that limits the return, too.
As bad as this season’s been, a sale would be far worse.
