Some days can’t possibly be summed up by one post. So consider this one just the start of a conversation that kicks off tonight but will go on in some form for years.
The Mets traded pretty much everybody. Justin Verlander [1] went back to the Astros, where — as I semi-seriously predicted — he’ll now face off with the Rangers’ Max Scherzer [2] for a division title. Tommy Pham [3] went to the Diamondbacks. Dominic Leone [4], not even the 20th guy on the roster I thought anyone would want, was shipped off to the Angels.
We all thought the Mets were going to merely tinker with their plan to spend big on free agency in the short term until their farm system was rebuilt. We thought that meant keeping guys on 2024 contracts and supplementing them with more short-term mercenaries. Instead, the Mets decided to use the money already spent on those high-priced free agents to, in effect, buy prospects, accelerating the farm rebuild in ways the draft doesn’t allow.
It’s interesting, bordering on audacious — where most ballclubs (and hell, most people) have trouble accepting the idea of sunk costs and admitting mistakes, Steve Cohen just shrugs. It’s a gambit that may launch a thousand business-of-baseball seminars.
Remember that term: business of baseball. We’ll come back to that in a minute.
What was already an earthquake of a trading deadline came with an additional tremblor courtesy of Scherzer’s account of his conversations [5] with Billy Eppler and Cohen. Scherzer said, essentially, that he was told the Mets now saw 2024 as a retooling year and 2025-26 as their next window of contention, meaning they wouldn’t be shopping for top free agents.
I have no reason to doubt Scherzer, who’s shown himself to be financially and strategically astute and has always struck me as honest, sometimes to a fault. So that leave two possible explanations for the gap between Eppler’s talk about this not being a liquidation and the focus turning to 2025-26.
The first is that Eppler soft-pedaled what 2024 will look like competitively and Scherzer spilled the beans. And hey, that’s possible.
But I think the second explanation is more interesting. I have no inside knowledge whatsoever, but I wouldn’t be shocked if it went something like this: With 2023 a disaster, the Mets decide to go beyond just trading the free agents to be and listen to offers on Scherzer, who no longer looks like much of a reliable commodity anyway. That process crystallizes Cohen’s thinking about what’s happened and the best path forward, and he does what a smart, unsentimental hedge-fund guy does: He concludes the current plan isn’t working, pivots to a new one, and wastes no time seeing it executed, because what’s the point of waiting?
The speed of that takes most everybody by surprise, including Scherzer and a bunch of his soon-to-be ex-teammates and Eppler. This isn’t how baseball franchises are run — though maybe it should be.
(Sticking with the Athletic — if you don’t subscribe, you really should — Will Sammon sees Eppler as the prime architect [6] of all this. He’d know better than me, but I dunno — it feels more like Cohen’s mind at work.)
Whoever’s hand was on the tiller, we wind up back with the business of baseball, and the other part of this conversation.
The new plan strikes me as smart. (Hell, I thought the previous plan was smart — it just didn’t work out.) But that will be cold comfort for the rest of the year, when a bunch of dudes cosplaying as Mets lose a bunch of games, and it will cold comfort next year, when the Mets will likely be a team with a bunch of pieces bolted on and assessed and repositioned and tossed away — a team that we’ll all know is waiting to become something that it isn’t yet.
The business of baseball stuff will be cold comfort on nights like Tuesday, in which someone named Rafael Ortega [7] played for the Mets at 8:10 pm, 40 minutes after I learned Rafael Ortega was Met property. The Mets and Royals, 2015 World Series opponents turned thoroughly irrelevant outfits, played a long game that was alternately torpid and sloppy, with the Mets taking a 6-4 lead in the 10th on a Francisco Alvarez [8] homer, immediately surrendering that lead when closer by default Brooks Raley [9] reported for duty without a decent slider, and then —
— oh God do we have to?
I suppose we do. The Royals loaded the bases and with two out the just-recalled Josh Walker [10] was entrusted with getting the Mets to an 11th inning. Walker somehow took the mound without a pitch com; Alvarez tapped his ear and started to come out to address the lack; Walker went to step off but got his foot stuck in a hole on the mound; and the umpires called a balk that brought in the winning run.
Yes, that’s right: The Mets lost on a walk-off balk [11]. A walk-off balk committed by a pitcher who didn’t throw a single pitch. That really happened — it’s not some LOLMets meme invented by a spiteful person to test the limits of credulity.
It really happened. It was embarrassing and infuriating and amusing in a bleak way and most of all it was deeply stupid.
One day it’s possible that we’ll talk about the 2023 trade deadline and admire how what the Mets did taught a generation of baseball fans the value of not being sentimental. That day may even come pretty soon. But until then, I fear, there will be a lot of days that will be embarrassing and infuriating and deeply stupid.