If there’s one thing Major League Baseball has taught me in the last year and a half, it’s that nothing wins games quite like a formidable, homegrown offensive core. The Astros, Braves, Dodgers, Yankees, and perhaps even the Twins are all guaranteed a playoff spot barely halfway through a season, and it’s almost entirely attributed to what their lineups look like.
The Braves have Freddie Freeman, Ronald Acuna Jr. Ozzie Albies, Austin Riley, and Dansby Swanson – all brought aboard by a gradual and methodical rebuilding process that, all things considered, took off rather early last year. They have a stranglehold over the National League East that is forecast to remain for at least the next three years, and their farm system pitchers are some of the best in the game. The team’s decision to step back after a mediocre 2014 and retool, despite making the playoffs each of the previous two years, is what’s gotten them here.
Back to the Mets, who have played sub-.500 baseball three years in a row despite winning a pennant in 2015. They have Jeff McNeil and Pete Alonso leading an otherwise lukewarm-to-promising offense. Even if Michael Conforto reaches 30 homers, Amed Rosario continues raking, and Brandon Nimmo comes back strong next year, there isn’t nearly enough depth at either the big-league or minor-league levels to guarantee any shot at winning a division between now and 2022.
They have a handful of valuable chips they can trade to make this path easier, just as the Braves and Yankees have. And in fairness, there’s still time to make something out of those opportunities by dealing either Zack Wheeler, Edwin Diaz, Wilson Ramos, or Noah Syndergaard. Unfortunately, trading for Marcus Stroman – however exciting and awesome a pitcher he is – seems completely antithetical to building a sustainable winner.
Never mind that it cost them two pitching prospects – one of whom is only 18 and has already garnered loads of attention in Simeon Woods Richardson. If the Mets cannot find a worthwhile return for Wheeler, they’ve effectively hamstrung themselves to running the whole thing back through the grinder in 2020. They will again go into an offseason “one or two pieces away” despite having one of the worst defenses in baseball and three financial albatrosses in Robinson Cano, Yoenis Cespedes, and Jed Lowrie.
The payroll constrictions will almost certainly force Brodie Van Wagenen to cook up another trade. More talented young players will get launched over the trenches, and nobody will care simply because they’re “not part of the win-now agenda,” even if guys like Woods Richardson, Jarred Kelenic, etc. were barely a year or two away from cracking prospect lists and becoming much more valuable.
The team will flounder again next year while core offensives run roughshod over their ill-conceived pitching staff. Marcus Stroman may not be part of the problem. Maybe Edwin Diaz won’t be, either.
But the organization’s decision to continue kicking a can down the road and trying to build a winner out of a group that hasn’t won anything meaningful since Barack Obama was president will only further ruin something that, off the heels of last season, looked to have a lot more potential.
The team lacks the foresight to understand what they can build around McNeil, Alonso, deGrom, and perhaps two or three other recurring characters in Conforto, Rosario, and Dominic Smith… and its general manager is too arrogant to understand that losing in the short-term can actually create something beautiful in the long-term.
