According to Jon Heyman of CBS Sports, the trade buzz surrounding starting pitcher Jon Niese is getting louder and that at least 3 or 4 teams are currently interested in acquiring the young southpaw from the Mets.
“If the package is right, the Mets will deal him,” writes Heyman.
The Mets are believed to be looking for a young pitcher (like Niese?) and a catching prospect in return.
If the Mets have a price established for Niese, it means he’s on the block.
This goes beyond the old adage of “nobody should be untouchable”, although it seems David Wright certainly is for now.
Last week, Joel Sherman of the New York Post mentioned the New York Yankees and Boston Red Sox as teams that would certainly be in the hunt for Jon Niese.
My question is this:
If you are serious in your assertion that you are working toward building a relevant team in 2014, why would you trade such a promising left-handed starter who will be just 27-years old and entering his prime years by that time?
Niese, 25, would seem to be a Met you’d tab as a keeper at this point, and when teams like the Yankees and Red Sox want in, it should give the front office some pause to ask themselves why?
Among all the starters in the current rotation (Johan, Dickey, Pelfrey, Niese, Gee), what pitchers stands out as a potential building block for 2014?
Are we seriously going along with this plan of putting all our eggs in one basket with Matt Harvey, Zack Wheeler and Jeurys Famila who each have yet to have any success beyond Double-A and in the case of Wheeler, Single-A? Is this really the master plan?
You would think a talented pitcher like Niese, who remains under team control for another four years, would be the last player that would be on the Mets’ trading block.
Right now, Niese is the only young pitcher in the organization who has proved himself to be a quality major league pitcher, while the other three are longshots at best and still have a ways to go before proclaiming either of them as such.
I don’t like the smell of this one bit. If anything, the Mets should be locking Niese up through his arbitration years like they did with David Wright and Jose Reyes what seems like eons ago.
