For those of us heading into this offseason with hopes of the New York Mets finding a way to re-sign starting pitcher Zack Wheeler to long-term deal, this past week hasn’t necessarily been a good one.
First, it was the news of Wheeler rejecting the Mets’ one-year, $17.8 million qualifying offer last Thursday, which officially put him on the open market. That wasn’t a surprise since he’s one of baseball’s top available starting pitchers. However, it was the start of a string of news making it seem unlikely that he’ll be back in Queens.
MLB Trade Rumors pegged Wheeler to earn a five-year, $100 million deal as a free agent, which already appears to be too rich for the Mets. Those thoughts only got less enthusiastic once the 29-year-old began getting compared to Patrick Corbin, who landed a $140 million guarantee from the Washington Nationals last winter.
Even if his next contract guarantees him somewhere between what Nathan Eovaldi earned last offseason ($68 million) and Corbin’s deal, it’s hard to see the Mets seriously getting involved, mostly because of the teams reportedly pursuing him. Jon Paul Morosi of MLB.com is reporting that while there’s a lot of interest in Wheeler, the Los Angeles Angels, San Diego Padres, Chicago White Sox, and Minnesota Twins are all “leading” in the pursuit of the righty.
While only the Twins were playoff bound in 2019, these four teams all have two things in common: a willingness to spend for top pitching talent and a desire to either win in 2020 or take a significant step forward.
So unless something unexpected happens, Wheeler won’t be donning the Orange and Blue any longer. While nothing seems even close to be official at the moment, I can’t help but think about what the hurler meant to the organization during the early stages of Sandy Alderson’s tenure as general manager at the start of this decade.
From the moment Wheeler was acquired from the San Francisco Giants in exchange for Carlos Beltran, he symbolized hope for an organization that was trying to clean up the mess they made as a result of trying to compete following the shortcomings of 2006-08. Matt Harvey was the first of the young aces to make his debut in 2012, but I’ll never forget Wheeler’s debut on June 18, 2013 in the second game of a day-night double header against the Atlanta Braves.
With Harvey starting the twin bill’s first game, Gary Cohen called it “Super Tuesday” because of the significance these two taking the bump in the same day had. Did it mean much for the standings? Not really — the Mets entered that day with a 25-40 record and were already 14.5 games out of first place in the National League East. There was still plenty of work to be done to bring competitive baseball back to Queens, but having both Harvey and Wheeler in the majors at the same time showed there was a light at the end of the tunnel.
Then Jacob deGrom surprisingly took the NL by storm with his Rookie of the Year campaign in 2014, which was followed by Noah Syndergaard and Steven Matz making their debuts in 2015. The Mets had five young and controllable aces on their staff for the foreseeable future. Who knows what they were going to achieve as a group? That picture of the starting rotation (Big Sexy included) prior to the 2016 season getting underway always gave me goosebumps.
Despite the promise this group held, it was hard to not think about how it’d end. After all, if a fraction of them reached their potential, there’d be no way New York could retain the entire group. Heck, virtually any big-league club these days wouldn’t tie up that much money to one area of the roster — regardless of how effective it was. But then, you know, baseball happened and Harvey was the first one to pack his bags, albeit in a much different fashion than many of us expected.
Harvey’s departure was far from a surprise given his struggles, but it was still sad and unfortunate because of those “what could’ve been” thoughts. The same thing will happen when Wheeler (probably) signs elsewhere. He was the symbol of the next era of Mets baseball for a while, and the Mets even traded one of the most important players from their previous era of baseball to acquire him. Thinking of all the promise there was and the lack of results that came it is enough to make any Mets fan sad. It’s great that deGrom has blossomed into the best pitcher in baseball and will be sticking around for a while, but if it’s this easy for them to let Wheeler walk, one can only imagine what it’ll be like when Syndergaard hits free agency in a couple seasons.
It’s not that the Mets don’t have an intriguing young core group of players in place for the immediate future — they really do. But watching impact players (especially ones that brought us hope when we desperately needed something to latch on to) head elsewhere once they’ve become effective major leaguers is tough.
I knew it was necessary to enjoy all those young (and affordable) arms in the big leagues as much as possible before things started to change. Even though most of this group was together for a number of years, it doesn’t feel like it was long enough, and it’s probably because they weren’t able to achieve the goals that were set for them.
There will hopefully be brighter days for the Mets in the near future, but Boyz II Men said it best when they said it’s so hard to say goodbye to yesterday.
