Brighter Days Are Ahead for Steve Cohen's Mets amid Dark MLB Trade Deadline

If two things can be true at once, Steve Cohen's New York Mets are a worse team on Wednesday than they were entering Tuesday and yet much better for it.

Yes, even if it takes until 2025 for it to show.

To hear it from now-erstwhile New York ace Max Scherzer, this might even be the best-case scenario for when the Mets, who are pretty much out of this year's playoff race at 50-56, might compete again. He claims to have heard it straight from general manager Billy Eppler before he agreed a trade to the Texas Rangers on Sunday:

Eppler disputed this timeline, telling the press after Major League Baseball's trade deadline passed on Tuesday evening: "I do want to be clear that it's not a rebuild. It's not a fire sale. It's not a liquidation. This is just a repurposing of Steve's investment in the club, and kind of shifting that investment from the team into the organization."

But what Scherzer said certainly feels like an accurate representation of where the Mets are right now.

In addition to Scherzer himself, fellow three-time Cy Young Award winner Justin Verlander is also now a former Met. Ditto for veteran closer David Robertson, outfielders Tommy Pham and Mark Canha and right-handed reliever Dominic Leone.

What's left barely resembles the roster that was supposed to build on last year's 101-win effort, but, well, we all know that Picasso quote: Every act of creation is first of all an act of destruction.

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What Did You Want the Mets to Do? Run It Back?

Look, you can't fault the Mets for what they tried to do this year.

If ever there was an obvious next step for Cohen and Eppler following last year's thrilling regular season but disappointingly short playoff run, it was dip into Cohen's $17.5 billion net worth in an effort to get even better. The Mets did exactly that amid an offseason splurge that elevated the club's payroll to a record-shattering $350 million.

The approach, though, was always inherently volatile. This was most apparent in the league-high collective age (32.9 years old) of the Amazins' pitchers. Accordingly, it is not surprising that what was an elite pitching staff in 2022 has gone backward in every conceivable way in 2023.

Even Verlander and Scherzer, who would have combined for a 1.99 ERA as teammates at the respective ages of 39 and 37 in 2022, regressed to a 3.61 ERA at the ages of 40 and 38 this year. If ever there was a warning sign not to welcome them back for their age-41 and age-39 seasons in 2024, well, there you go.

For a good example of what the Mets absolutely should not have done when Cohen and Eppler's best-laid plans went awry, just look to The Bronx.

Mired in a disappointing 55-52 season of their own, that's where the Yankees seemed unsure if the right move was to buy or sell at the deadline. They ultimately did neither, and their failure to sell may prove to be especially damning.

Their roster consists of a handful of pending free agents who won't be worthy of qualifying offers and another handful of bad contracts (i.e., Giancarlo Stanton, Carlos Rodón and Anthony Rizzo) that are only liable to get less movable in the future. They seem, in every sense of the word, stuck.

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Youth Movement = Bright Future

By opting not to be like the Yankees, the Mets did more than just shed roughly $100 million in salaries. They also completely remade their farm system.

These are the prospects the Mets acquired just since last Friday's trade of Robertson, with their team and wider MLB ranks according to MLB.com:

• INF Luisangel Acuña: Mets No. 2, MLB No. 44
• OF Drew Gilbert: Mets No. 4, MLB No. 68
• OF Ryan Clifford: Mets No. 6
• INF Marco Vargas: Mets No. 9
• RHP Justin Jarvis: Mets No. 15
• C Ronald Hernandez: Mets No. 21
• INF/OF Jeremiah Jackson: Mets No. 22

That's seven legit new prospects for a farm system that was already in halfway decent shape. Though the Mets have seen catcher Francisco Álvarez and third baseman Brett Baty exhaust their prospect eligibility this year, B/R's Joel Reuter still had their system ranked in the top half of MLB at No. 12 after the draft in July. It's surely a top-10 system now.

It's a cliché to extoll the virtues of building a contender on a foundation of young talent, but that obviously wouldn't be the case if the notion didn't have any real-world relevance.

Just look at ascendant contenders like the Cincinnati Reds and Baltimore Orioles and legacy contenders like Atlanta, the Houston Astros and the team out west that the Mets are now in position to emulate: the Los Angeles Dodgers.

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None of This Means 2024 Has to Be a Drag

As soon as Cohen took control of the Mets from the Wilpons in 2020, the prospect of them becoming the Dodgers of the East was and continued to be only too obvious.

That never was going to happen overnight, but where the Mets are now feels similar to where the Dodgers were when Andrew Friedman took over the front office in Oct. 2014. The team had its fun spending big in pursuit of wins, but that's when it was time to get serious about building a more sustainable foundation.

Just as the Dodgers have established a sky-high baseline by graduating wave after wave of prospect talent while also consistently ranking among MLB's five biggest spenders, there's no reason the Mets can't do the same.

Assuming, of course, that the process of hoarding prospects is still followed by some commitment to spending. And it sounds like it will be.

"We don't want to punt," Eppler said. "We want to have a product that we feel good about and people can feel good about. We don't want to endure long stretches of being bad."

Whether or not their pursuits are ultimately successful—and whether or not it's Eppler and not, say, David Stearns calling the shots—there will be nothing stopping the Mets from going after the top free agents on this winter's market. Once again, Cohen is worth $17.5 billion. Even if you didn't know the exact figure, you might still have been able to infer it from how he paid Scherzer and Verlander $63 million to not play for his team anymore.

Shohei Ohtani? Probably a long shot now, but he might like money enough to hear the Mets out. Japanese ace Yoshinobu Yamamoto? A decent fall-back for Ohtani if there ever was one. Matt Chapman? Sure. Lucas Giolito? Also, sure.

And so on. The bottom line: As rocky as the path the Mets are on may be, at least it's a path forward. The real cause for despair will thus only come if, by scaling back his efforts, Cohen makes it any longer than it needs to be.

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Stats courtesy of Baseball Reference, FanGraphs and Baseball Savant.