Looking to past Mets trade failures

With the Mets pursuit of a shortstop for the 2015 season still simmering, former Mets General Manager Steve Phillips penned an ESPN insider article opining that the Mets need to go out and make a trade for a superstar player to take the leap to being legitimate contenders.

That opinion is right in line with the way that Phillips acted when he was in charge of the Mets, trading for Al Leiter, Armando Benitez, Mike Piazza and Mike Hampton in building the team that would drop a heartbreaker of a World Series to the Yankees in 2000.

While Phillips’ plan fell apart to a point after that 2000 season, then was flushed completely down the toilet by failed trades for Roberto Alomar, Mo Vaughn, and to a lesser extent Jeromy Burnitz before the 2002 season, there were two moves that he nearly made that fell apart that could’ve altered Mets history.

With his free agency looming just a year away and no contract extension in sight, the Seattle Mariners looked to trade then-10-time All-Star Ken Griffey Jr. during the 1999 offseason.

Phillips aggressively pursued the outfielder during the December Winter Meetings and had advanced talks with Mariners GM Woody Woodward.  Griffey made it known that he wouldn’t accept a trade to any team except for the Cincinnati Reds.  Despite that, a 1999 New York Times article by Jack Curry notes that two Mets players reached out to Griffey in a chance to get him to change his mind.

As far as any looking into it can find, the players who would’ve gone to Seattle in such a deal have never come out, but one can assume that at least one of Roger Cedeno and Octavio Dotel were part of the discussion as there were several teams interested in them at that point.

The deal of course fell through as Griffey would be shipped off to the Reds in February of 2000, and the Mets ended up shipping Cedeno and Dotel along with prospect Kyle Kessel to the Houston Astros for Mike Hampton and Derek Bell less than two weeks after the Griffey talks broke down.

In the end this one worked out for the better for the Mets, as Hampton would be key in their postseason run, then when he bolted for the Colorado Rockies, the Mets used the compensation pick they got to select David Wright.

Would Griffey have helped the 2000 Mets win a World Series? Maybe, depending on how the rest of the Mets offseason went.  He was certainly a better option than Timo Perez in centerfield, though.

The other near miss on a trade for a superstar player was the Mets 2000 trade deadline pursuit of Cincinnati Red shortstop Barry Larkin.

With Rey Ordonez out for the rest of the season and Melvin Mora doing a capable-but-not-fantastic job of filling in, Phillips looked to bring in a big name to fill the spot for the rest of the season.  The 36-year-old Larkin was a free agent at the end of the season and extension talks with the Reds had been going nowhere, so he asked to be traded.

The Mets were there.

They offered a package of prospects comprised of outfielder Alex Escobar, and pitchers Eric Cammack and Jason Saenz.  The Reds agreed, and a 72-hour window opened up for Larkin to accept the trade.

Larkin still maintains to this day that he would have loved to play in New York, and would’ve been excited to don the orange and blue.  He loved playing in Flushing so much he gave his oldest daughter, Brielle, the middle name D’Shea.

But the Mets would not offer Larkin an extension either – likely because of the impending free agency of Mariners shortstop Alex Rodriguez – so he nixed the deal.  Larkin didn’t want to be just a “hired gun” according to reports at the time.

Five days after that deal fell through, the Mets made a trade to bring in Mike Bordick from the Baltimore Orioles for Pat Gorman, Leslie Brea, Mike Kinkade and Melvin Mora.

Baseball-Reference game log data tells us that from the time Larkin rejected the trade on July 23^rd until he sprained his knee on August 27^th and was shut down for the rest of the season, he hit .284/.370/.379.  The rest of the way Bordick hit .260/.321/.365.[1]  There is no doubt that Larkin gave the Mets a better chance to win the World Series, but because the Mets were set on trying to sign Rodriguez in the offseason, that never came to fruition.

The “What if?” with the Larkin trade is similarly muddy as the Griffey deal.  If they swing the deal for Larkin, that means they would’ve agreed to sign him to a three-year extension, which is what he was asking for.

Perhaps that deal means the Mets don’t have the need after the 2001 season to trade for Alomar or Vaughn or Burnitz.  Maybe they don’t unload Todd Pratt, Dennis Cook and Turk Wendell and we’re robbed of Mets trivia question answer Gary Bennett or the Bruce Chen era, which led to the “Scott Strickland is the future closer of the Mets”[2] era!  More seriously, the entire 2001-2004 era of Mets history could have been completely different.

In these two cases, the old adage “the best trades are the ones you don’t make” might not be true.  Griffey or Larkin could have been the pieces that put the Mets over the top and brought them a title in 2000.

While of course we will never know what would’ve happened, the lesson to learn is simple – when you’re close, you go for it, even if it means trading your top prospect.  Maybe Alex Escobar would’ve gone on to become a star, but the Mets might’ve been World Series champs.  Maybe one of the Mets prospects now will become a star if traded, but maybe Troy Tulowitzki leads them to the promised land.  It’s time for the Mets to learn from the past and take that chance.