Are the Mets a sustainable winner?

The non-waiver trade deadline was at 4 p.m. Eastern on Monday, August 1st. Since I was not working that day I had the opportunity to follow the last couple of hours viewing MLB Network and ESPN and, with tablet in lap, monitoring the Twitterverse.

It was tedious sticking with MLB Network since one of their panelists was Harold Reynolds who is about as good at his job as was Gary Apple doing play-by-play for Mets TV this past weekend.

After all the deals were done – and there were 18 of them that day alone – most of the general managers of the selling teams explained that their moves were done to bulk up their farm systems to create a “sustainable” winning franchise.

That term stuck in my mind since it was exactly what Sandy Alderson set as his goal when he took over for Omar Minaya. You’ll recall his sell off of expensive veteran pieces like Carlos Beltran and R.A. Dickey. While this was probably the right thing to do on a baseball-only strategy it dovetailed with the idea of bringing down the team’s payroll dramatically. Given the Bernie Madoff fallout one could have made the case that the rebuild was more for money saving purposes than a team rebuilding one.

It is difficult to assess where things stand right now since the team looks particularly unlucky when it comes to staying healthy. Most Mets fans probably think their franchise is the most injured and unluckiest team in Major League Baseball but they would be wrong.

Here’s the Mets’ DL as of a few days ago.

While the Mets have 10 players on their DL, and that’s a heap, take note of the fact that the Dodgers have 15 on theirs and the Braves have 12 on theirs.

Also scanning down that table you see a great majority of these injuries are to players 30 years old and up. The killer injuries to the Mets are obviously the ones to Cespedes and Harvey. And while it’s unfortunate to see Wright’s name on that list it is the one that most figured to be there given his spinal stenosis condition. Duda’s injury could have been another disaster for the team but James Loney has played so well that first base is practically a push.

Clearly if the Mets had Cespedes back in the lineup and a healthy Harvey in the rotation they would be in better shape won-loss-wise than they are at the moment.

Getting back to the question at hand as to whether the team is a sustainable winner one can make an argument that they are since they have a core starting staff of Jacob deGrom, Harvey, Noah Syndergaard, and Steven Matz.

The counter argument is that beyond these young starters the team is nothing special. The position players are for the most part old (as baseball players go), slow, range deficient, often placed in less than their optimal position on the field.

To be a sustained winner a team likely needs a better mix of young and middle aged players. They would need a vibrant top-10, at least, farm system to churn out several capable replacements each year. The team on the field needs to be athletic and able to score runs in all possible ways from home run hitting (that this Mets team can do) to building runs with hits, walks, steals, and even the occasional bunt. It also wouldn’t hurt to have a third base coach who had a clue as to when to flash the red light instead of the green one. We know the 2016 Mets are quite awful in doing anything but scoring from the long ball.

The current team that looks to be building a sustainable winner is Theo Epstein’s Chicago Cubs. It pains me to say it but the Yankees are right now where the Cubs were two to three years ago.

Unless the Mets start drafting and trading better to bring in more dynamic and younger position players it is quite difficult to see them being a sustainable winning franchise.