The Mets just made a significant move leading up to Spring Training and the 2022 season. They acquired Chris Bassit for J.T. Ginn, their #5 prospect and top rated pitching prospect as well as Adam Oller (ranked 24th overall by Mets360.com). Bassit immediately steps into the rotation with Jacob deGrom, Max Scherzer, Carlos Carrasco and Taijuan Walker giving the mets the starting rotation depth they had craved all off season.
Today we are going to focus on who they gave up and some of the other names the Mets have traded away in recent years. Some players have stung more than others and some players may yet sting us more as years go by.
J.T. Ginn – SP (Athletics): Ginn was drafted with a bit of an injury red flag attached to him. In 2018 he had been a first round selection by the Los Angeles Dodgers but made the decision to attend Mississippi State instead. This move cost him as he experienced arm soreness in 2019 and 2020 saw him require Tommy John surgery. The Mets still drafted him in the second round of the 2020 draft as his pitching stuff remained enviable. They began to be rewarded in 2021 when Ginn returned from injury and became a prospect to note as he rose from Low A St. Lucie to High A Brooklyn. This upward trend had to be what excited the Athletics who were looking to trade several high profile players prior to the start of the season. This being said, the Mets only acquire Bassit for one season and rentals can have a high level of regret attached to them as the prospects traded stay with their new clubs for years and years.
Adam Oller – SP (Athletics): Prior to 2021 Adam Oller had not been a New York Met and, as he started the year at 26 and in AA, he wasn’t much of a prospect. His performance in 2021 exceeded expectations and Oller had joined a large pool of players vying for starts in the majors as depth options. With Chris Bassit officially joining the Mets the loss of Oller is far smaller. The Mets already have Tylor Megill, David Peterson, Joey Lucchesi, Trevor Williams, Jordan Yamamoto, Yennsy Diaz and Jose Butto as options should a starter become injured.
Pete Crow-Armstrong – OF (Cubs): The Mets traded Crow-Armstrong for Javier Baez in a desperation deal to try and save their 2021 season. The outfielder had been injured earlier in the season and has no new stats to add to his official scouting report but that hasn’t stopped scouts from dreaming on the potential of this physically gifted young man. Crow-Armstrong has cracked the Top 100 prospect list for the Cubs and is supposed to be turning heads at training camp. Any deal for a rental player is bound to look bad but there is a pretty strong feeling that the Mets will someday regret their Javier Baez deal.
Josh Wolf – RHP ( Guardians): The Mets seemed to have nabbed a trio of great picks in the first three rounds of the 2019 draft selecting Brett Baty, Josh Wolf and Matt Allan. Last year the Mets ended up trading away part of that haul by sending Wolf as part of the package to obtain Francisco Lindor and Carlos Carrasco. Thankfully, for the Mets, it appears that this particular loss has not bitten quite so hard as others of the past. After the lost 2020 season, Wolf pitched almost 66 innings for Low A and his results were not great. While his K/9 held just a hair of 9.0, his WHIP and ERA make a potential #2 pitcher projection seem like a steep longshot.
Isaiah Greene – OF (Guardians): Greene, still only 20, was another part of the Lindor trade and his 2021 season was far better than that of Wolf. That being said, performing as a capable leadoff hitter in Rookie ball isn’t much of a headline worthy accolade. Greene hit for a steady average with solid speed and pretty good patience but he’s a long way from cracking the Top 100 prospect list.
Simeon Woods Richardson – SP (Twins): The Mets traded him to the Blue Jays in 2019 for Marcus Stroman. Now with the Twins, Woods Richardson played all of 2021 with his respective team’s AA affiliates. The talented pitcher had been on the Top 100 Prospect list for the Jays after a strong season in 2019 between New York’s Low-A and Toronto’s Advanced A teams but his 2021 numbers weren’t as optimistic. His strikeout numbers remain good but he more than doubled his BB/9 and needs to get his control in order to bounce back to Top Prospect form.
Justin Dunn – SP (Mariners): A bonafide major league pitcher at this point, Dunn made good on his potential and has begun making an impact for the Mariners. This is salt in a wound for Met fans who have to hate the deal that brought in Robinson Cano and Edwin Diaz more and more every time they see Cano’s contract on the team.
Jarred Kelenic – OF (Mariners): Some people were a little too quick to judge Kellenic a bust after the 2021 season. His stats look rough but one needs to remember that he played most of 2021 as a 22 year old and had logged only 21 games in AA and 30 in AAA before getting the call. The adjustment was rough but Kelenic could be much more the 1.016 OPS hitter he was for Tacoma than the .615 OPS hitter he wound up for Seattle.
If Woods Richardson makes the list, so should Anthony Kay.
I like the willingness to trade minor league SP for major league SP, like the Stroman and Bassitt deals. Some people think that prospects are vastly overrated while others feel you should never trade one. The plain fact is that one of the advantages of having prospects is to flip them for real needs at the MLB level.
You just have to accomplish that while getting appropriate value from your minor league asset
Fair point with Kay. I just felt like the Mets were completely sleeping on him and didn’t even have him on their prospect radar.
I don’t have too big of a deal with the Bassit trade but I am really starting to hate the Baez deal.
I wonder if the Mets had already decided that Alex Ramirez was a stronger CF prospect and, therefore, that Crowe-Armstrong was expendable.
Still, it was a wasteful trade.
The huge plus about the Diaz trade, in comparison, was it gave the Mets 8 years of team control. Cano has been a disappointment, obviously, and Diaz has not lived up to his incredible 2018 season. But at least you are getting two MLB players on a roster for 8 years. Morever, BVW was correct — and an outlier — in that he banked on the Mets being legitimate contenders in 2019. Could have been the Nationals if things broke slightly differently (Noah, Cano, Diaz all terrible and much worse that their established norms). Oh, well. I refuse to fault them for trying to win.
Bassit is 1 year. Baez was 2 months.
You’re thinking that 4 years of Cano and his contract were a huge plus in that deal?
It’s even worse – they acquired Cano with 5 years of “control.”
Maybe the Mets should trade deGrom – they only have one year of “control” with him. I bet we could make something work with the Nationals where they give us Patrick Corbin and Stephen Strasburg. Those two have a combined 8 years of “control.” That would be a great deal! Who cares that they went a combined 10-18 last year and are owed $257 million going forward? It’s all about control.
No, of course not, but now you are just trying to be belittling and narrow.
Cano did not work out; we all understand that.
But at the time of the trade, he looked like he’d be a professional bat in the middle of the order and that the last two might be a problem. Overpaid, yes, but some of that cost mitigated by dumping Jay Bruce and the crappy reliever.
Four years of control of Diaz — or is it five? — saved the Mets a lot of money and some of that savings was also calculated in the Cano contract.
Obviously “control” isn’t all that matters — but you believe it matters a lot (as do I) when we are talking about Baez deal. I just see a lot of inconsistency in the thought process.
I agree with you on Baez. I didn’t like that deal from the minute it was made and despite his overall numbers, he was bad when the Mets were still in the race and piled up stats when they were basically out of it. The issue with the Cano deal was that the Mets overpaid so much when they were taking on a terrible contract. The length of time to me for Cano was a negative, even if they got a couple of good years out of it. It would have been a better deal (but still not good) if Cano had one or two years left.
Cano was the pill they had to swallow in order to get the best young reliever in baseball (at the time). This at a time when the Mets had the worst bullpen in baseball.
That’s understood by anyone who wants to understand.
Not the best deal in the world, as everyone knows. But Mets had needs and were trying to win. Cano, on paper, was going to hit and contribute in 2019, 2020, 2021. One of baseball’s best pure hitters. We saw how that worked out.
If Bassit is only “good/average” and Ginn goes onto enjoy a 40 WAR career, is the trade a disaster? I don’t think so. They are trying to win. This year. In the actual present. Not every trade works out perfectly. There is always risk, especially when you are trying to win.
On Seattle, one might wish that Mets didn’t give up Kelenic AND take on Cano. It should have been either/or. But where were players going to come from? The farm system that BVW inherited was a disaster. The owners weren’t going to spend. And the mission was NOT to roll over like a dog.
Again, I’d like to think I would not have made that exact deal. But I respect that they tried to win and 2019 was one of the most fun seasons the Mets gave fans in what was basically Sandy Alderson’s lost decade. That 2019 team was very close to making a playoff run. Built around the starting pitching, it didn’t help at all that Syndergaard was lousy. The idea was that he’d be very, very good.
Just looked at Mets360’s projections for Syndergaard entering the 2019 season.
There was talk of Cy Young Awards, not a jump from a 3.03 ERA to 4.28, going from 9 HRs to 24.
You can have a solid plan but then the players need to perform. It wasn’t crazy to believe that the 2019 Mets could win 90+ games and make a serious run in the playoffs.
Your point about Bassitt and Ginn is right on. I understand the Mets rationale for the deal and am kind of neutral, but OK with it. It makes sense for the team as they stand now with a lot of win now aged players. Evaluating the trade years down the line is nothing more than hindsight which no one has at the time of the trade. While you often hear people say that a trade can’t be evaluated for several years, that’s not true, as you pointed out. The issue with the Cano trade is the point that Brian made that the Mets should have been able shop Kelenic and Dunn and do much better than they did.
This is revisionist history. Let’s hear from the guy who made the deal and what he said at the time:
From MetsBlog:
“When asked about parting with top prospects Jarred Kelenic and Justin Dunn, Van Wagenen explained landing Cano and Diaz was an opportunity they couldn’t pass up.
“The opportunity to go fill two primary needs was paramount in trying to get this deal done,” he said. “And we were willing to make those sacrifices.”
Van Wagenen didn’t view Cano as a cost of doing business. He viewed Cano as an essential part of the deal.
It was four years of control for Diaz.
As for comparing the Ginn deal to the Baez one, it’s not exactly a direct comparison when you have six months of control with a team that looks like it’s got a great chance to make a deep playoff run versus two months when half your team is injured and the other half is underperforming.
Besides, my complaint at the time the deal was made was getting Baez rather than Bryant. It wasn’t over the lack of control. The Mets were clearly going to spend in the offseason. Baez worked out better than I imagined and I was in favor of re-signing him at the start of the offseason. Of course, I didn’t expect we’d be able to get Scherzer and that changed everything.
In FanGraphs’ writeup of the Ginn trade, they take an interesting view. Jeff Jaffe writes that the Mets did well to hold onto their top position prospects as pitching prospects are more apt to have health issues than position prospects.
I have never read that Kelenic was labeled a bust, but popular 20/20 hindsight was the Mariners rushed him. Dunn was traded to the Twins today.
Did the Yankees do better in trading a broken player in Sanchez and a useful Urshela for Donaldson and his $50MM owed and two young contributors at catcher and SS? I’d give them a better grade than the Mets. What the heck does Brian Cashman keep putting in other GM’s tea?
The Mets needed a number #3SP this spring. Looking back at the trades in the past they attempted to obtain a #3SP.
Stroman fits the bill and he had a fine season in 2021. Apparently he wore his welcome out. Woods Richardson and Kay have not developed into a #3SP.
The Carrasco trade was supposed to fit the bill but he was injured and is struggling for his major league life. Wolf is struggling also.
The Cano/Diaz trade has been a bust so far with the Mets. Cano’s WAR for the Mets isn’t even high enough that to deemed him a starter. Diaz is WAR for the Mets in three years cumulative doesn’t even equal his 2018 WAR. Dunn could be considered #3SP but the most Innings pitched and one season is 50 innings so that would be a risk. Right now the Mets could use Dunn even if he isn’t this year’s #3SP.
In the Biaz trade they received Williams also. Williams is not a #3SP.
That leaves us to the Bassitt trade. He should fill the bill as the #3SP but the Carrasco trade was supposed to fill the bill also. We will see. Ginn and Oller would not fill the bill this year and the needed is this year.
I would not be comfortable if the Mets traded Alvarez or Baty because they have a definite path be stars in the majors. Any other prospect should be considered trade bait to improve the major league team.
Hi Brian,
Where are mets360.com’s prospect list?
I know David, who is our main minor league guy, will do one shortly. I’ve also done one in the past and I might do one, too.