The Mets shouldn’t be aggressive at the deadline

Say one thing for the 2024 Mets, say they keep it interesting. The team hit what could have been the low point of their season as they dropped to 10+ games below .500 when the calendar flipped from May to June. In the process they somehow looked even worse than the mediocre team most expected them to be in what was, for all intents and purposes, a “building” or “transition” year. Rabble-rousers were getting out their pitchforks even earlier than usual, and we all wondered what a deadline as a seller would look like with David Stearns cutting the deals.

In a mildly surprising twist, the offense went ballistic and the pitching was not terrible from about mid-June until the All-Star break and beyond, lifting what appeared to be a listless team into the thick of the wild card race. They went from almost certainly sellers at the deadline to potentially looking to bolster the roster for a serious run in October. With the right moves and a little bit of luck, who knows what could happen…

Maybe let’s pump the brakes just a bit here.

The “right moves” noted above may be dramatically different depending on your opinion of this team’s current ceiling, but there seems to be an increasing call for them to effectively go all-in on the season. In fact, a recent article written by Tim Britton of The Athletic (pay wall) is literally titled “Mets shouldn’t hold back. They should be aggressive buyers at the deadline.” I’m a fan of Britton’s work, but this is likely the exact opposite of how the team should operate as we approach the deadline.

The standard arguments are there, including the “ya never know” aspect of just getting into the playoffs, the current potency of the offense, and citing that some recent pennant winners took aggressive approaches at the deadline that propelled them to greater heights (including a nod to the 2015 Mets). The core flaw in the argument, however, is also one that has been made often recently: that the Mets are “good enough” in an NL with few teams looking like powerhouses. The problem with this line of thinking is that the team likely isn’t actually good enough to make it deep into October.

Even if the lineup continues to knock around staffs across the league, and putting aside the huge question marks in the bullpen, the team simply does not have a playoff-caliber rotation (and as of this writing Kodai Senga left his first start of the season on Friday with an apparent leg injury). As Brian Joura so accurately broke down the state of the rotation earlier this week, the team simply doesn’t appear to have the horses to make it to the finish line.

Could that change with a flurry of huge trade deadline deals that bolster the rotation? Not likely, and that kind of improvement would surely completely dismantle the farm. Pure rentals should be approached with maximum caution, and young starters with years of control don’t simply fall out of the sky.

I’m much less of a “prospect hugger” than I used to be, mostly due to years of watching my favorites almost without exception flame out and vanish into the ether, so it’s not about avoiding paying a premium for the right players. The issue is that this team is not one starter away from having that aforementioned playoff-caliber rotation, and it’s not particularly close (the rotation’s current 3.7 WAR is 27th in the MLB).

The best approach would be of the measured variety, where the team looks to improve the edges of the roster to solidify a potentially fun run towards a wild card berth this season without setting their plans for sustained success on fire during their first year of executing it. The exception would be, of course, if a team makes an offer that simply cannot be refused. That would apply to both acquiring and trading away players if the deal improves the team for the future, by the way. If someone offers a haul for Pete Alonso you have to do it, and I think Stearns and Steve Cohen would feel the same way. After seeing the ransom the Knicks paid the Nets for Mikal Bridges, you kind of have to at least be willing to listen.

I get that dismantling the Braves after going to town on the Yankees has made this a poorly-timed article, but the 2024 Mets are not the team for which you push in all of your chips. You shore up the parts of the roster that can be reasonably upgraded without impacting your ability to develop a consistently competitive ball club. The moves for Phil Maton and now Ryne Stanek are great examples of this approach and what we should expect to see as the deadline approaches and passes.

It’s fun to dream, but you have to be realistic about these things.