The Mets made three promises at the trade deadline:
1. They would be open-minded about trading their best starting pitchers, yet it was difficult to find an executive who felt they ever engaged the Mets seriously on Jacob deGrom, Noah Syndergaard or even Steven Matz.
2. They would eat money to make better trades. They ate no money, saying there were no trades that could be enhanced by doing so.
3. They would empower the three-pronged general manager construct of Omar Minaya, J.P. Ricciardi and John Ricco to think creatively outside the box. Yet, they made the two most obvious deals available to them by shipping out their two best walk-year players, Asdrubal Cabrera and Jeurys Familia, for rather standard returns. It is the kind of swap you could have learned in Baseball Trades for Dummies.
There are so many lessons these Mets need to incorporate en route to being a quality organization — one should definitely be don’t promise what you can’t deliver. You don’t become a well-run operation by selling it, only by doing it.
The Mets had the opportunity to be the kings of this trade deadline since they had water in a desert — the lone team with plenty of high-quality starting pitching to deal in a market bereft of it. Multiple executives asserted some version that the Mets had a window to change the narrative of this period of time by being open to trading with all teams — that means the Yankees and members of the NL East — and grinded and grinded as the proactive aggressor to push toward what they wanted in return for a starter or two.
You can make a legitimate argument the Mets should have kept all the starters because a) they want to win next year or b) they needed to retain them for Sandy Alderson’s successor to decide what to do next. I think that was the wrong move, but it is legitimate. What is not authentic is promising open-mindedness and creativity and producing none.
The inanity of having three acting general managers with separate tastes, work ethics and styles of communications funneling information to an ownership that wanted to hear an outcome in which the team contends next year speaks to neither open-mindedness nor creativity (nor the fierce aggressiveness and sturdy integrity necessary in this market to convince teams they were not wasting their time if they engaged the Mets on starters, when time ticking toward a deadline is so precious).
Talking about open-mindedness, willingness to eat money and creativity only matters if, you know, you are actually open-minded, willing to eat money and are creative. If not, that plays like a desperate organization hoping the illusion of good work substitutes for actual good work
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