Merry ChristMets
In a surprise to us all, the Mets took some of the money they saved from Yoenis Cespedes, and they invested it back into the team.
We can be frustrated this was a necessary step, and we can question why the money wasn’t spent on the 2019 team. We can also really take issue with the fact his agents had to come back to the Mets. That’s all for another today.
Today, there is reason to celebrate because Dellin Betances is a New York Met. Much like Ralphie and the Red Rider BB gun, it was the Christmas gift we all desperately wanted but never expected to get.
So, in the words Betances himself, Merry ChristMets!
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“In a surprise to us all, the Mets took some of the money they saved from Yoenis Cespedes, and they invested it back into the team.”
—–Startling, even. It’s also difficult to comment on Betances, since as is often the case with the Mets commentary becomes necessarily schizophrenic.
Was it a good move? Well, that depends. It’s a good move in the context of Van Wags having screwed up the offseason. It turned out they had money to spend: 13m-20m on Porcello and Wacha, 4m on Marisnick, 1m-ish on Brach, and 16m on Betances when you figure in all the guarantees (isn’t it essentially 7.5m +5.5m in incentives and 3m in fake deferred money in the form of a ‘player option self-buyout’?). There’s even talk about being able to package Smith and perhaps a lottery ticket with Lowrie to unload his 10m salary.
Add it all up (ignoring for now the Cespedes’ rebate) and the range is somewhere from 25.5m to 51m. Let’s split the difference and call it $38.25m. And for that thirty-eight million, two hundred and fifty thousand dollars, the Mets got themselves a #6 on a contender, a reliever in Wacha who can start but has an ERA of 4.39 and ERA+ of 94 over the past 4 seasons, a limited backup OFer with a .280 OBP, and a reliever who can be great but missed last year with a serious injury.
How is that possible? For $38.25m it’s easy enough to find two players who can drive you towards the postseason with a promising degree of certainty. Instead the Mets blundered from pillar to post, like a scatterbrained shopper in Home Depot who variously remembers this and that need patching. And in that sense, this offseason resembles every of the past decade, where the GM had no set offseason budget and had to go to ownership for each purchase, making his job and his plans uncertain and often incoherent.
Betances is a good signing in the context of a team that has put itself in a hole during an offseason that hasn’t gotten the team back to where it was in late March 2019, since it needs big upside and now has to take a big risk to get big upside.
But the Mets should never have put themselves in this position in the first place.