This will go down in the annals of trades I care about more than most, but Tyler Stuart was a high cost for Jesse Winker.

Now, to Mets fans Winker is Babe Ruth. This guy just wears out the New York Mets, and there is value in keeping him away from potential first round opponents. Still, a team building long and short term shouldn’t make a trade like this.

Winker is a platoon bat. Even if you want to say he isn’t, that’s likely his role on this team. He’s also on an expiring deal. Players like this are nice when they hit.

Remember back to Tyler Naquin. Mets fans were doing backflips over getting him. That was until he and his .203/.246/.390 batting line proved to be an abject disaster.

Notably, Jose Acuña has a 1.77 Double-A affiliate for the Cincinnati Reds. The 20 year old Hector Rodríguez has a .746 OPS in Single-A. We don’t know what they’ll become, but when Naquin gave the Mets nothing, these prospects were basically just thrown away.

Stuart, 24, had a pedestrian 3.76 for Double-A Binghamton. What you liked was the 2.1 BB/9 against the 9.6 K/9.

He’s predominantly a fastball-slider pitcher with a high swing and miss rate with his slider. Long term, he’s probably a reliever, and with his control, he could rotate between the rotation and bullpen. He’s probably poised to make his Major League Debut sometime in 2025.

To some extent, think José Buttó. Yes, the stuff is different and so is the control. However, Buttó flashed two good pitches in the minors. Now, he’s a solid pitcher in the Mets pen with a promise to become much more.

If we go back to 2022, you’d be tearing your hair out watching Buttó become a good reliever at a time where Carlos Mendoza has to sacrifice a chicken to get through a game where he needs to use more than one reliever, which is every game.

If we want, we can over focus on Winker not hitting in the postseason, but that was just four games. In the inverse, we can look at his good numbers against the Atlanta Braves this season.

The main thing to like about this deal is David Stearns is going for it. He’s not making the Josh Hader mistake with this team. So far, he hasn’t truly impacted the long-term outlook of the team.

That said, he paid a high price for a platoon bat. As we’ve seen time and again, unless you’re Steve Pearce on the 2018 Boston Red Sox, you typically come to regret these deals.

If Winker is Pearce, and the Mets win the World Series, who cares what Stuart does in his career. If the Mets don’t win, this trade was a mistake. Let’s hope this isn’t a mistake.