Wednesday catch-all thread (11/27/24)
Please use this thread all week to discuss any Mets-specific topic you wish.
For those of you wondering why anyone would opt out of a contract that paid them $31 million, please see Blake Snell. Despite coming off a relatively poor season, Snell snagged a 5/$182 deal from the Dodgers late Tuesday night. Good pitchers get paid in free agency.
In the back of my mind, it seemed like Snell would be an option for the Mets on a 3/$100 type deal but he did way better than that.
Is this an overpay for the Dodgers? Maybe? It’s not a deal that the Mets should have made, in my opinion. Yet that doesn’t mean it was a bad deal for the Dodgers. Los Angeles has so many good but injured pitchers that it’s not a bad idea to add another talented arm, not needing to get 175 IP from him, like most clubs would need adding this type of contract to their payroll.
The Dodgers will look to mix and match from the following hurlers to form a rotation, based on who’s healthy at any given time:
Tyler Glasnow
Tony Gonsolin
Clayton Kershaw
Dustin May
Bobby Miller
Shohei Ohtani
Snell
Gavin Stone
Yoshinobu Yamamoto
Health permitting, they’re likely to go to a six-man rotation, due both to the presence of Yamamoto and the wealth of talented arms available. It seems unlikely that they’ll have to resort to bullpen games next year in the playoffs. Still, when you have a bunch of pitchers who’ve been hurt in the past, you can’t be surprised if they get hurt in the future.
This is certainly a situation where the rich get richer. The Dodgers are smart enough to go for it again now given that some of their prime stars (Otahni, Betts and Freeman) are all at or on the other side of 30. I too would not have given perhaps the best 5 inning pitcher in the game such a long contract, but assume the Dodgers deferred a big chunk of change as they have done on other contracts. And, they are truly a team that just needed to add a piece or two to make them the top contender. The Mets have much more that needs to be done.
While I like and trust David Stearns' judgement, I don't want to fill the pitching staff with cheaper reclamation projects with the hopes that they recover their old form. They got lucky with Severino, Manaea and Quintana last season, but they all ran out of gas at the end when they needed their best possible performance. Not as bad a Tom Glavine who needed just to beat the lowly Marlins to get into the playoffs, but we need some front line arms.
Burnes and Flaherty come to mind as do a flock of relievers. Lets' make a splash now and not wait to see what the Thanksgiving leftovers look like.
Chris, I think your first line is spot on.
As for Manaea and Severino, I really look at them as two different cases. There was a lot of reason to expect a rebound from Manaea. There was virtually no reason to believe Severino could do anything remotely like that.
While I still think that what Severino did had more to do with luck than skill - the fact is that he did ... something. He was a league-average pitcher over a bunch of innings. To me, this is a best-case scenario for Severino. And my feeling is that the Mets should aim higher than that. At least with someone potentially pulling down a $20 million AAV.
At the end of the day, there are always a ton of ways to assemble the roster and there's not one "right way" to assemble a playoff squad. And after what he did in MIL and then did last year with the Mets, it seems Stearns has earned a lot of rope with how he chooses to put the team together.