Don't Trade Beltran

The current rumor going around the internet is that the Mets are not likely to get a top prospect in return for Carlos Beltran. There are various reasons why this is so; I'm not interested in them. What I am interested in is what it means: that, if no one will give them anything particularly enticing in return for Carlos, they should keep him for the rest of the year. The standard argument you hear against this is that the Mets will get nothing from Beltran if they don't trade him: he will depart at the end of the year, and since he cannot be offered arbitration the Mets won't even get compensatory draft picks for him. There is one slight hole in this argument, which any advocate of trading Beltran would gladly acknowledge: what you get from Carlos Beltran for the rest of the season is wins. According to Fangraphs, Beltran has been worth 3.9 wins above replacement through the first 102 games of the season; extrapolating for the remaining 60 games, we project Beltran as being worth a further 2.3 wins for the rest of the season. Drop Beltran and the Mets might as well be 10 games behind the Braves, rather than 7.5. Trade him to the Braves and it might as well be a 12.5-game deficit. So trading Beltran will make the Mets a worse team for the rest of the year; this will reduce their odds of making the playoffs, etc. etc.



A trade advocate would say to this, yes, but the Mets aren't going anywhere this year. Sure the Braves have been going through a rough patch, but if you think that they're going to fade far enough for the Mets to have a chance of beating them you're being wildly unrealistic. The Braves are just a much better team than the Mets. And that's all true. One estimate put the Mets' odds of making the postseason around 6%, which is quite low indeed. Low enough that, perhaps, there's not much point pursuing those slim odds. Certainly if you could get a top-level prospect, like Julio Teheran, it's worth tossing away those 6% odds of making the playoffs.

But, at the same time, six percent is not nothing. During the '07-'08 run for the Mets, in just about every game they got up big early and then kind of went to sleep late, letting their bullpen fritter away leads and failing to generate any late-inning spark on offense. In both of those years they had sizable leads in the late summer but then gave them away down the stretch. This year, on the other hand, it seems like every time the Mets are trailing late they score a bunch of runs. Often this comeback charge falls short, but it feels like they rarely just shut down the offense when they get behind. I don't generally like these kind of micro-macro arguments, but a part of me is just curious whether this Mets team is going to mount some kind of comeback down the stretch. If, that is, they have Carlos Beltran batting third for them.

So for me, the fact that the Mets do have an outside chance of making the postseason that will all but vanish the second they trade Carlos Beltran means that no, they don't have to trade him. There should be some "price" in terms of prospects below which they will not be willing to part with the remnants of this season. If the Giants or the Braves or whoever say that they will only surrender a couple of middling quasi-prospects, the Mets should say, thanks but no thanks. We'll take our chances making a run at the Braves. Then, maybe, we'll see if Carlos is interested in signing with us again in the off-season. If not, we'll simply say thanks for seven great years. After all, it's not that the Mets don't get anything from Carlos Beltran if they don't trade him: they get Carlos Beltran.