The 2016 New York Mets have been eliminated from the post-season after losing last night's National League Wild Card Game. Noah Syndergaard was brilliant, getting into the sixth inning before giving up a hit and finishing with a pitching line of 7.0 IP, 2 H, 0 R, 3 BB, 10 K, good for a Game Score of 80. That would've been tied for the second-best start of the 2015 playoffs. It's the second-best start ever in a game which eliminated the pitcher's team, behind a Mike Mussina gem from 1997. (It is therefore the best such start by a National League team.) Unfortunately Madison Bumgarner turned in an even better start, a complete game shutout with four hits and two walks against six strikeouts (Game Score 83), and Jeurys Familia gave up the game-winning three-run home run to Conor Gillaspie of all people in the ninth inning, bringing the Mets' season to a close.
Which means it's time to look to next year. Here's what I figure the incumbent 2017 Opening Day 25-man roster looks like:
Travis d'Arnaud
Lucas Duda
Wilmer Flores
Asdrubal Cabrera
David Wright
Michael Conforto
Juan Lagares
Curtis Granderson
Rene Rivera
T.J. Rivera
Brandon Nimmo
Justin Ruggiano
Gavin Cecchini/Matt Reynolds
Noah Syndergaard
Jacob deGrom
Matt Harvey
Steven Matz
Zack Wheeler
Jeurys Familia
Addison Reed
Hansel Robles
Josh Smoker
Josh Edgin
Robert Gsellman
Seth Lugo
That's assuming that every free agent leaves and that all options (or effective options) are declined.
I think that's a good team. The rotation, if healthy, still has the potential to be historic, and right now there's no solid reason to think any of them won't be ready to go next spring. You've still got the Reed/Familia tandem at the back of the bullpen, and Gsellman and Lugo available out of the bullpen or as spot starters. And most of the position players look league average at worst, again assuming good health. I suspect this team could win another ~87 games and have a very good chance of winning a Wild Card spot.
But as we learned last night, sometimes a Wild Card spot isn't worth very much. So here's what I would do if I were Sandy Alderson to turn this good team into a great team that should challenge the Nationals for the division. Spoiler alert: I don't think the team needs to import, like, any players who weren't on the Mets in 2016. They just need to figure out which ones to retain.
Resign/Extend Yoenis Cespedes. This has got to be the top priority. Pay. The. Man. Pay him a lot. Pay him whatever he wants, pay him more than the 3/$75 you gave him last time. Last year Cespedes looked like an absolute star, with the one quibble maybe being his plate discipline (4.9% BB, 20.9% K). This year he solved that, nearly doubling the walk rate to 9.4% while cutting (!) his strikeouts to 19.9%, even as strikeouts continue to rise around the league. The only reason his numbers don't look better this year is all the nagging injuries he had, causing him to miss time (he hit 30 home runs in 3/4 of a season, a.k.a. a 40-homer pace!) and to a certain extent underperform when he was playing. But there's good reason to suspect that those injuries were made worse by having him out of position in center field. So keep him in left field and he's every bit the true superstar. (The re-emergence of Curtis Granderson as a viable CF option, see e.g. his spectacular catch last night, makes this that much more palatable.) It's a decent offense without Cespedes, but he's the guy who makes opposing pitchers afraid, and this team needs one guy like that.
Bring back Jose Reyes. There are a bunch of reasons for this. Reyes was good! +1.2 fWAR in 60 games, a pace for +3 WAR over a full 150 games. And after July, when he was seemingly not quite up to speed yet (a problem that should be taken care of by a full spring training), he put up a full win in about 44 games, more like a +3.5-4 WAR pace. More to the point, Reyes is cheap! The Colorado Rockies released him from a contract that will pay him $22 million next year, and anything the Mets pay him is subtracted from what the Rockies (or his previous teams on the same contract) owe him. So Reyes has no reason to mind having the Mets give him the league minimum, and he clearly wants to be a New York Met. The Mets should want him back too, for one big reason: David Wright insurance. Wright is on the roster, and hey, if he can be healthy and play third base four or five days a week all year next year, that's great (assuming he can still perform well). But at this point that's wishful thinking; I'll believe David Wright will play another game in a Major League uniform when I see it. Unfortunately, you can't really sign a different starting third baseman, because if Wright is healthy there might not be a spot for that other guy. Unless that guy is Reyes, you're paying him nothing, and he's probably happy to shift over to second base or to be a utility infielder if it comes to that.
(Some might of course object to bringing Reyes back because of his domestic violence incident, and while sympathetic to that view I continue to think that giving him a chance to be a better person, and to help him be a better person, is the best course of action. I also think that being a New York Met is singularly helpful to Reyes in his quest to be a better person.)
Trade Jay Bruce, probably. The Jay Bruce trade will almost certainly go down as the Alderson regime's worst move. Bruce was awful this year (and awful last night!), and we gave up an exciting prospect in Dilson Herrera. That said, the team now faces the question of what to do with Bruce. They have a $13 million team option on him. If I were GM, I'd probably just decline the option, give him the $1 million buy-out, and send him on his way. He does not fit onto this team; Conforto and Granderson are both superior ballplayers and they fill the same role Bruce would. The only way he might fit is if Lucas Duda has too much of a chronic back condition to be the starting first baseman next year, in which case you could make Bruce the first baseman instead. (Preferably the long side of a first base platoon with Flores, but whatever.) Also despite hitting 30 home runs his bad defense made him worth less than 1 WAR this year; $13 million is a really steep price to pay for one win that you had in-house anyway.
However, I suspect that the league massively overvalues Jay Bruce for some reason, and that therefore they will pick up his option. In that case they should trade him. Trade him for whatever they can get back in terms of prospects. Be willing to eat a whole bunch of that salary to do it, too. Basically just salvage whatever you can out of the smoking wreckage of that godawful Herrera trade. But under no circumstances allow Jay Bruce onto the 2017 Mets. Not even if they fail to resign Cespedes! Again, we already have two players similar to but better than Jay Bruce. We don't need him; we never needed him. Aaaaaaaargh.
Resign Jerry Blevins. Look at that bullpen. It's got some nice pieces. What it doesn't have is a reliable lefty. Smoker looks intriguing, but Edgin... Edgin is not a guy you want to rely on. Blevins is. He's pitched 47 innings for the Mets across two seasons, and has a 2.49 ERA with the team (2.79 in 42 IP this year). Nor is it smoke and mirrors; his FIP is 2.89. He's legitimately really good! He strikes people out! He didn't have a platoon split this year but probably mostly because lefties tagged him for a .373 BAbip. He's exactly the guy you need in that bullpen, he should come relatively cheap (though if he wants a reasonable two-year contract I'd give it to him), and he seems to like being on this team.
Resign Kelly Johnson. The bench needs reinforcing. Johnson seems to be a really good bench piece. Both of the last two years he's had sOPS+ figures of over 130 as a pinch-hitter, meaning he's a lot better than the league average pinch-hitter. He's got minimal platoon splits in his career, increasing his late-game versatility (though Terry Collins doesn't really seem to notice that). I was skeptical of Kelly when the Mets first acquired him last summer, but he works well as a role player on this team.
Give Neil Walker a qualifying offer and let him walk. Neil Walker was good for the Mets this year, until he got hurt that is. And we don't exactly have a Dilson Herrera waiting to take over for him. But we do have a Wilmer Flores, and if Wright is healthy we may also have a Jose Reyes. I would give those guys a chance, and put the money that might have gone toward a multi-year deal for Walker into Cespedes instead. If Walker seems likely to reject the QO, give it to him and get the draft pick, but don't make a serious effort to resign him.
Resign Bartolo Colon. This one probably makes the least baseball sense. There certainly isn't room for him in the starting rotation, and it's a bit of an experiment to see if he can be useful in a full-time relief/spot starter role. And we already have a couple of guys for that role in Lugo and Gsellman. But, he really seems like a big part of the clubhouse, he seems like he really enjoys being a part of this team, and you want eight starters that you feel good about heading into any given season. Adding Bartolo fills out the SP depth chart: the five fireballers in the rotation plus Colon, Lugo, and Gsellman. Probably only two of the three would be in the major league bullpen if everyone's healthy, with someone down in AAA staying stretched out as a starter (probably Gsellman?). But it's rare for everyone to be healthy; all eight would probably see significant playing time, and they would make the team a lot less dependent on having the top five guys stay in the rotation all year.
Let Loney, de Aza, Niese, and (maybe) Salas walk. Loney is bad. Niese is bad. de Aza probably isn't as bad as he looked for the early part of this year, but he's not exactly necessary either. If they wanted to bring back Salas to fill out the bullpen with actual relievers rather than starters for whom there isn't room in the rotation, that would be fine.
Do something about the catching, maybe? This is the one real uncertain, I think. If Travis d'Arnaud has, say, been hampered by some nagging injuries this year, sapping his power, then you probably stick with him. If d'Arnaud resumes hitting home runs, he's a very good catcher. If he doesn't, he sucks, and neither Rivera nor Kevin Plawecki looks likely to provide relief from said suckitude. That said, there aren't a ton of great catchers out there. You're not gonna trade for Posey or Lucroy. They could perhaps consider going after Wilson Ramos, who's a free agent but who just sustained an injury. If he were willing to take a shorter-term deal with the Mets, that could make sense for both sides; in that case you probably trade d'Arnaud for prospects if you can, or stash him in the minors and hope he figures some stuff out if you can't.
That would all add up to something like this:
Lineup:
Reyes, 3B (S)
Cabrera, SS (S)
Granderson, CF (L)
Cespedes, LF (R)
Duda, 1B (L)
Flores, 2B (R)
Conforto, RF (L)
d'Arnaud, C (R)
Bench: Rivera, R., Lagares, Nimmo, Johnson, K., Rivera, T.J.
Rotation: Syndergaard/deGrom/Harvey/Matz/Wheeler
Bullpen: Familia, Reed, Robles, Blevins, Smoker, Lugo, Colon
Then in the minors you've got Plawecki, Cecchini, Reynolds, Ty Kelly, perhaps Justin Ruggiano, Eric Campbell, Gsellman, Montero, Ynoa, Verrett, Edgin, Gilmartin, and Goeddel available as depth. This, I think, is a great team, one that could be juggernaut-like if everyone's healthy and could still be very good if a lot of people get hurt. The rotation is of course absurd, the bullpen is solid (especially if someone can get Familia's split-finger working again so he can rejoin the ranks of the truly elite relievers rather than the merely very good), the lineup is solid up and down except perhaps for d'Arnaud, the defense shouldn't be too terrible, and the bench is actually quite strong. (Nimmo, for what it's worth, has shown good pich-hitting skills in his brief time in the majors.) Later in the year Amed Rosario could make his presence felt, if he's been torching Vegas for the first couple months of the year, but if everyone's healthy and performing we might not even need him until 2018.
Oh, and note that I'm counting on precisely nothing from David Wright in the above scenario, which I think is appropriate.
Of all the moves I outlined above, only retaining Cespedes feels like much of a stretch at all. I suspect they can all be done while keeping the payroll from getting too outlandish--and it really ought to rise, since we're a New York team that's just made the playoffs two years in a row and is looking to do so again. And it doesn't involve importing a single player not currently a New York Met.
Get it done, Sandy.
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