Big bucks, little bang for the Mets

Baseball's biggest spenders are now paying their players to work elsewhere.

Bobby Bonilla

Kodai Senga leads the New York Mets in strikeouts. He has an ERA of 3.17. Opponents are batting .200 against him. 

He is only 30 years old and is committed to the Mets through 2025 at least. His salary, provided he doesn’t meet incentives, will meet the modern definition of reasonableness, at $15 million per.

Of more relevance is the fact that he remains a Met. The trade deadline came and snatched bodies from every corner of CitiField. Senga is still standing. The Mets’ highlight film for 2023 should be entitled Senga and Jenga, that game of stackable pieces that invariably winds up all over the carpet.

It won’t be a long film. In baseball’s Year Of Spending Dangerously, the Mets might not be the most disappointing team in the sport, not with the Cardinals and White Sox around, but they do illustrate the worst business model. 

The Mets began the season with a 40-man roster payroll of $376 million, baseball’s highest in history, but the team they put on the field was strictly cubic zirconia. Already a lap down in the N.L. East and too top-heavy to vault the low wild-card bar, the Mets began stripping their roster for parts, attracting great interest from other clubs who insisted the Mets continue to foot part of the bill.

As a result, the Mets are suddenly paying $155 million to players employed somewhere else. Twelve teams had lower 40-man payrolls than $155M when 2023 began.

Of course, this is the same franchise that continues to pay Bobby Bonilla $1.25 million every July and will do so through 2035, when Bonilla will be 72.

You may say that owner Steve Cohen can cover all of that, and that if the Mets could stage six Taylor Swift concerts at CitiField they could pay their refugees three times over. And, yes, the fans and the media pick up the bullhorn every year at the winter meetings and demand that their team outspend everyone else for talent. That, of course, is why Albert Pujols, C.J. Wilson and Josh Hamilton enjoyed so many championships in Anaheim.

If fans really don’t care about payroll mismanagement, they should. They wind up paying for it anyway, through parking and game tickets, and in the time investment they make in the ongoing saga. If a club overpays for Max Scherzer ($43.3 million this year), how can the fans believe in its ability to judge any player? How can they expect the Mets to compete in a division that includes the Atlanta Braves, who have devoted their money to players entering their prime years, instead of rewarding them for their history?

The Mets are not only 18 ½ games behind the Braves, at this writing, but they’re six behind Miami, which spent $130 million on its 40-man, Opening Day roster and ranked 24th of 30 teams in salary.

The Mets, Yankees and Padres ranked 1-2-3 in largesse and none are above the playoff line. Only five of the top 10 spendthrifts (Dodgers at 4, Phillies at 5, Blue Jays at 6, Braves at 7 and Rangers at 9) would make the playoffs today.

So would Tampa Bay (23), Cincinnati (27) and Baltimore (29). But this is not news. The link between salary and performance has always been rusty. It only makes sense. Players don’t really make money until they hit arbitration and they don’t make silly money until they put in six years for free agency. Some teams try to pre-empt that process and commit to their young players before Year 6. That is why Seattle is waiting for Julio Rodriguez to play like last year’s top A.L. rookie. Rodriguez, 22, is on the first year of a 12-year deal, one that he can abandon after six years, to the tune of $209.3 million. His .738 OPS is fourth on the Mariners and is 120 points lower than last year’s.

Look at the redemptive Orioles and Reds, who are thriving with young players they either developed or got in shrewd deals. There is no bypassing that process.

Now, one should always beware when reading that “the Guardians received the Rangers’ No. 3 prospect” in some hypothetical trade, because you don’t know who did the rating or whether that player can navigate the quantum leap to the majors, and no one else knows either.

But if your supply chain of kids is broken, you’re always overcompensating, trading from weakness, and paying exorbitant prices for free agents without wondering why they were allowed to be free in the first place.

There were some wiseacres who went to the College World Series and said LSU had more legitimate prospects on its roster than the Mets had in their entire system. That’s premature at best. Francisco Alvarez is a 21-year-old catcher who has 21 home runs. He is rough defensively, but his bat will find a spot somewhere. He was the Mets’ No. 1 prospect according to Baseball America. The No 2 was third baseman Brett Baty, who has gotten his chance and is hitting .225 with a .637 OPS.

How did the Mets’ cost-overruns make them the Pentagon of baseball?

Well, the twin $43.3M salaries of Scherzer and Justin Verlander were the main source of the bloat. Shortstop Francisco Lindor is making $32.4 million this year and will be making it every year through 2031, when he will blow out 37 candles if he has enough breath. The Mets got him from Cleveland after the 2020 season. Lindor got MVP votes in four consecutive seasons for Cleveland. He has only gotten MVP votes once as a Met, and that was last year, and this year he’s hitting  .234 with 21 home runs and 67 RBI. He’s one of their better players but he shouldn’t be their highest-paid position player.

Closer Edwin Diaz ($18.6 million) injured his knee in the World Baseball Classic and is out for the year. Starling Marte ($20.7 million) is 34 years old with an OPS of .640, and he is currently on the injured list with migraines, which at least connects him with Mets fans.

Center-fielder Brandon Nimmo ($18.5 million) is a solid, everyday leadoff man who probably should be a Met for life. But he can’t drive himself in, and finds himself 41 runs short of last year’s 102.

So you have years like this, years in which Jeff McNeil doesn’t hit like a batting champ. But you also have Verlander, who was a Cy Young Award winner only last season and had just won his last three decisions, giving up 10 hits in 19 and one-third innings. 

The Mets not only sent Verlander back to the deliriously happy world champion Astros, who had missed him. They sent along $35 million to defray Verlander’s costs this year and next year, and agreed to contribute if Verlander pitches enough innings to activate his contract in 2025. The best one can tell is that Houston will be getting Verlander back for about $17.5 million per season out of its own pocket. Jim Crane, the Houston owner, said he had never seen a deal like this.

The Mets could have kept Verlander as the anchor for the 2024 staff. They are too committed to punt away next season.But now that Verlander is gone, they’ll have to join the auction for yet another free agent. 

As Cohen knows, you don’t get filthy by digging deeper holes. You just get filthy. Maybe Cohen  thinks there’s oil underneath CitiField. He’s more likely to find Jenga pieces.