Livescore
There’s a reason Steve Cohen said the Mets needed one more hitter when they reached a deal with Carlos Correa (before that deal fell apart). It’s because they do. Agreeing to a one-year deal with Tommy Pham, who could be perfectly fine as a fourth outfielder/DH, doesn’t qualify.
And finding the final, needed piece for the offense is on Billy Eppler and a very capable front office.
Before coming to terms with Pham, the Mets — per SNY’s Andy Martino — made an aggressive offer to outfielder Adam Duvall, who agreed to a one-year, $7 million deal with the Boston Red Sox.
Duvall, like Trey Mancini and Andrew McCutchen — two other Mets targets who recently signed elsewhere — is far from perfect. But he would’ve given the Mets an outfielder with serious power potential who is also a plus defensively.
Pham, who has slashed just .231/.324/.372 over the last three seasons (though he has hit left-handers well) and struck out a ton last season (167 K’s in just 554 at-bats), was in the ninth percentile in 2022 when it came to Outs Above Average. So he’ll be a bit player for the Mets, or at least he should be.
Maybe the Mets didn’t have a shot at Duvall because the Red Sox are giving him their starting center field job. Perhaps they didn’t want to go to two years for Mancini. As far as McCutchen, it seems that he simply wanted to go back to the Pittsburgh Pirates, where it all started for him. And like Pham, McCutchen would’ve profiled as a bit player for the Mets.
Currently, the Mets have power deficiencies in left field and behind the plate. And despite Eppler’s comments on Tuesday that Eduardo Escobar had a good season in 2022, the truth is that he didn’t. He had a damn good September after being ice cold for most of the season, but third base is a question mark entering the 2023 season.
Yes, the Mets were a very good offensive team in 2022, when only four teams in baseball scored more runs than them. But their offense was way too reliant on contact and did not have enough power. And that issue reared its head many times before the lineup went largely comatose during their NL East-deciding sweep at the hands of the Atlanta Braves late in the season and their three-game loss to the San Diego Padres in the Wild Card Series.
Going into the offseason, one of the main things the Mets needed to do was add more punch to the lineup in the form of an everyday player. That they haven’t done that is a failure.
At this point, it’s time for a two things can be true.
1. The Mets have had a terrific offseason, bringing back key internal free agents (including Edwin Diaz and Brandon Nimmo) and going outside the organization for Justin Verlander, Kodai Senga, Brooks Raley, and others.
2. Their offense will be vulnerable, and they will be putting themselves in a tough situation if they don’t add the serious bat they still need.
Here’s a reminder of what Cohen said after coming to terms with Correa, whom the Mets were right to walk away from over concerns about how his ankle will hold up over the duration of a deal:
“We need one more thing, and this is it,” Cohen told Jon Heyman of The New York Post. “This was important.”
Cohen added: “This really makes a big difference. I felt like our pitching was in good shape. We needed one more hitter. This puts us over the top.”
To reiterate, the Mets still don’t have the kind of hitter the owner said they “needed.”
But as New York continues searching for that hitter, now is not the time to do something stupid.
You don’t trade some of your best prospects for Pirates outfielder Bryan Reynolds, whom Pittsburgh has reportedly been asking for a Juan Soto type of package in return for. That ask is just insane.
But Eppler and the Mets need to do better this season than they did at the 2022 trade deadline, when their major additions were Daniel Vogelbach and Darin Ruf — leaving themselves woefully short in what turned out to be their only chance at a playoff run with both Jacob deGrom and Max Scherzer.
In response to the above, there are those who will point out that the trade market was not overflowing with offensive talent. And the players who were out there were quite expensive. My retort to that will be that it’s on the front office to find players, not the media or the fans. And at the deadline last season, the front office failed.
There is still about a month to go until Spring Training, but — as of now — the Mets haven’t put the necessary finishing touches on an otherwise great offseason.
Perhaps Pham can be a band-aid that helps get the Mets through the early part of the 2023 season.
Maybe they pull of a surprising trade between now and Opening Day that brings them a difference-making bat.
There’s also a chance that Francisco Alvarez and/or Brett Baty emerge and fill the power void, though it doesn’t seem either player is firmly in the Opening Day plans. Whether or not they should be is up for debate, and both of them have the potential to be game-changers.
But if the Mets don’t add that “needed” offense before Opening Day or find it during the season in the form of Alvarez and/or Baty, they’ll have to operate very differently at this year’s trade deadline than they did at last season’s. That’s because they still haven’t found the finishing piece to the offense.
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