It’s an issue of credibility.
The New York Mets do not have any. This is not particularly news. They have not had any for quite some time, but they have spectacularly less credibility now, somehow, than they did even 48 hours ago. Frankly, it’s less that credibility is a positive attribute they lack than it is that they continue to trade in its obverse, and have done so for so long that a great, pulsing gravity well of non-credibility sucks in everything they do and strive for and spits out nothing except … the New York Mets.
You are likely aware of the bare facts of the latest mess: in the middle of Wednesday night’s game between the Mets and the Padres, Joel Sherman of the New York reported – as hard news – that the Mets had completed a trade with the Milwaukee Brewers for the services of outfielder Carlos Gomez. This trade was then confirmed by a number of other reporters, whose sources gave them the full package: injured starting pitcher Zack Wheeler and infielder Wilmer Flores would be going to the Brewers in return for the Mets’ new centerfielder. Brewers players tweeted farewells, the official MLB account announced the trade “pending club confirmation,” as they do for every actually-completed trade before the deal is rubber-stamped by the Commissioner’s Office, and then …
… nothing happened. Wilmer Flores, who started against the Padres for the Mets, remained in the game despite being fully aware of the situation. There was no way he couldn’t be; Mets fans were exuberantly chanting Carlos Gomez’s name at him while he stood at the plate in the bottom of the seventh inning. He remained in the game despite being in tears on the field because, well, as far as Terry Collins was concerned, that was what you do when you’re the starter – he would later joke in his postgame news conference that “I’ve been in tears in the third inning and nobody has taken me out of the game!”
Collins protested ignorance of the trade, which made no sense whatsoever but was also more or less irrelevant — no manager or executive is allowed to publicly acknowledge a trade until it’s completed. That’s why Royals GM Dayton Moore was on the Kansas City pre-game show last Friday denying that the team had traded for the Reds’ Johnny Cueto despite the fact that the team had, in actuality, agreed to a framework with Cincinnati to trade for Johnny Cueto. Official denials mean nothing for precisely the reason that things sometimes fall apart.
Which is what happened to the Gomez deal. At some point after Joel Sherman’s sources told him the deal was agreed to – and at some point after every national writer in the country had someone telling them the deal was done and who was going where – the deal became undone. Precisely who and how that came to pass depends on whose sources, on and off the record, you believe. The Mets are pushing the angle that something in Carlos Gomez’s medicals convinced him he had a hip condition, and that upon learning that, they called off the trade. The Brewers are pushing the angle that after agreeing to a deal, the Mets got worried about the financial aspects of absorbing Carlos Gomez’s $9 million 2016 salary, and invented a medical concern in order to torpedo the trade.
We will never fully know what transpired in those negotiations on Wednesday night in a complete, verified “factual” sense — though it’s almost certain a fuller picture of events will come out at some point, if not this year then in years down the line. What we do have is two competing public claims. The first is that the Milwaukee starting centerfielder, who has averaged over 140 games played each of the last three full seasons, who has played 74 of the Brewers’ 102 contests this year while being effective on both sides of the ball, and who was traded to the Houston Astros less than 24 hours later is secretly nursing an injury concern so bad that he became immediately toxic to the organization that drafted him and which desperately needs his talents right now. The second is that Mets ownership is underhanded, cheap, and committed to a vision of upper-level management that has no real concern for who it hurts or how it appears, because it views itself (correctly, so far) as utterly untouchable, unaccountable, and unpunishable.
So we come back to the question of credibility, and the fact that Carlos Gomez will be in the lineup soon for Houston, healthy and feeling fine, while the guy who the Mets have publicly humiliated all year got to sit out today, about 18 hours too late to avoid the insult he suffered last night, while his team’s still-porous bullpen blew a six-run lead in miserable fashion, and the Mets continued to tell the media they had no plans to acquire any more relief pitching. Given Carlos Gomez’s hip against the sum total of miserliness and pig-headedness atop the Mets front office these past few years — and to be clear, above the head of GM Sandy Alderson, who has struggled mightily to build a team even this competitive — it is quite easy to figure out who’s more likely to be telling the truth.
But maybe that’s unfair. Maybe the Mets did make a good faith effort, from top to bottom, to acquire Carlos Gomez, and maybe his mystery medical condition is real. Maybe they’re still out there, on the cusp of acquiring the impact bat the team desperately needs. Maybe those reports from Thursday afternoon about them instead trying to dump Jon Niese’s salary are wrong.
Maybe any number of good things will happen in Flushing before the trade deadline at 4pm tomorrow. But it’s been a long time since the Mets have had the credibility to believe that’s the case.
- This article has been updated to reflect the news that Carlos Gomez has been traded to the Astros.
