The Mets had a very active deadline and there’s a lot to talk about. Let’s skip the usual preamble and jump right in.
Roster Needs
Despite their strong play over the last two months, the Mets roster had very clear needs entering the deadline. Chief among them was the bullpen, which ranked 16th in baseball with a 4.06 ERA and even lower by FIP (21st, 4.13). By both metrics, things were even more disastrous in July, with injuries and general attrition weakening the group and leading to a 5.12 ERA (24th) and a league worst 5.58 FIP. Yes, there was a bit of bad fly ball luck involved here, but the group was nowhere near acceptable for a team that fancied itself a contender. The team needed 3-5 new arms here.
A similarly glaring but somewhat less appreciated hole was in right field. Despite solid offensive output (107 wRC+), Mets right fielders ranked 17th in fWAR prior to the deadline. Starling Marte’s bat has bounced back somewhat, but his defense was quite literally the worst in baseball, nuking any semblance of value he offered. Once he went down, Tyrone Taylor and DJ Stewart were overexposed as platoon starters. An addition here was a necessity to patch the lone but glaring hole in the lineup.
Finally, we have the rotation, which lacked a clear top-of-the-rotation arm in the wake of Kodai Senga’s calf injury. Such an arm would put the Mets in a much better position for both the regular season and the playoffs, when shorter roster make talent concentration much more critical. An elbow injury for Christian Scott and middling performances from David Peterson and Trevor Megill also made adding another mid-rotation or back-end type appealing to reinforce the group for the remainder of the regular season.
We need five relievers
David Stearns got things rolling on the reliever font early, acquiring Phil Maton from the Rays for a PTBNL or cash three weeks ahead of the deadline. Maton, who signed a 1-year, $6.5M deal with a club option in the offseason, had been atrocious in Tampa, tallying a 4.58 ERA as his already middling fastball velocity collapsed even further. Under the surface though, Maton’s cutter and curveball were still effective, suggesting a potential path forward as a junk balling reliever could be unlocked with a few tweaks (something that has largely born out in his first month with the Mets, but we don’t judge moves based on results here). It’s exactly the kind of bet you want to be taking, a very nice way to leverage the Mets’ financial flexibility; call this opening foray into the trade market a solid B.
Two-and-a-half weeks later, the Mets made another addition, snapping up Ryne Stanek from the Mariners. Long an effective relief option at the back of contender’s bullpens, Stanek got off to a poor start in Seattle, but one that was more driven by small sample size fluctuations in batted ball luck and command (an aspect of pitching that stabilizes far more slowly than stuff). Stanek’s stuff was still largely intact, and the Mets acquired him for Rhylan Thomas - an organizational depth piece - after the Mariners added Yimi Garcia. Another very nice gamble that looked past 30-40 poor innings at underlying traits to acquire a good pitcher at low cost, and another move that earns a B.
On deadline day, the Mets hooked up with the Rays again, acquiring Tyler Zuber for relief prospect Paul Gervase. Zuber was at one point a notable relief prospect for the Royals who began suffering shoulder problems right as he made the majors. Those issues derailed his early career, and he was pitching for the Long Island Ducks earlier this year before Tampa signed him. Since that point, he’s dominated the upper minors, featuring a fastball with outlier characteristics out of his release point and a useful cutter / sweeper combination. He’s also optionable and under team control for multiple seasons after this one. Zuber is basically a present-value version of what you’d hope Gervase is, and the Mets didn’t even have to sacrifice team control to get a player who can help this year; slam dunk A.
Finally, the Mets squeezed one last move in before the deadline, acquiring Huascar Brazoban from the Marlins for Wilfredo Lara. Brazoban has a unique profile, someone with options and basically all of his team control remaining despite being 34 already. No doubt his advanced age turned off a lot of teams and made the rebuilding Marlins eager to move him. Despite that, Brazoban has quietly been one of the better relievers in baseball this season, excelling at inducing week contact, limiting walks, and inducing in-zone whiff; he’s immediately the Mets’ best option in the 8th inning. That the acquisition cost was so low (a former IFA who would not have registered in the Mets current top-30) is astounding, and this is a clear A+ move.
If you count the waiver claim of Alex Young in the middle of the month, the Mets did in fact add five relivers to reinforce a much beleaguered bullpen. Volume-based approaches to bullpen construction are often more effective given the inherent volatility of relievers, but it can difficult to add enough arms to refresh that approach in the middle of the season. Nevertheless, that’s exactly what the Mets pulled off.
The other moves
To patch their outfield, the Mets brought in Jesse Winker from the Nationals for Tyler Stuart. Winker, a long-time Mets villain, signed a 1-year, $2M deal with Washington prior to 2024 and has had a huge bounceback season. He can’t really defend at all, but there’s a real argument that he was the best bat moved at the deadline, at least in terms of current-year impact. Winker’s 126 wRC+ and righty-mashing abilities slot perfectly into RF, where he can get the bulk of the playing time and push Tyrone Taylor back to a caddy role. Stuart, meanwhile, is not a significant price; he’s seen some strikeout gains in Double-A this year, but the underlying stuff remains middling and multiple attempts at new pitches have not taken. He’s got a major league future, likely as a middle reliever or maybe an up-and-down starter, but would not have made an updated top-20 list for the Mets. That’s another A move.
Finally, we get to the rotation, where the Mets acquired Paul Blackburn from the A’s for Kade Morris. After several years as an up-and-down guy, Blackburn has settled in as a solid back-end starter type over the last three seasons in Oakland. Despite having a solid cutter, changeup, slider, and curveball, Blackburn throws his 4-seamer and sinker - two of the worst pitches in baseball - more than a third of the time. A very simple tweak to the pitch mix here could make him much more effective down the stretch, and because he’s under control for 2025 as well, the Mets can fiddle further with things in the offseason.
In terms of cost, Morris is an eminently replaceable piece; he was an interesting arm when selected in the 3rd round last year and has had a solid season, but his stuff has actually backed up in the pros. Frankly, the Mets’ revamped pitching development pipeline will produce several arms better than this each year. It’d be going too far to say the Mets got Blackburn for free, but this is a move you make 10 times out of 10; another clear A.
Market Context
To be frank, acquisition costs in trades this season were insane. Yusei Kikuchi - a rental pitcher who is not meaningfully better than Paul Blackburn, returned three of the Astros top-10 prospects. The Padres dealt out multiple former top-100 guys for two relievers with shiny ERAs in Jason Adam and Tanner Scott (though a lot of those players are clear arrow-down prospects). The Phillies got even worse value on their reliever trade, acquiring Carlos Estevez - a rental pitcher who is not significantly better than the arms the Mets added- for a top-100 caliber arm and another good pitching prospect. These are all absurd price points, and sellers did astoundingly well.
That is, they did well if they were not dealing with the Mets. David Stearns and the rest of the Mets front office consistently found value by eschewing shiny first-half performances and big names, instead finding unheralded contributors overlooked by other contenders. It demonstrated both a savvy ability to navigate a challenging market and a great deal of creativity, adjectives we’ve rarely used to describe this organization.
As can be seen above, all of the moves the Mets made look quite good in a vacuum. Place them into context - the best seller’s market in years where contenders were playing absurdly elevated prices - and the moves look like bargains, if not outright robberies.
Conclusions
Let’s recap. The Mets needed significant bullpen help, an outfielder, and probably a starter, and were confronted with one of the best seller’s markets in years. They did not give up a prospect of note and managed to fill every hole on the roster, including four players with club control for 2025. Meanwhile, other contenders paid out the nose for similar or inferior additions. The one quibble might be that the Mets didn’t land a top-of-the-rotation arm, but none of the potentially available players in that category (Blake Snell, Tarik Skubal, Garrett Crochet) were traded.
Billy Eppler infamously boasted that the Mets did not give up a top-19 prospect at the 2022 deadline because the team wanted to avoid reducing their future playoff odds. That deadline was, of course, a disaster, one that played a significant role in the team’s eventual collapse.
There’s no denying that Eppler’s remarks capture a real objective for front offices; trading top prospects does reduce your future chances of winning, and teams should try to avoid doing so when possible. That’s only half the picture, however, as the future value of prospects must be weighed against the importance of capitalizing on a roster that’s good right now. Put another way, if you’re going to ardently hold on to your best trade chips, you need to be sure you can find real solutions to problems on the present roster.
That’s exactly what David Stearns and the rest of the Mets front office accomplished at this deadline. Like 2022, the Mets did not move a top-19 prospect. Unlike 2022, the Mets are a much better team than they were a week before the deadline, now boasting one of the deeper 40-man rosters in baseball. That’s incredible work no matter how you slice it, and it illustrates the stark contrast in competence between the current management group and those that came before.
In 2023, the Mets leveraged Steve Cohen’s money to pay down bloated contracts and improve their prospect return. In 2015, Yoenis Cespedes went nuclear after the trade deadline and helped carry the team to the World Series. Both of these were excellent deadlines, but neither required the same creativity or had the same degree of difficulty as 2024; it’s a lot easier to use your owner’s money or trade top prospects for good players than it is to thoroughly remake 1⁄4 of your roster midseason at minimal cost. For that reason, I think the 2024 trade deadline is the best deadline for this organization from a process perspective in at least the last decade, if not ever. It was a master class all around, and it earns a clear A+.
