The trade deadline has come and gone and the Mets have improved their team to make a run for the postseason.
Mets president of baseball operations David Stearns spoke to the media shortly after the 6 p.m. cutoff on Tuesday to talk about how his first trade deadline with New York, the pieces he acquired and much more.
How Kodai Senga’s injury changed plans
The Mets were hoping to have ace Kodai Senga being the big addition to their rotation before the deadline. Unfortunately, the right-hander suffered a calf strain in his first start back from injury.
With Senga down for the rest of the regular season, and young prospect Christian Scott also missing time due to injury, the Mets looked to strengthen the rotation, which they eventually did when they acquired righty Paul Blackburn from the Athletics.
“You’re never going to replace a pitcher like Senga at the deadline,” Stearns said. “We just tried to figure out how best to fortify our team around it and it meant both in the rotation and the bullpen. To ensure we had enough arms and some flexibility in various roles to put us in the best position for the last two months and hopefully beyond.”
Starters like Jack Flaherty of the Tigers were eventually dealt at the deadline, with high-end starters like Blake Snell and Tarik Skubal available for the right deal, but Stearns said that it’s “always a balance” to try and figure out which prospects to part with in any deal.
However, he and most of the baseball world acknowledge that this trade deadline was a bit of an outlier in terms of how expensive certain arms were.
“There was some pretty aggressive pricing this year but that’s to be expected,” he said. “We have a lot of teams that were trying to add and teams for various reasons that were reluctant to sell. There was a pretty clear dynamic that was going to yield the type of deadline that we had.”
Philosophy behind bullpen deals
The Mets had a glaring need for bullpen help way before the deadline and Stearns started making moves, first by acquiring Phil Maton from the Rays and picking up a number of arms in the days leading up to Tuesday’s cutoff.
In total, Stearns traded for four relievers and he explained his philosophy behind this season’s bullpen.
“Quantity and quality, If we’re doing this right,” he explained. “Bullpen performance is really volatile and bullpens evolve over the course of a year and the needs of your pen evolve over the course of a year. We try to be responsive about the needs of the pen.”
Two of those arms were Huascar Brazoban and Tyler Zuber. Stearns briefly spoke on the former Marlins pitcher and what he can bring to the Mets bullpen.
"[Brazoban] can go multiple innings, he's got a pretty unique pitch mix," he explained. "He can fit a variety of roles in our pen and that can evolve as we get healthy in our pen as well. That fact that he has some roster flexibility as well, is helpful."
With the additions to the pen and Blackburn’s addition to the rotation, Stearns said that Jose Butto will remain in the bullpen at least for now.
But what about the lefties in the pen? With Jake Diekman being DFA'd and other unavailable, Stearns was asked about the lack of southpaws.
"We have three lefty relievers we have confidence in on our major league pen right now," Stearns said. "We have some right-handed pitchers who are capable of getting left-handed hitters out and we have some of those guys coming back hopefully soon."
Playoffs remain the plan
Stearns and the rest of the Mets organization were confident this year's team would compete for a playoff spot since the start of the season. While many pundits wrote them off, the team on the field -- led by Carlos Mendoza -- has played up to the organization's vision and are in the thick of the Wild Card race.
But Stearns came in saying he wanted to build a sustainable winner with a built-up farm system. The Mets did not give away any of their top prospects, which Stearns said wasn't a decree from the team but he was contacted by other clubs about them.
"Every single one of our top prospects was asked about multiple times," Stearns said. "There are challenging decisions across all these conversations. We consider everything very seriously and there's rarely a clear-cut decision on these things. We always have dialogue and debate and ultimately try to make the best decision possible."
However, Stearns clearly believed any deals for his prospects were not worth the price and made incremental improvements to the team while keeping his farm intact. Despite that, he believes this team is good enough to make the postseason and that was his plan all along.
“The plan coming into the season was to compete and make the playoffs. That was the plan and that remains the plan," he said. "Where we are right now, no matter how we got here, we got to a place where we believe we’re a playoff-caliber team. We did what was the right thing to do to add to certain components of the team.”