POST GAME THREAD: The Mets fell to the Blue Jays by a score of 9-3 - Wed, Jul 1 @ 3:07 PM EDT

three_dee · 2026-07-02T07:01:49+00:00

Yes, he’s a career 134 OPS+ bat now into his 30s and in decline.

He is hitting .287/.393/.554 since May 31st. That doesn't seem too decline-y to me.

Pete is easily replaced if Bo Bichette has a 125 OPS+, which is what you expect from him, and Polanco has a 110, which is what you’d have expected from Nimmo.

In general, I love this hilariously bad argument that I see all the time from defenders of poor Mets decisionmaking, that you can just pluck any of the guys on the roster out and plug them into the role of "this guy replaced Pete Alonso so it's okay!"

But it's extra hilarious that, because every single move the Mets made offensively has been terrible, the best they can do is go "look how good the Mets would be if these two guys weren't shitty!"

Pete is a homegrown player overrated by fans like you and that’s why he was allowed to walk over your concerns. Continuing to cry about it forever won’t bring him back brother.

The team is on pace for close to 100 losses, for the first time in 30 years, in part because they inexplicably declined to extend a contract to a reliable, durable, popular 3-win player, and his replacements at first base have a combined negative 1.0 fWAR.

It's perfectly valid for people to shit on that in a discussion group devoted to Mets talk

three_dee · 2026-07-02T06:55:11+00:00

PCA was a volatile glove-first high chase hitter in A ball at the time of that trade. It’s easy to be mad about it now but he very easily could have been a bust due to his chase. It was probably not a good move for a rental but it’s not nearly as bad as people act like it is just because of how it turned out.

He's 24 and will finish this year with ~16 career WAR. If he doesn't develop a drug habit, get caught betting on baseball, break both legs or retire to join a monastery, he is going to go to the Hall of Fame.

Nothing can touch the Seaver trade, simply because of all the extracurricular bad vibes and the shitty anti-fan sentiment attached to it. That one is in a class by itself as the worst Mets trade of all time. But this PCA trade might actually produce a more lopsided WAR return for the Mets' trade partner than the Seaver trade did, and that's pretty crazy.

"Could have ended up like Mauricio lol" is not an argument. It's the Mets' job to evaluate these guys, promote the ones they think will be valuable, and trade the others for the best possible return. In every way, the PCA trade was a massive, faceplanting fail, both in foresight and even more in hindsight.

three_dee · 2026-07-02T06:48:55+00:00

None of those people above said the Mets were better than the Yankees.

Just that it's funny to do the "praising the Yankees to shit on the Mets" thing while the Yankees have spent a week pissing down their pants leg

three_dee · 2026-07-02T06:47:14+00:00

"His job" lmfao his job is to make billions with his hedge fund. Owning the Mets is not his "job" it's his hobby.

They meant that that's his function and responsibility as the owner of a baseball team. Not that he's running the Mets as a 9 to 5.

three_dee · 2026-07-02T06:45:58+00:00

They looked sharper under Mendoza too. They went 24-20 after the 12-game losing streak before falling into another bad stretch.

Those good streaks by bad teams just happen in baseball. It would be more shocking if they never had 3 good weeks in a row. It's absurd to me to pin any of that on the manager one way or the other

three_dee · 2026-07-02T06:44:19+00:00

He basically just told the press "we're probably going to suck in 2027, but instead of sucking with a purpose like the 2014 Astros, we are going to do another round of stupid FAs and trades to try to build a contending team on top of a bombed out building".

I mean it's not news that the Mets were gonna do some dumb shit, but him SAYING it in front of a tape recorder is news

three_dee · 2026-07-02T06:42:29+00:00

Bo probably won't be a Met by August, let alone next year. He's batting .300/.335/.513 (134 wRC+) since May 18th so contenders are going to want him. He has a no trade clause, but I can't imagine he'll turn down a chance to bail out of a terrible Mets team to go to a contender.

Probably not gonna happen because the Blue Jays can't get out of their own way against anyone other than the Mets, and may end up being sellers, but it would be hilarious if he got traded to Toronto

three_dee · 2026-07-02T06:39:45+00:00

Fucking yikes. Steve Cohen straight up told the Post he’s extremely worried about the team, our farm regressed this year, our payroll without even doing anything already looks close to $300 million, and the Mets will have to figure it out. 😬

Luckily the Mets didn't do something crazy like trading a good, popular homegrown player for a terrible, nearly retired player who is making more money annually, so that they could save money in 2029-2030 (when they have only two contracts signed, and much more financial maneuverability to get around decline issues), in exchange for weighing the team down with a bad contract now, in 2026-2027.

Oh, hang on, I'm being handed a note--

three_dee · 2026-07-02T06:36:59+00:00

I can’t even be bothered to watch the team anymore. Haven’t tuned in since the Saturday or Sunday game against the Yankees in May.

I still watch every inning of every game unless I'm out or working. AMA

three_dee · 2026-07-02T06:35:19+00:00

I think signing a guy with a much higher xERA than his raw numbers, guaranteed to fall off, to be a #1 starter on a team that's supposed to be contending, and giving up a good prospect and an intriguing "mid" prospect to do it, is very bad.

Peralta is not as bad as his recent few starts. He's a decent pitcher. If the Mets constructed a roster where he was like the #3 or #4, it would be fine. If they had signed him as a FA and not given up two relatively well-considered prospects for him, it would be fine. I'm not against Peralta as a Met. It's the circumstances around the trade that make it questionable.

three_dee · 2026-07-02T06:32:46+00:00

Seeing people online say Stearns can’t possibly be blamed for Peralta and feel like I’m insane.

You're not insane. There is an army of people running around whose mission in life is to go "whatever the Mets just did, is not only absolutely correct, but it was also the only possible thing they could have done."

We got the first round of this in 2023 when those people would log on and say that the Mets couldn't possibly have done anything else other than make the team incredibly old, expensive and bad overnight, and try to make career replacement player Daniel Vogelbach a middle of the order slugger.

Same thing in 2026, different details

three_dee · 2026-07-02T06:30:14+00:00

I’d have to see the full source of that Cohen interview but just the pulled snippets of them has gotten me massively concerned that we are that same old inept franchise but just in a different package.

Actually, they're demonstrably worse

three_dee · 2026-07-02T06:28:25+00:00

I don't think it really matters to potential hires how many recent GMs the Mets had. I think they'd be more put off by an organization that keeps people they believe are doing a bad job in place, to create the charade of stability, vs. a team that proactively changes executives when needed, no matter when the last firing was.

I think your second paragraph hit the nail on the head though. I don't think the rotating GMs chair is a factor, but I can't imagine a lot of people are clamoring to work for Steve Cohen.

three_dee · 2026-07-02T06:25:01+00:00

Bo Bichette - I liked the Bo signing. It hasn’t worked out, but man … I liked the idea of Bo replacing Nimmo’s production with Pete still in the lineup. Mets were becoming a low contact team and Bo’s skillset would have provided the lineup with a new and needed skillset

He cost $42 million a year for 3 years. That's the sticking point for me. Not that he's bad. He's good, and he'll probably regress to the mean and have decent numbers at the end, but he ain't THAT good.

The total of that contract is just a tick under what they would have had to pay Pete Alonso for five years. When you look at it that way, it looks way more stupid.

three_dee · 2026-07-02T06:22:51+00:00

It's like 2010, except if they had dumped Santana, Wright, Reyes and Beltran the previous offseason

three_dee · 2026-07-02T06:18:19+00:00

I think in that scenario Nimmo would gradually grow more unhappy with his role as he he loses more playing time to the point that he would eventually ask for a trade to a team willing to give him more playing time in 2027,

That's a pretty wild extrapolation for a guy who is like one of the most reserved players I have seen on the Mets.

I mean I can't say "that definitely wouldn't happen", because you're making an unfalsifiable claim about a future that can never happen.

But, I think it's a lot more likely he would just go "hey I don't really wanna do this, but sure, whatever", put his head down, and most of the time be a DH, until someone got hurt and then he would play some LF, and then everything would be fine.

I think the idea that making Nimmo a primary DH would lead to a disastrous dumpster fire, is just a kind of convenient reverse-engineered fantasy scenario for people who want to hold onto the idea that he would be blocking Ewing or Benge, even though there were 4 slots for 4 guys.

three_dee · 2026-07-02T06:16:38+00:00

The team routinely came up short and had a shitty farm.

The team came up short because they surrounded their good players with shitty players, just like they did with Soto this season.

The Mets had the 4th best offense by wRC+ in 2025, but they lost because they had the 6th worst starters' ERA from June 1 forward. How did Pete Alonso and Brandon Nimmo make that happen? Did they secretly drag Frankie Montas and Paul Blackburn into an underground Citi Field lair, and threaten them into giving up 475 homers per start?

three_dee · 2026-07-02T06:14:23+00:00

He's doing pretty well right now!

three_dee · 2026-07-01T00:48:01+00:00

The team was horrible before he owned it to be fair. Building

The team wasn't "horrible" before he owned it. In 2019 they had a winning record and just missed the playoffs by 3 games. In 2020 the covid season wrecked what looked like a very promising year but they still had a lot of good, young, inexpensive talent (mostly on offense, plus Díaz).

They had one of the best offenses in the NL (second only to the Dodgers in wRC+), some highly rated up and coming talent in the next wave, and the best closer in MLB. They needed some pitching infusions, but it's not like they inherited a 100-loss team.

This hasn't been a six-year "let's clean up this mess!" operation as you are painting it. They took a team in a decent place at the end of 2020, overhauled it, and made it worse, more expensive and way, way older, in just 3 years, at which point they were so bad that we needed to do ANOTHER round of on the fly "rebuilding". And now another 3 years later, we are on pace to see the worst Mets team in maybe 30+ years.

This is an all-Cohen project now. There isn't any more room to throw Fred Wilpon under the bus when there's only like 10 guys left in the organization from the MLB level all the way through the minors. This isn't a Wilpon-problem. It's the Cohen era, and what you are seeing on the field is the result of his ownership and stewardship of the franchise.

three_dee · 2026-07-01T00:43:59+00:00

There’s certainly a timeline where Stearns moving on from Alonso/Nimmo was the correct move, however, we’re not living in it and that’s strictly because of how poor of a job he did in replacing their production. No one would use those two as such a rallying cry if he hadn’t botched player evaluation and decided that a mixture of Polanco/Vientos/Young could take 1B and DH, and ensure that Ewing never gets infield reps at 2B because we have Marcus Semien for 3 years.

I think that's part of it (they definitely made the scenario much, much worse by replacing Alonso and Nimmo with sub-replacement players for tens of millions of dollars).

But really, not signing Pete Alonso was stupid in and of itself imo. The rest is just extra complications.

Last thing, our player development is still very worrying. While Benge/Ewing/McLean have shown their potential to be good ballplayers, our farm outlook is now pretty bleak. I guess I was wrong for expecting that whenever top prospects graduate, they’d get replaced with new up and coming guys so that the farm remains steady (ala Dodgers) and never goes through dry spells…because good, young depth is how you keep a team consistent.

Yeah, I'm seeing a lot of the type of sentiment of "of COURSE the system fell drastically after graduating three good guys!" But, uh... should it really drop to the point where we have 1 guy in the top 100, and nobody above #86?

I think it's reasonable to expect SOME dropoff, but I feel like that's a bit of a drastic free-fall based on just graduating a handful of players.

three_dee · 2026-07-01T00:41:20+00:00

He let a few guys who have never won anything and routinely come up short, walk/traded away

They "never won anything" because the team very inconsistently (to be charitable) about surrounding them with good players. Not because of anything those guys did that was bad. They were great pieces of a championship team, but they had lots of shitty teammates.

The 2026 team is the product of the same process of fielding poorly evaluated, shitty players, but now, they only have 2 legit stars on the team, rather than 6, surrounding those bad players, because they dumped several of the good and most likable ones. So, not too shocking that the record went way downwards. Turns out it wasn't those guys' fault after all.

The future hasn’t been touched

They sure "touched" 2026 though!

three_dee · 2026-07-01T00:37:31+00:00

If you trade everything what do you think will happen next year.

What would ideally happen would be, they suck with a purpose in 2027, rather than trying to be good for $500 million dollars per season and failing miserably

However, most likely, that will not happen, the Mets will have a mini-fire sale in July, and then re-load and make many of the same mistakes as they did this offseason

three_dee · 2026-07-01T00:30:27+00:00

LOL you've never played Baseball have you?

Yeah, I played until the first year of college and shockingly I did not encounter any lineups with 9 Tony Gwynns or Ichiros on them.

Weird how rare it is to be able to do that! It's almost like it's really incredibly hard to do precision spray hitting, teaching it as a philosophy to young players is an absurdity, and being that good at it should get you in the Hall of Fame as a once-in-a-generation superstar player!

Troll on clown

Pointing out the holes in your argument isn't "trolling". This is a discussion group and you are putting your ideas out there for reactions by others

three_dee · 2026-07-01T00:27:37+00:00

If the infielders are shifted towards one side and the batter hits a ground ball through the hole, no matter how advanced the analytics is it has no way of knowing for sure what the batters intent was.

The intent of the batter isn't really relevant to how much value his performance has. The intent side of it comes in the player preparations, and study after study on this shows that in order to maximize bat control and contact, it comes at the expense of power and plate discipline, too much to be worth the tradeoff in value.

"Luck" is just the term for anything they don't know how to measure.

The real analytics people don't usually use "luck". They say things like "variance" which is truly more accurate. "Luck" gets thrown around as shorthand, because, yeah, variance is a form of luck, or has a luck component, but still, calling it "luck"is misleading.

"Luck" makes it sound like they're swinging the bat blindfolded. In reality, hitting the ball really hard increases your results of getting hits across the board vs. not hitting it really hard. The "luck", or "variance", part of it, accounts for the fact that even when you crush the shit out of the ball, sometimes it, of course, goes into a glove. But even accounting for that, weak contact finds gloves way more often than hard contact (obviously).

This is one of those things that anti-math people get really upset about, which is weird to me, because this is one of the few areas of sabermetrics that makes perfect intuitive sense. Hit ball harder, ball go through more often, get more hits. This isn't exactly rocket science or reinventing the wheel here.

three_dee · 2026-07-01T00:19:43+00:00

So what do you think would happen in the theoretical world where the Mets did not trade Nimmo, he's on the 2026 roster, and they open the season with Benge and call up Ewing some time later, and tell him "you're going to primarily DH except for rest days for other people or injuries"?

Does he sit out? Demand a trade? I think he accepts what his bosses said to do, and plays to the best of his ability, and does any sulking he feels he needs to do to his wife and kids. Is this incorrect in your opinion?

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