An invisible two-year reign

How the new Steve Cohen/Sandy Alderson regime repudiated Brodie Van Wagenen’s entire tenure

An invisible two-year reign

🧓 by Blake Zeff

Much has been made of this busy Mets’ offseason — from new ownership, to multiple new GMs, and a largely remade team. But now that the dust has settled and the offseason is effectively over, a glaring storyline has come into focus: just how dramatically the new Steve Cohen/Sandy Alderson regime has repudiated Brodie Van Wagenen’s entire tenure. From player personnel to front office staff and even some draft picks, the Brodie era has been dismantled so systematically and comprehensively in just four months, that his two-year reign will have strikingly little impact on the club this year or in the near future (unless you count what he sent away).  

That’s a pretty remarkable statement to make about a management team that presided over the most recent official game the Mets have played. And yet, look at the 2021 front office, Major League roster, and farm system. With the exception of a few employees (including most significantly, the manager), 2 or 3 big leaguers (more on them in a bit) and a few recent draft picks (like Matthew Allan, JT Ginn and Pete Crow-Armstrong, whom many are high on, but are years away), Van Wagenen’s fingerprint is all but missing from the current version of this franchise… before a single game has been played since his departure. 

Within hours of taking over the franchise, Cohen and Alderson relieved the top levels of the front office (Brodie, VP Allard Baird, special assistant Omar Minaya and farm director Jared Banner) of their duties. As a result, no senior official brought in by Brodie remains in the upper echelons of the inner circle. (A rare staffer promoted by Van Wagenen who was retained by the new regime? Director of Pro Scouting Bryn Alderson — yep, Sandy’s son.)

But the Brodie erasure goes much deeper than the c-suite. Look at the Major League roster. 18 members of the current 40-man are gone from last year. From a new starting catcher and shortstop, to a completely remade starting rotation and bench, these are two different teams. And most of the 22 players that do remain from 2020 were holdovers from the original Sandy Alderson tenure. In fact, the only remaining big-league Mets acquired by Van Wagenen are J.D. Davis, Dellin Betances, Miguel Castro, Jeurys Familia, Edwin Diaz and Marcus Stroman (extending Jacob deGrom was wise but doesn’t count as a BVW acquisition in our book). 

And each of those remaining Brodie guys comes with a story. 

Let’s start with the only everyday player, Davis. While he was heralded as the one big find Van Wagenen acquired, the new regime has made no secret of its ambivalence towards the defensively challenged third baseman, declining to commit to him as the starter, and making him the one case they opted to battle in arbitration (over a difference of $300,000). It looks like JD will get the chance to be the everyday third baseman, but it follows reports of trade talks with the Cubs about Kris Bryant, the acquisition of Jonathan Villar, and plenty of reps at third this spring for Jeff McNeil and Luis Guillorme. In other words, if the Sandy front office could have replaced Davis at third, it sure looks like they would have. 

Betances and Familia are both relievers past their prime, whom the club had no choice but to keep around this year, given that they’re under contract. Betances is on a relatively cheap player option after last year’s struggles, so it remains to be seen how long he’ll stay. Tougher to part ways with will be Familia, whom Van Wagenen gave a $30 million deal after his closing days were behind him. But put it this way: neither will be counted on to be the kind of stopper they once were, and if the front office could have moved them, it would have.  

Which brings us to Diaz. There’s a time and a place to spill ink (and tea) on the notorious deal that also brought Robinson Cano to Queens. Let’s save it for another day. For the purposes of this particular column, let’s just say that Diaz is expected to close and is therefore the main exception to our thesis. He could have a serious impact on the season — for better or worse. What it cost to acquire him was mind-boggling the day it occurred, and always will be. But it’s a fact: Diaz is the one key part of the Van Wagenen portfolio still standing in Flushing.                       

As for Stroman, he was re-signed on a qualifying offer that the new regime didn’t itself offer, though it’s fair to assume it would have. And Castro has a chance to be a useful arm in the pen. As I said, we won’t get into Cano here, other than to say, if they could have gotten anyone on earth to take his contract, they would have. (Side note: Could Cano have been part of a package shipped to Colorado with Davis to get Nolan Arenado? I know it sounds crazy, but the Rockies paid St. Louis $50 million to take the star third baseman’s contract, which suggests they might have taken Cano as the salary relief portion of a deal with the Mets. Oh well...)  

In the end, Stroman, Diaz and Davis are the only impact players acquired by Brodie who remain on Alderson’s reboot -- and it’s not clear that any of them are in the new regime’s long-term plans. Plus, while they’re all here now, they came at a steep cost, particularly to Alderson: each was traded for multiple prospects he had once signed.     

In remaking the team this year, Alderson’s signature move, of course, was the deal for stars Francisco Lindor and Carlos Carrasco. To get them, Sandy drew a line in the sand and refused to surrender prospects like catcher Francisco Alvarez (whom he had signed in 2018) or infielder Ronny Mauricio (whom he’d signed in 2017).  

Which blue-chip prospects did he happily give up instead? Josh Wolf and Isaiah Greene. High-level draft picks of one Brodie Van Wagenen.