ANALYSIS: Mets acquire Javier Báez and depth starter

How did the Mets fare in Friday's deadline deal?

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As you know by now, in the final hour the Mets finally got busy and acquired shortstop (and soon-to-be second baseman) Javier Báez, along with right-hander Trevor Williams from the Chicago Cubs in exchange for 2020 first round pick Pete Crow-Armstrong.

Then, shortly after the deadline, the Mets announced Jacob deGrom suffered a setback and will be out until September due to additional inflammation in his right forearm. Acting general manager Zack Scott said the team received his MRI results (which continue to show no structural damage) a few hours before 4:00 PM, but said the news didn’t change their approach at the deadline, noting, “You can’t replace Jacob deGrom.”

We will discuss how the Mets should have handled the deadline, given the deGrom news. But first, let’s break down the trade they did make.

Why did the Mets do this deal?

Steve Cohen owns the Mets. There was no way he was going to let his first trade deadline come and go without making a splash. The Mets did that on Friday by acquiring a power-hitting, Gold Glove infielder, in his prime, who was the first player in major-league history to start the All-Star Game at second base and shortstop in consecutive seasons, and who helped the Cubs end their championship curse by winning the 2016 NLCS MVP Award.

The Mets couldn’t afford to let 4:00 PM ET pass on Friday without adding at least some starting pitching depth. We will talk in a bit about how they should have added more. But focusing on who they got from the Cubs, Trevor Williams gives them a classic innings-eater, while an unspectacular one. He comes to New York with a 5.06 ERA, but has looked decent in his last few starts, and while his velocity has dropped on his fastball recently (always concerning), he doesn’t appear to be someone who has been impacted by the crackdown on sticky stuff (i.e., his spin rate has been constant). Unlike Báez, who is set to become a free agent this winter, Williams is under team control through 2022. The Mets reportedly had a choice between taking Williams or Zach Davies, but chose Williams because he has three options remaining, which they immediately used to send him down to AAA-Syracuse.

Of course, Francisco Lindor’s shadow looms large over this trade, and for a couple of reasons. First, who knows when he will be healthy enough to return to the lineup? So adding Báez gives the Mets a right-handed hitter who can handle southpaws and play shortstop on an everyday basis. Second, after shelling out $341 million to lock up Lindor long-term, this trade feels a bit like a vitamin boost for a player who hasn’t looked completely comfortable playing in New York. Báez and Lindor are close friends, and perhaps putting them together in the same clubhouse will spark something magical.

What did the Mets give up?

If you’ve been tracking all of the trades across the league, the price for acquiring even a rental player has been quite expensive. The Mets lose their fifth best prospect in Pete Crow-Armstrong, their #1 draft pick from 2020, who is out for the season after undergoing surgery on his right shoulder (non-throwing) to repair a GLAD (glenolabral articular disruption) lesion.

At 19 years of age, the highly touted Crow-Armstrong is still several years from making an impact on the major-league level. FanGraphs grades him as a 45-FV prospect, with medium risk. Prospects of this pedigree have averaged 0.7 WAR in their first nine seasons, based on 76 prospects with a similar grade between 1996 and 2010. The bust rate, or the odds of a player like Crow-Armstrong producing less than one win above replacement level is much higher than people realize. As a defense-first center fielder with speed, he doesn’t need to hit a ton to provide value. It’s very possible he will become a productive player when he reaches the bigs. But if his bat doesn’t translate (a high risk), his ceiling is limited. Still, the much-celebrated Mets farm gurus clearly saw big things for the speedy, elite defender, spending their first pick on him a year ago.

Since the Cubs reportedly included enough cash to pay most of the remaining salaries for Báez and Williams, the surplus value they provide comes at a low dollar cost. It also signals the Mets were intent on staying under the luxury tax threshold (we can talk about that on another day).

Do we like this move?

It’s hard enough to predict what a player will do over an entire season, let alone a few weeks. If we believe that Lindor will be back in mid-to-late August, Báez will gain a short period of time handling the everyday shortstop duties, replacing Jonathan Villar. Since Villar took over for Lindor in late July, he has more than held his own, slashing .289/.357/.421 in 12 games. While Villar doesn’t carry the powerful stick that Báez does, over the past two seasons, the two players have almost identical production numbers (86 wRC+ versus 87 wRC+). In other words, it’s not impossible to believe Villar would produce as much, if not more, offense than Báez does over the next few weeks.

Once Lindor returns, the lineup decisions become more complicated. As we mentioned, Báez has been an All-Star second baseman, so he can easily slide over to the right side of the infield, creating a dynamic double play combination with Lindor. Obviously, that would push Jeff McNeil to a new position, likely third base, where he has struggled throwing the ball. Villar would find himself on the bench. And Luis Guillorme’s and JD Davis’s innings could well be reduced as well. Another option might be to move McNeil to the outfield, but that might be risky given his leg fatigue issues.

This means the marginal improvement for the Mets once Lindor gets healthy comes down to whether they are better with McNeil and J.D. Davis/Villar in the lineup, versus with Báez and McNeil/Davis platooning at third. FanGraphs had projected McNeil to produce 1.1 wins for the rest of the season had he remained at second, which goes down a bit by splitting his time between second and third. Meanwhile, Báez is projected to produce 1.2 wins for the Mets.

J.D. Davis becomes the wild card. He is hitting .220 since returning from injury, and he has been dreadful against left-handed pitching, with only four hits in 26 plate appearances. FanGraphs had Davis projected at 0.7 WAR as a full-time third baseman before the trade. If he had met those projections, McNeil (1.1) + Davis (0.7) would only produce slightly below the value you get from Báez (1.2) and a McNeil/Davis combination (0.9). Considering Báez is batting .324/.355/.535 in the month of July, with four home runs, it’s logical to believe he is better positioned to meet his projection than Davis. So perhaps that gap widens to half of a win.

Defense remains a difficult thing to translate into numbers, and Baez’s defensive numbers are down across the board this season. But good ol’ fashioned common sense tells us an infield anchored by Lindor and Báez is a hell of a lot better than surrounding Lindor with McNeil and Davis (last night’s incredible play by McNeil notwithstanding). There’s added value there.

If Trevor Williams gives them another half of a win (projected at 0.4 WAR) — and he is basically replacing minor league spot starters, so there’s added value there— the Mets might have added over a win (plus whatever Williams produces beyond this season) at the cost of a prospect who might not reach that value for several years. We should mention the Mets’ bench also gets deeper with Báez in the fold.

Conversely, Báez has struggled since the beginning of last season. For every home run he hits, he strikes out seven times. He has an on-base percentage under .300, which is right around where his career number sits. If he struggles to adjust to life in Queens, and Williams’ downward velo trend continues, it’s possible the Mets don’t end up adding much value at all from this trade, relative to what they already had. The margins will be dictated by what Báez does with the bat in his hands.

In the end, the Mets gain a right-handed bat who can electrify on both offense and defense, while possibly giving Lindor the added energy he needs to save his season. They also add a small amount of depth in the rotation to avoid nights like last week when Jerad Eickhoff served up ten runs against Atlanta. While Williams’ 5+ ERA is scary looking, in six of his 12 starts this season, he has pitched at least five innings while allowing two runs or less. Nobody wants to give up top prospects; the question will be whether the price of Crow-Armstrong is worth a two-month rental of Báez (who is all but assured of departing for free agency). We’ll find out this fall, and in the years to come.

Did the Mets do enough?

In a vacuum, the Mets obviously got better in the near-term by acquiring Báez and Williams at the cost of the future promise of Pete Crow-Armstrong (which has no value this season, but is unknowable in the future). After learning the deGrom news, though, it’s hard to understand how the Mets stopped there, and why they let the opportunity to solidify their pitching staff pass without adding an arm more capable than Rich Hill or Trevor Williams.

The Mets’ front office clearly knew pitching was a problem, even before the deGrom news, with Zack Scott repeatedly saying that upgrading it was his top priority. Rich Hill was a nice pickup, and Trevor Williams seems like a marginal one. But let’s be honest, the Mets did very little to improve their biggest need, at a time when the Braves bolstered their offense and bullpen.

Instead, they seemed to meet two undesirable outcomes: surrender a top prospect in the system, in Crow-Armstrong, while failing to address their core deficiency. A week after back-to-back games without an announced starting pitcher, you’d expect the organization to make stockpiling arms their main priority. After learning the deGrom news, it should have been a maniacal focus.

So far, many Mets fans to seem be giving a pass to the front office on its failure to add significant pitching help. This may be the result of years and years of depressed expectations amid organizational malaise. By contrast, if the Yankees had this many key divisional games without starting pitchers, and Gerrit Cole suffered a setback, it’s hard to imagine Brian Cashman wouldn’t beef up on arms. If he somehow failed to do so, it’s even harder to imagine Yankees fans and reporters just throw their hands up and shrug, “Well, he tried his best!”

Yes, Mets brass has suggested “there was no one available” or “the price was too high.” And that’s clearly what they experienced. But their job is also to be creative, smart and aggressive… to figure out a way. They have the richest owner now, so money is no longer an issue. The Dodgers and Yankees always seem to get it done. Now the Mets should be able.

If the price for starting pitchers was too hefty, there were also several strong relievers available, from Craig Kimbrel to Richard Rodriguez. Creating a “super pen” would be a creative way to overcome the depleted rotational depth, by essentially making each start shorter (think the 2015 Royals). Or to put it differently, a case for getting bullpen help in this market, rather than a guy like Baez, is: The marginal upgrade from JD Davis to Javier Baez is not as big as the upgrade from Anthony Banda to Craig Kimbrel.

In its defense, this front office was not left a lot of prospect depth from its predecessors. While the Dodgers and Padres can seemingly trade dozens of top prospects to get the stars of their dreams, the Mets essentially have 6-8 blue-chip prospects, and then a sea of lower-level minor leaguers that other clubs do not want. This undoubtedly made things much harder. But still, if you’re going to go for it this season, then you have to really go for it and upgrade your biggest flaw. In this case, it seems like the pitching market passed the Mets by, and they then struck on Baez to make a splash, warts and all.

Over the last few months, Zack Scott has come across as articulate, thoughtful and likable. But the fact remains, it is hard to look at this deadline haul — especially with the Braves going for it — and say the organization did what it had to when it comes to pitching.

The good news is that this debate will yield an answer in a few months. In expressing disappointment with the front office’s performance this week, we would love nothing more than to be proven wrong.