Stockpiling Talent
Morning Dose: Wednesday, August 5
☀️ Good Morning:
NOTE: I am on my family vacation this week, which we scheduled well before MLB decided to put the deadline in August instead of the last day of July. Therefore, I will have to give you my fuller thoughts on the deadline and how it impacts the path forward under David Stearns next week.
Today will be the last issue until Monday, unless something crazy happens.
I’m going to start my post-trade-deadline analysis from a slightly different angle than you might expect.
By trading eight major-leaguers for 13 prospects, David Stearns didn’t only try to make the best of expiring or near-expiring contracts to update your favorite site’s prospect rankings, he pushed a bunch of incumbent prospects down the pecking order, effectively proving the shallowness of the system.
It’s one thing to trade for a bunch of Top-100 prospects (by the end of the day on Monday, Stearns finally made fans happy by acquiring one).
It’s another to shop in the bargain aisle for mid-to-low-level assets that were still, in many cases, better than the what you already had on the snack shelf.
The Mets’ farm system is deeper today than it was on Sunday.
We know that much.
What that means for how each player is slotted, developed and made use of is yet to be determined.
