All is fleeting, grasshopper. Even baseball teams. Especially baseball teams.
Mets come, Mets go. The franchise is an ever-shifting assemblage of overlapping stints in orange and blue, some lasting years, some concluded in minutes. For a fun game, construct a chain of overlapping Met teammates back to 1962 with as few links as possible; what I find compelling about that exercise is that you’re plucking a very few keepers from more than 1,200 discards.
So it is right now in miniature: On Tuesday the Mets traded for A’s starter Paul Blackburn, Rays reliever Tyler Zuber and Marlins reliever Huascar Brazoban, who will join recent imports Jesse Winker, Ryne Stanek and Phil Maton.
Blackburn is here as an alternative to the shufflearama necessitated by the injuries to Christian Scott and Kodai Senga, though one senses Jose Butto may not be done with SP assignments. But next to the bullpen, the starting corps looks like the very definition of stability. The bullpen has now been rebuilt on the fly since Opening Day: Of the relievers on the roster then, Edwin Diaz is still standing and Adam Ottavino‘s responsibilities have been downgraded significantly. They’re it — Drew Smith, Jorge Lopez, Michael Tonkin, Jake Diekman, Yohan Ramirez, Brooks Raley, and starter-demoted-to-longman Adrian Houser are all gone.
How do you grade the last day of the overhaul? I’ve never liked that game, to be honest — it calls for an answer like Zhou Enlai musing on the influence of the French Revolution, as the players imported will launch their own chains of transactions and transformations to weigh and argue about. Ask me in a year, or three, or 10. For the moment, I’ll note that Blackburn adds some much-needed flexibility, I’m impressed by the combination of Brazoban’s recent track record and remaining years of control, and Zuber is at least an intriguing project. More significantly, David Stearns didn’t give up a single prospect whose subtraction made me wince.
For now, the about-to-be-further-transformed Mets had business to take care of against the Twins, last seen getting outpointed by a baker’s dozen worth of runs. Tuesday night’s game was rather different: crisp, mostly clean and very fast. Minnesota’s David Festa allowed an RBI single to J.D. Martinez and a homer to Mark Vientos (witnessed by Festa’s parents in a memorable SNY shot) but nothing else; Festa’s only real mistake was drawing Sean Manaea on a night he had everything working.
Manaea was the best he’s been as a Met, striking out 11 and allowing just one runner past first in seven innings, plus showing off some amusingly elaborate personalized handshakes. (Even more amusing: whatever it is Pete Alonso and Winker are doing to entertain themselves here.) Stanek was victimized by an Alonso error to start his second go-round as a Met but emerged unscathed with a little help from Diaz, who recorded a four-out save despite throwing, by my count, 72 sliders that screamed HIT MEEEEEE while sitting in the middle of the plate. The Twins didn’t hit them; whatever works I suppose.
And so we arrive at the last day of July and the assembly of the roster that will push through August and September with hopes of playing beyond those months. A bit of hoary old baseball wisdom is you spend the first two months seeing what you have, the next two getting what you need, and the last two going for it. Well, here’s to going for it.
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