The Mets Should Just Let Jacob deGrom Walk*
*If he wants to, that is. Ultimately, the choice isn’t even going to be theirs, but deGrom leaving in free agency wouldn’t be the end of the world
But first, this week’s edition of The Pavilion. Also, this was supposed to run yesterday, but I got my covid and flu shots on Thursday night, and that pretty much erased Friday as a concept. So think about which day you would most like to completely check out of, and go get your shots the day before that.
First of all, our own week in review…
Roger Cormier wasn’t just rooting against the Astros, but for the Phillies by the end of October. Ultimately, after the division series, the whole thing was just a Houston coronation, and…
The bummer ending to the baseball season at least had baseball in it. Now, we’re into the darkness, as Michele Catalano wrote, both literally and figuratively.
We also had one podcast this week, Not A Football Podcast 10, with the whole gang — me, Keelin Billue, Britt Huber, and Grace McDermott. Our producer, Vobby Balentine, called it the best ending to a show since the M*A*S*H finale, which… our seven-way parlay already went down in flames on Friday night. Also there, another banger from Roger, identifying the real problem with football analytics.
Elsewhere on our Substack, uh, blogroll? Are we bringing back blogrolls? Maybe. Because Twitter is imploding, and, well… at least it’s funny? Parker Molloy ties it all together nicely.
While everyone is cordially invited to the Willets Pen Discord, let’s be real, the only way I’m getting off Twitter is when they mercifully pull the plug.
Thankfully, Twitter chaos didn’t have an impact on this week’s elections. Craig Calcaterra’s thoughts about Ohio also ring true in a lot of ways for New York, even if my state remains deep blue.
I haven’t watched a ton of basketball yet, but I enjoy that the Knicks are kind of normal. Like, they’re not a contender, not a lottery team, maybe they’ll be around the playoff picture… but they’re just a normal basketball team? And that’s refreshing in its own way. Also, this was great.
Non-subscribers get three free reads on The Nation. Make Elie Mystal’s election wrap-up one of them.
The Republican gains produced this week have their origins in a series of antidemocratic decisions, and until that changes, until Democrats work harder to fight those kinds of decisions, Republicans will come into every election with an unfair advantage.
Solidarity with the HarperCollins union, now on strike.
And since this is going out right at kickoff on college football Saturday, Alex Kirshner over at Slate on the future of the sport, as seen in Baton Rouge. Something I’m curious about is whether college football is changing so fast, we’re currently just in a transitionary era before figuring out what the mid-21st century will be like in the sport.
If I were still in The Industry, today’s newsletter would probably get the headline I gave it, without the asterisk.
The reason for that is, my real opinion doesn’t make for good SEO. Did you read the subhead? With the nuance and the real opinion? That doesn’t get clicks.
Jacob deGrom is a free agent because he wants to test the market. That’s his right and he’s earned it, and if he wants to go to another team and try a new challenge, so is that.
For the Mets, it really ought to be a simple process to keep playing Simple Man every five days: Steve Cohen tells the best pitcher the Mets have had this century that whatever the best offer is, he’ll beat it, and make it clear that it’s a choice of what deGrom truly wants to do.
One thing, though, it needs to be quick. The Mets can’t spend their whole winter waiting on deGrom’s decision. There’s too much to do.
That’s where the spicy take part comes in. It’s not that deGrom is replaceable, because he isn’t. It’s that the Mets, if he does move on, arguably have a better path to a championship with a differently constructed roster.
Throughout the 2010s, and especially after I moved from hockey to baseball at The Sporting News, I argued with my dad about, essentially, how much of the sports we love are about luck versus skill. When we talked about it, we didn’t talk in absolutes, but we also talked for more than 800 words in a conversation. Of course there are both luck and skill in sports, but how much can one impose their will to win a game, and how much is left up to the fates?
That’s where we’d clash, and all the more as it became clearer through time just how little distance there is between greatness and failure, especially in baseball. Not that this is a new concept, but a combination of sabermetrics and expanded playoffs have combined over time to erode the mythos of the World Series as determinant of the best team in baseball.
I’ve always been into numbers, and through the 2000s, when I wrote about stats, I did so with the idea of making the revolution that I was experiencing online, into something palatable for someone who was very much not online.
Where it became contentious, and where I think the best case is for a negative effect of analytics on sports, is when analytics transformed from a study tool to an optimization tool. Where WAR could help show Ben Zobrist’s value, for instance, roster construction started to become algorithmic.
You could argue it was always that way, that teams have always chased stats and now just chase different ones. What my dad got angry with me about was stripping humanity from the picture.
But that’s The Industry, and the stripping of nuance. Just because columns are longer than tweets, doesn’t mean it’s the full picture or argument.
But what if it hadn’t rained after Cleveland tied Game 7 in 2016? What if any of a million little things that weren’t in a team’s control had gone the other way? Yes, of course, there’s randomness in the multiverse, but also of course this is the universe we live in.
More concretely, you go to overtime and next goal wins. Does that really tell us who the best team is, or does a six-month body of work? Does it matter?
The World Series started as a challenge between rival leagues. The Stanley Cup has its own rich history as a challenge trophy and an interleague prize. Of course everyone wants the prize at the end, but once the 1973 Mets beat the Reds in the NLCS, the World Series being the best against the best was over.
That 82-win team took a top five dynasty of all time to seven games. This year, a third-place team from a five-team division took a dynastic kind of team to six. That’s baseball.
And then there’s the Astros, who were and are as responsible for the optimization of baseball and the commoditization of players as anyone. Some of the dumbest commentary about the 2022 Astros is that this title is different because it’s clean.
One, we know as much now about how the 2022 Astros won this title as we did about the 2017 Astros at this point in 2017. And two, it’s not like people outside of Houston are happy about this.
But there is a difference. The 2017 Astros were the culmination of that tech bro weaponization of analytics that became the win-at-all-costs monster we saw, put into human form by the inimitable Brandon Tauchman. The 2022 Astros, certainly in a baseball universe influenced by the 2017 Astros for better and for worse, were just a really fucking good baseball team. I don’t remember ever expecting the Yankees to get swept in a playoff series, and Houston made it look even easier. Really, after the division series, didn’t the rest of October feel like a coronation? We’ll never know what Houston might have done against Atlanta, L.A., or the Mets.
That’s how baseball has evolved, and why division titles should be celebrated — three bad days does not cancel six awesome months. To me, devaluing the regular season, only accepting ultimate success, is the thing that strips baseball’s humanity.
A funny thing to me is that my dad was a Yankees fan, having grown up a Mickey Mantle fan, but I knew him as a Don Mattingly fan, someone whose career, both as a player and manager, has been defined by coming up short of the ring, but who of course can be celebrated as one of the greats.
This summer, my son got into stripping humanity in the classic American way, capitalism. He absolutely fell in love with Monopoly, right alongside his other loves, baseball and Roblox.
I find two of those interesting. The Monopoly book that we’ve read together is one I got when I was a couple years older than he is now. It has Monopoly-themed recipes. It’s a hoot.
As Monopoly has been so present in my life, it’s little wonder that I connected it with baseball, in a way that carries forward all of these thoughts about luck and skill intertwining in the game.
There are Strat-o-Matic games for every sport. It works best for baseball because baseball has the most variables that are like a roll of the dice, including needing a 20-sided one if you’re really serious. The actions of a baseball game are well defined, easily codified to a scoresheet. In other sports, there are physical conflicts and simultaneous reactive motions, more resultant conflict from the offense being the team with the ball.
Like Strat-O-Matic, Monopoly has dice and cards. The way that I’ve started thinking about baseball roster construction is like each team is building its own board. What emerges isn’t the idea of a real game of Monopoly, because it tortures the analogy to think of building a hotel on Jacob deGrom, but a roster map in the way that the Monopoly board is a sort of map of Atlantic City.
For the 2022 Mets, it’s easy to think of deGrom and Max Scherzer as Boardwalk and Park Place. For the Yankees, it’s a little more complex, as Aaron Judge certainly is Boardwalk, but you can think of Park Place as either Gerrit Cole or Giancarlo Stanton.
What a fun choice, whether to include Clarke Schmidt or Isiah Kiner-Falefa. But you can see where the Yankees struggled in that important middle of the board. (The greens, due to their infrequency of being landed on, but potential for big impact, seem like a good spot to group midseason additions or kids. There’s been a lot of thought to get to this, and maybe a wider discussion will be fun another time.)
Here’s how I mentally assembled the 2022 “Metsopoly board.”
The thing is, though, that’s not what the 101-win Mets’ board really looked like, is it? For most of the summer, there was no deGrom. And there’s a question to be asked about how it plays to have your “Boardwalk” player be a starting pitcher with health concerns. As a Mets fan, the best way to answer those questions is to sign deGrom to whatever contract he wants and worry about the rest when you’re atop a double-decker bus riding up Broadway.
But the point is that the Mets know they can build a contending team without deGrom as their omega. What does the Monopoly board look like now, after deGrom’s opt-out and other players reaching free agency?
The Mets… had a lot of free agents. But you can see where they build a version of the team that’s more about building toward and around the young, talented, everyday players they have, whether that’s the double play combo of McNeil and Lindor or the thumper combo of Lindor and Alonso… or maybe another thumper to pair with Alonso.
The point is, the Mets might want to build a statue for deGrom eventually, but their 2023 team might be better if they build it with the idea of de-emphasizing starting pitching as their biggest strength. That’s where you can whip yourself up into a galaxy-brained “maybe the Mets shouldn’t re-sign deGrom” take, and where my dad would rightfully be furious. Now, more than October, is when the real battle of data against humanity happens. How the Mets pursue, or don’t pursue, their franchise player has an impact on the fanbase, and the organization, that cannot be captrued by the numbers. The Mets absolutely must go all-out to keep deGrom, a homegrown Hall of Fame candidate. It’s still his choice whether to stay.
Whether or not it’s a good idea for the Mets to move on, in a strict baseball sense, doesn’t matter. Each event in baseball might be independent, like shooting craps or who gets the “Advance to Boardwalk” Chance card, but the humanity still matters.
The Mets won 101 games this year. Had deGrom beaten Atlanta at the end of September instead of the Dodgers at the end of August, everything is different. And if deGrom leaves for any reason other than he wants to be someplace else, it’s a blow to the organization’s attempts to crawl out from under the wreckage of the Wilpon era. It’s why Buck Showalter in the dugout matters, and why the Yankees are doomed before a pitch is even thrown in 2023, committing themselves to the same mistakes and same failures as Brian Cashman and Aaron Boone continue trying the same thing over and over again without an ounce of self-examination.
The Mets will try some version of their own same thing next year, with or without deGrom. It sure seems like Nimmo is ready to move on, and that necessitates some lineup reconstruction. How similar next year’s Mets are to this year’s depends on deGrom’s decision.
The idea of 2023 as the start of a post-deGrom era is not to suggest forsaking the rotation. It’s about setting up a team that has the depth to make it to October and to thrive there, not just get to the end and have its weakness exposed. The Mets’ brief series against the Padres did show how quickly that strength can become a weakness.
Everyone involved would love for deGrom to stay here and win a bunch of titles, retire 48 one day, and build a statue next to Tom Seaver’s. The question for the next few weeks ought to be whether deGrom would rather chase that dream or another one. Then the Mets can chase theirs, with or without him.
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