The state of the Mets future is a grim picture as they hobble away from a season of so many disappointments this year. We have seen them bring up a line of prospects to the big club the past two months and quite frankly, I only see a few future big leaguers. Amed Rosario and Dominic Smith are legit, but I just don’t see anything other than everyday middle of the road, up today back to Vegas tomorrow prospects right now. Talking to a well respected major league scout, I was told that the Mets have a very weak and shallow farm system. You say so what? Well today more than ever in baseball, a major league team needs a strong forty-man roster. The way players are breaking down left and right, the need for a call-up to play like a big leaguer and not like a prospect, is a necessity.
Look at the Dodgers, Yankees and Astros this year. All three had players go down from the opening bell and throughout the season. The Dodgers lead the majors in players on the DL and were still able to dig into their monster farm system to bring up quality productive players. Same with the Yankees and Astros. The Mets did not have rescue boats on board and went down with their ship like the Titanic. The dumping of older players in the last two months was pathetic. What they got in return as far as prospects are concerned was a joke. I will call those transactions moves, not trades.
Baseball is a marathon of eight to nine months of physical and mental stress on a player. They will break down, all of them. Many will never let the team know about daily soreness or pain, so we will never really know how many are playing at less than one hundred percent. The bottom line is, it takes a lot of players to get through a season. If you want to be at the top at the end, you need a farm system with good players. Granted, the Mets do have some quality big leaguers who started out this year on the twenty five man roster. But it is that other group on their forty man roster and below who can make or break a season. In the age of specialization, there aren’t any really good utility players around who can be plugged into a lineup in a days notice. The Cubs Ben Zobrist and Pirates Sean Rodriguez are the only two out there who come to mind.
So what do the Mets do to boost the quality of their organizations farm system? A monumental task to say the least. They need to reseed the farm and put in a new sprinkler system. Maybe they need to start thinking about cleaning house and use some of their good pro players in trades this winter, where they get back two or three top prospects in return. If one of them turns out to be good, they are at least right where they were before the trade. Get two to shine and you are on your way to rebuilding your ball club into something fans can get excited about. The clock is ticking on guys like Steven Matz and Zach Wheeler. Both are not at the top of any teams list as they are looked at as injury prone. Matt Harvey? Funny how they named a major disaster Harvey. You couldn’t get a good hotdog vender for him now. They may not be willing to part ways with any of the other big arms that got them to the world series in 2015. But the longer they wait the less valuable they will be for a trade.They need to begin the slow process of rebuilding their player development system, fast. Right now the farm looks like it was devastated by locust.