Billy Eppler's Mets legacy: Not going big at the 2022 trade deadline
Mets general manager Billy Eppler talks with the media before a game against the Washington Nationals at Citi Field on Sunday, July 30, 2023. Credit: Jim McIsaac
Flash back to 15 months ago, when life was good for the Mets. They were on their way to the second-highest win total in franchise history. Jacob deGrom, finally healthy after more than a year on the sideline, was about to return. Edwin Diaz was the best reliever in baseball, Jeff McNeil was going to win a batting title, Francisco Lindor was putting together an amazing bounceback season and Max Scherzer — literally Max Scherzer, the superstar pitcher and virtual lock Hall of Famer — was willingly a part of it.
Theirs was an out-of-nowhere charmed season after years of mediocrity or worse, a once-a-generation opportunity to do all anybody in baseball wants to do: win it all.
Presented an opportunity to bolster the roster for the playoff push, though, the Mets largely passed. And that is Billy Eppler’s legacy as general manager: not going big at the 2022 trade deadline, theoretically in service of a better tomorrow — a future he won’t be a part of after his resignation Thursday amid an MLB investigation reportedly about the team’s alleged misuse of the injured list.
There are lessons to be learned from Eppler’s time here, including positive ones regarding retaining established star homegrown players when they’re due for a big contract and knowing when to quit on a season. But the most important one is about missed chances.
The Mets needed help at catcher or at least DH, plus probably at least one more reliever, preferably a lefthander. They ended up with a pair of DHs — Daniel Vogelbach and Darin Ruf — plus a backup outfielder, Tyler Naquin.
Everybody remembers what happened next.
On the day of the deadline, defending his approach, Eppler made sure to highlight that the Mets retained their top 19 prospects. Then they blew the rest of what had been a 101⁄2-game division lead. Then they finished with the same record as Atlanta but lost the NL East on a tiebreaker, determined by a brutal last-weekend-of-the-season sweep. Then they lost to the Padres in the first round of the playoffs. Then their attempt to do better yielded this year’s mess: a season that was all but over by the All-Star break, arguably the biggest and definitely the most expensive failure in Mets history.
The way 2023 unfolded underscored the point about 2022: You just don’t know when a season like that will happen again. When it presents itself — whether or not you anticipated such a World Series chance at this point in your timeline — you have to capitalize, not worry about prospects. Take your shot.
“Through the forecast and some of the predictive modeling that we’re able to do, we can look and see what does that actually subtract from the future and how many years does that subtract out in the future?” Eppler said on Aug. 2, 2022, explaining why it wasn’t worth trading minor-leaguers for major-leaguers. “If you’re subtracting a percent or 1.5% [per year] over a four- or five-year period to move up 1% now, I don’t think that’s how sustainability [works] — which has been an objective of mine and [owner Steve Cohen’s] and [then-team president Sandy Alderson’s] as we were putting this whole thing together, to try to do everything in service to that kind of sustainability. That’s how we measure that. Everything that presented itself just took too much of that future away.”
That is painful peak GM-speak, unfortunately common in the modern major leagues. Every Mets boss during their past messy whirlwind half-decade has talked about sustainable success. None achieved any meaningful level of success, never mind the consistent kind.
There is, of course, a version of the Mets’ future in which the Eppler era benefits from hindsight. The farm system he left behind is better than the one he inherited.
Maybe his legacy will wind up looking different. Maybe the prospects he didn’t trade last year and the prospects he traded for this year will develop well. Maybe they’ll become part of the foundation of the next great Mets team(s).
Maybe Eppler’s successor will give them help when they deserve it.
Tim Healey is the Mets beat writer for Newsday. Born on Long Island and raised in Connecticut, Tim has previously worked for the South Florida Sun Sentinel, the Boston Globe and MLB.com. He is also the author of “Hometown Hardball,” a book about minor league baseball in the northeast.
