No regrets from Billy Eppler, but no assurances about next year for these Mets
The infield dirt in an empty Citi Field was getting resurfaced for a soccer game Friday afternoon, while several miles north, the Yankees were deep in their postseason bubble.
The Mets, many of whom will not return next year, were spread to parts unknown as general manager Billy Eppler gave his final assessment of the 2022 season.
“No regrets,” he said.
It’s easy to dismiss Eppler’s viewpoint as absurd. The Mets had 101 regular-season wins but went out with a whimper in their NL Wild Card Series, managing a single hit in a deciding Game 3. Their performance at the trade deadline was a wholly uninspired affair that did little to address the lingering concerns that showed themselves at the worst possible time. They were a team built around front-end pitching, but even with two former Cy Young Award winners, it wasn’t enough — not when you take away the numbers and the accolades and remember that they’re human and fallible.
There was a sense that the front office wanted everything all at once — to build a championship team now but not give up any of their top prospects in the process. The trade deadline came and went and the Mets’ top 19 minor-leaguers were still in the system.
The implication: Steve Cohen’s money, and what it had done thus far, would be enough.
It was not.
Now this franchise has to live in a world in which expectations are high and the willingness to take risks is a currency all its own. It’s also the one currency that seemed in short supply for the team with the highest payroll in baseball, not when their trade deadline returns were Daniel Vogelbach, Darin Ruf, Tyler Naquin and Mychal Givens.
Asked about his work at the deadline, Eppler had nice things to say about Vogelbach . . . and mentioned no one else.
Meanwhile, valuable relievers David Robertson and Raisel Iglesias went elsewhere and catcher Willson Contreras stayed put in Chicago.
Fine, the Mets didn’t want to sacrifice the big three of Francisco Alvarez, Brett Baty and Mark Vientos, and that’s solid thinking (not calling up Vientos or Alvarez earlier in the year was less solid).
But this coming offseason will provide another opportunity to make a splash, and while that certainly will take free-agent money, it also should mean tweaking the established blueprint. It’s yet to be seen if that’s something Eppler is willing to do.
“If you tell me we can design a team that’s going to lead in on-base percentage, score in the top five in runs and we’re going to have two Hall of Famers in the front end of our rotation, I think that’s a pretty good recipe,” Eppler said. “We’re dealing in human performance, right? It’s a probabilistic world. It doesn’t come with guarantees. But I did like the position our club was in.”
In a lot of ways, he’s right. And anywhere but New York, helping improve a team by 25 wins probably will earn you a gold star. It’s also true that the playoffs are an eternal crapshoot (just ask the 2001 Mariners with their 116 wins).
Eppler built a team that was second in the majors in on-base percentage that struck out rarely — two strong postseason indicators. And for the traditionalists, the Mets had many of the typical hallmarks of championship teams: two aces, strong fielders and speed on the basepaths.
But a lot of those players may be headed out. There are no assurances, for instance, that Jacob deGrom or Brandon Nimmo are coming back. And oh, yeah, they’re not playing baseball now.
“We’re always looking to get better,” Eppler said. “We’re always going to look to improve our processes. How do we take the inputs of a forecast on player performance, which is variable? And how do we try to get ourselves to a place where we feel comfortable with the acquisition?”
Eppler, like any front-office executive worth his salary, is trying to control the uncontrollable. A lot of the time, that means hoping for the best and expecting the very, very worst. A lot of the time, it means doing everything to mitigate the “bad luck” that leads to, say, losing to a string of sub-.500 teams in September.
Sometimes it means recognizing that while OBP is important, the ability to hit home runs in a short series can be season-defining. The Mets were 15th in the majors in homers, and Eppler indicated that it isn’t a primary concern in the offseason. Maybe he’s just trying to avoid showing his hand, or maybe he’s actually OK with no long-ball threat beyond Pete Alonso and Francisco Lindor.
“If it’s in the cards and it can happen, that’s one way to do it, but still honoring getting on base is an important aspect,” he said. “I’m a fan of on-base percentage, I’m a fan of OPS in kind of simple terms. There are more granular ways to look at that and more process-oriented ways to look at that result. But I think if you just sorted teams by on-base percentage and sorted teams by OPS, you’d probably pick teams that you’d want to be a part of.”
He’s mostly right — no regrets, remember? Except, of course, that the teams you really want to be a part of are the teams that are still actually playing.
Laura Albanese is a reporter, feature writer and columnist covering local professional sports teams; she began at Newsday in 2007 as an intern.
