Mets: Why Trevor Bauer is the most essential free agent to sign

Starting pitching doesn’t solve everything but it makes it easier

It’s not as if a team can load up on starting pitching and guarantee a trip to the World Series. Sometimes in sports, we get caught up in believing things like this.

Good starting pitching can, however, make it a whole lot easier. A dominant rotation takes ease off the bats, defense, and bullpen. Those weaknesses aren’t as obvious when you have five guys in your rotation capable of shutting down even the most dangerous opponent.

Bauer won’t single-handedly bring a parade to Flushing. He’s the best one available, though. Passing on him is putting more faith in your bats to score an extra run or two. It’s asking your bullpen to do the impossible and pick up a starting pitcher who couldn’t make it through the fourth inning.

Bauer can give the Mets a chance to win every fifth day. That’s more than we can say about many of the other arms we saw take the hill in 2020. It’s the one requirement I think we all ask from starting pitchers: a chance at victory.

Everything in baseball seems to return to the starting pitching. How the starter performs determines the number of runs you need to win. It saves the bullpen from running onto the field, often overworked and ready to underperform.

Throughout Mets history, many of their greatest teams had such memorable seasons because of their starting rotation. The current Mets need to go outside of their organization to make this the case as well.

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So, for the final time, I’m going to request a pen. It’s for Trevor Bauer to put his name on a contract with the Mets. Good pitching is hard to find, it would cost even more in a trade to get, and it makes everything so much easier.