5 NY Mets players most likely to be traded at this year’s Winter Meetings

5) Starling Marte

Any other prospects the Mets could deal at the Winter Meetings is anyone’s guess. Kevin Parada? What color is the bag the balls are in that they’d be getting back? We turn our attention, instead, to Starling Marte. In a similar spot as McNeil, he’s an ill-fitting veteran fading fast.

Marte’s All-Star campaign with the Mets in 2022 feels like eons ago. He had a lousy and mostly absent 2023 season. This past year was something in between. The absence of power down the stretch with his last home run of 2024 coming on the day when Grimace threw out the first pitch at Citi Field is a reminder of one skill he is now void of altogether. With this in mind, he’s a terrible choice to be the team’s DH in 2025 which seems bound to happen given how poor his defense has become.

Trading Marte would have to be something close to a salary dump if not a swap of bad deals. The Mets could always hope for the best and see him experience some sort of revival. Until David Stearns actually does eliminate major league players from the Mets roster in a trade, I’m bound to believe he’ll stay away from finding a suitor for Marte.

The kind of deal Marte might work could be more complicated than any of us can conceive at the moment. Something similar to the Robinson Cano/Edwin Diaz trade where veterans and prospects were traded away by the Mets is one of the more rational directions to go. A much maligned trade for years that actually worked out well for the Mets, one has to wonder if it’s just easier to demote Marte into a part-time role and cut him midseason if things go terribly wrong.