Cardinals-Red Sox trade connection will always be better than NY Mets-Brewers

It's easy to see the flurry of moves between the Boston Red Sox and the St. Louis Cardinals and feel like the New York Mets are missing out. Thanks to Chaim Bloom's tenure as Red Sox chief baseball officer, the two sides have linked up on two significant trades (Sonny Gray and Willson Contreras) since Bloom took the reins in St. Louis.

Not only have the Red Sox benefited twice from the Cardinals' fire sale, but the two sides could link up a third time, with Boston rumored to be in on St. Louis star second baseman Brendan Donovan.

Teams often develop preferred trade partners thanks to previous deals and similar organizational philosophies, but when an executive's employment history bridges the gap even further, we can see a flurry of moves, as is the case with the Red Sox and Cardinals.

That might lead Mets fans to wonder why David Stearns hasn't taken advantage of his connections to the Milwaukee Brewers. The Brewers have what the Mets desperately need in ace Freddy Peralta, and one would assume that, just like with Boston and St. Louis, the familiarity between the two organizations might help lessen the blow of Milwaukee's sky-high asking price.

However, there are serious differences between the Mets-Brewers link and the Red Sox-Cardinals connection, which prove no such favoritism will happen now, nor any time soon.

Don't expect the Mets-Brewers connection to be anything like the Red Sox-Cardinals

The Mets have long admired the Brewers' way of doing business, interviewing both Matt Arnold and Pat Murphy for vacancies years ago. While it seems that Stearns would facilitate the relationship even further, the circumstances each club faces make that an uphill challenge.

For one thing, both teams are National League contenders, so there isn't a clear pathway to do deals like there is between the Red Sox and Cardinals.

St. Louis is clearly in a rebuilding phase, meaning the Red Sox have been able to swoop in and take advantage of their sell off. The Brewers are known to sell veteran assets, too, but their motivation is very different.

Milwaukee has arrived as a perennial contender because they shrewdly trade away solid veterans before losing them in free agency. That's allowed them to keep the cycle of contention going, despite being in one of the league's smallest markets.

Many times, what they target are big-league-ready talents with loads of team control, and that makes matching up with another contender difficult since a team like the Mets might have to subtract from the major league roster in order to swing a deal.

That leads into the second point, which is that the Brewers' thrifty habits mean that the players they are trading are often in their final year of arbitration or signed to team-friendly contracts, as is the case with Peralta.

Without the bloated contracts like what we saw from Sonny Gray and Willson Contreras going to Boston, the Mets' financial might and ability to absorb payroll as a means to provide additional value to the Brewers is negated.

The bottom line is that the Brewers and Mets are direct competitors with each other, while Boston and St. Louis are not. That doesn't mean that the two sides can't come together on trades, like a deal to land Peralta in Queens, but if that were to happen, it would be because New York was the highest bidder, and not because of any discounts due to the relationship between front offices.

That isn't changing any time soon, so while it might look like the Mets could take advantage and plunder the Brewers from time to time, it's never going to happen.