Hypothetical NY Mets-Brewers trade from 2023 looks like a dream deal 2 years later

Around this time in 2023, everyone was putting together their best trade packages involving the New York Mets buying or selling. The team wasn’t quite committed in either direction. Desperate attempts to make them better before the trade deadline inched up too closely, such as adding Trevor Gott, proved futile. The team ended up selling everything that wasn’t nailed down, including a blockbuster deal that sent Max Scherzer to the Texas Rangers for Luisangel Acuna.

In 2025, we can safely begin to come to some conclusions about the deal. Scherzer won a World Series with the Rangers months after the trade with only a mild contribution coming directly from him. Acuna isn’t exactly developing into the young player we had hoped. Now in the minors because the team couldn’t or simply wouldn’t find him at-bats, this feels much more like a salary dump than anything else.

Because the Mets paid a large portion of Scherzer’s salary, they were able to get a legitimate prospect back in return for him. What if the Milwaukee Brewers had been the willing participants? Kerry Miller of Bleacher Report put together a few hypothetical trades with one of them involving a swap of Scherzer and Jacob Misiorowski. Who knew two years later this would have been a dream deal.

Max Scherzer for Jacob Misiorowski could have turned into an all-time Mets theft

It goes without saying, so let’s say it anyway, this wasn’t a deal that was actually on the table. Who knows if the Brewers would have made the same deal the Mets cut with the Rangers? Given their financial limitations, the Mets may have needed to pay down even more of Scherzer’s deal which, in a way, makes it a bit more dangerous. Who’s to say Misiorowski would have thrived in the Mets system either? Hypothetical lookbacks at deals or events like this always have this to consider.

At the time, Misiorowski wasn’t one of the league’s best young pitchers. In case you haven’t been paying attention, he has a 1.13 ERA in his first 3 starts. In 2023, he was in just his second professional season. He graduated from A-Ball and finished the year with 5 starts in Double-A that saw him struggle with a 5.57 ERA.

Misiorowski has been on the rise ever since, pitching well again in 2024 on the farm and cruising through Triple-A at the start of this season. At 23, he’s doing the kinds of things Mets fans have been waiting to see their youthful minor league arms accomplish.

Taken in the second round of the 2022 draft, Misiorowski’s scheduled start against the Mets on Wednesday has added irony because he goes against Blade Tidwell who'll come in behind Huascar Brazoban. Misiorowski was the 63rd overall selection that year’s draft. The Mets took Tidwell with the 52nd selection. It is a little more complicated than comparing the two with Misiorowski coming out of Junior College therefore receiving a larger signing bonus than many others drafted around the same time as him. Misiorowski received $2.35 million in comparison to those around him who were getting about half of that.

If the Mets could have, we can probably believe they would have added a pitcher of Misiorowski’s ilk back in 2023 in exchange for Scherzer. It was a trade deadline full of position players coming to the New York system. The greatest part would have been that David Stearns would have ended up with one of his well-aging prospects after all.