NY Mets rumors: Francisco Lindor is as available in trade talks as he should be

Rumblings, whispers, and New York Mets rumors about the team’s desire to move on from Francisco Lindor are more complicated than anything spewed by a podcast host. From the reporters whose job it is to know, only five players are reportedly going to get David Stearns to hang up on you.

SNY’s Chelsea Janes reported that youngsters Carson Benge, A.J. Ewing, Nolan McLean, and Christian Scott are all untouchable right now. So is Juan Soto.

Noticably absent from the list, Francisco Lindor. Yep, the Mets are apparently willing to hear other team’s pleas. However, according to Jim Duquette, he’s only as available as he should be.

The Mets are willing to listen on trade offers for Francisco Lindor, but it sounds unlikely

Duquette didn’t break any glass with his sensible assessment of the situation, which comes from sources, shouldn’t surprise anyone. Even if the Mets are in love with Lindor, they’ve shown a willingness to seize any opportunity they can to make themselves better. This includes a brash trade of a guy who has routinely been a top 10 MVP candidate and the runner-up back in 2024.

A .210/.291/.363 hitter costing $34.1 million over the next five seasons has little appeal to anyone. In the right situation, we’d have to believe Lindor would agree to a trade. It didn’t take Brandon Nimmo long to mull over the idea of going to the Texas Rangers.

Trading Lindor for the sake of clearing out his salary would be an unfortunate way to end his tenure even more so than Nimmo. Any trade involving him would probably require the Mets to acquire another bad, maybe less so, contract in the process. They’re going to try to compete next year and certainly could without Lindor even if his replacement isn’t under team control.

Getting called “immovable” isn’t all that much of an insult as many players on the other side of 30 in their worst seasons, coming off of an injury, and expensive would be too. The only kind of a match one could conceive would be to swap him for someone like Xander Bogaerts whose contract is two years longer and his performance has been worse. Trea Turner is another one of those guys whose performance and contract would be a hypothetical match. Don’t hold your breath on that ever happening and not just because the Canadian wildfires are everywhere.

It doesn’t sound like the Mets will actually find a trade partner in the next few weeks, but the offseason is definitely a much different story. The idea of trading Lindor this past winter was a heavy topic in December with Fernando Tatis Jr. as the desirable chip. No longer the player he was pre-suspension for PED usage, that’s a fun yet incredibly complicated situation you can bet becomes a topic of conversation as soon as the Mets season ends.

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