3 biggest NY Mets offseason overreactions

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A great part of being a fan of anything is to overreact about every single move. You can cheer like a Pee Wee's Playhouse character whenever the word of the day is said. You can curse the person who bought you your first New York Mets cap when they blow a lead in the seventh of game 162 when they’ve already been eliminated for a month. Everything in between is available, too.

This offseason has been filled with plenty of reactions. Some have crossed the line of logic.

Unlike the last two winters where the Mets undoubtedly got better on paper, this year’s moves are more debatable. There has been plenty to react to and equally as much to overreact about.

1) The Mets and Steve Cohen have gotten cheap

The Mets are behaving a little more responsibly with their payroll. However, to question the amount they've spent seems ill-informed. You can't call out Steve Cohen who was willing to give Yoshinobu Yamamoto $325 million. He was always going to sign with the Los Angeles Dodgers. They'd meet any offer the Mets would give.

This offseason hasn't been a trip to the Dollar Tree. The players they’ve added have been at market value. You may not have wanted them to spend $10.5 million on Harrison Bader or had a preferred choice over Sean Manaea or Luis Severino. If the Mets wanted players of their caliber, they needed to pay.

If the Mets had gotten cheap they would’ve rolled into the coming year with guys still on their rookie deals or in arbitration-eligible status. Joey Lucchesi would be the third starter. Jeff McNeil would have been traded to clear room for Joey Wendle to be the everyday second baseman, not an infield utility man.

It’s a complete overreaction to question the payroll. The choices are justified to be upset about, just not the number of zeros at the end of the contracts they have given.

2) The Mets are picking up Yankees scraps

Do people in Chicago do this too or is it just us? When a player goes from the Cubs to the White Sox or vice versa, are there permanent binoculars on them or have those two teams lost so much over the last 100 years that they don’t really care?

In either case, anyone upset or critical of the Mets for adding ex-Yankees to their organization are overreacting. The majority of those raising this point in a negative light aren’t even Mets fans. Who cares where a player came from? Who cares where they go? The only person we care about where they came from is Cotton-Eyed Joe.

Harrison Bader is as much of a Yankee as one of the most forgettable Yankees you can think of. Luis Severino and even new Mets skipper Carlos Mendoza are far deeper into the discussion of ex-Yankees joining the Mets, but even so, why does it matter?

When it becomes routine for the Mets to continually sign former Yankees then maybe it becomes a point of discussion. The manager knows these guys and may have very well spoken up about what a good fit they’d be for the 2024 Mets.

If the Mets somehow end up with Josh Donaldson or Corey Kluber, then we can get concerned they’re doing nothing but looking at past Yankees rosters for warm bodies.

With the Yankees signing former Mets pitcher Marcus Stroman, we can only hope this narrative has ended.

3) The Mets have had a good offseason

Grit your teeth if you must. The Mets haven’t had a good offseason. Smart? Yeah. Strategic? You betcha. Being the smartest person in the room or team in MLB doesn’t win you anything. The Mets have proceeded with some sort of a plan to take gambles on players who may or may not succeed in 2024. It’s not much different than what everyone does with any addition. The difference for the Mets is several of the newcomers either have a track record of injury or were terribly bad in recent seasons.

Better spin rates, an increase in velocity, and elite defense in center field isn’t enough to convince fans who refuse to wear orange and blue colored glasses that this was exactly what the team needed to do this offseason. They aren’t tanking, punting, or butt fumbling. The Mets are trying to sneakily grab players they believe can be much better than even the back of their baseball cards say they can be.

The problem with this strategy is they’re bound to miss on a lot of the additions. Add it with the uncertainties the ball club already had and the Mets need just about everything to go their way in order to compete.

Most frustrating is that they’ve done very little to get a head start on the following winter. Other than Sean Manaea, there is no second year available on any of the free agent deals. We can’t expect them to hit a home run on every target next offseason.

The Mets haven’t had a good offseason. While not the most miserable we’ve seen by a long shot, they’ve left too much room for error with the choices they’ve made.

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