The only request for Billy Eppler at this year's trade deadline

The New York Mets have yet to declare themselves buyers or sellers, but we know what’s probably about to happen. How much of what they do against the Washington Nationals this weekend will really matter? They’re supposed to beat the Nationals. They should take care of business versus the Kansas City Royals afterward. Then the Mets are scheduled to play the Baltimore Orioles when reality will most certainly set in.

If there’s one request we’d all like to issue to Billy Eppler, it’s to not be so hard on himself. That’s the nice way of putting it. He should be held responsible for a lot of what went wrong this year. But he did help add to a team that doesn’t need to get blown up at the trade deadline.

The request to issue out to Eppler is to keep everyone with team control for next season. Anything short of a jaw-dropping offer should have the Mets staying mostly intact.

NY Mets GM Billy Eppler should only be allowed to trade the pending free agents

David Robertson. Tommy Pham. Mark Canha (team option). Dominic Leone. Carlos Carrasco. Anyone headed into free agency this offseason should be gone before the night of August 1. It doesn’t matter if the Mets looked like they were robbed. Losing these players for nothing at all would be a horrendous mistake by Eppler.

The bigger error would be to start subtracting from next year’s roster. Brooks Raley’s team option for next year makes him too important to keep around. The real line in the sand is drawn when it comes to Daniel Vogelbach. Trading him for anything is fine, however, the lack of trust in Eppler should have us pondering whether we’d prefer the Mets to non-tender him and look for a trade in the offseason with even more suitors. If David Stearns really is headed to Queens, I’d prefer to give him a chance to evaluate another team’s talent in a trade involving an obvious non-tender candidate.

The increasingly poor outcome of the Trevor Gott deal confirmed all of our Eppler doubts. It was a nice effort and we were grateful for Steve Cohen to eat the money on the Chris Flexen contract. However, to immediately get rid of Flexen without trying him out in a needy bullpen and to select Gott as the piece paired with him seems like an early loss.

Eppler has a few ways he can screw up the trade deadline for the Mets. He needs to keep it simple. Anything not nailed down for 2024 can go. We’ll say our prayers and take our vitamins while hoping broken clocks really can be right twice a day.