3 negligent Mets offseason decisions the team is paying for right now

Tampa Bay Rays v New York Mets
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Some roster negligence has the New York Mets chasing the rest of the division. Since Steve Cohen took over as the owner of this ball club, a down-and-out Mets club this early into the year hasn’t been a thing.

Finger pointing has begun. Scapegoats are getting verbally whipped. A lot of the problems for the Mets are due to underperforming players. Some of this could have been rectified with a better offseason.

It’s these three negligent offseason decisions where the Mets are looking like they came up short. The team is now paying for it in mid-June.

1) The NY Mets neglected to improve the DH spot

Comedy Central could probably do a whole series of Mets fans roasting the different DHs they’ve tried out in just the last two years. Remember when the thought at the start of 2022 was how the Mets were perfectly built for the DH? J.D. Davis, Dominic Smith, and even Robinson Cano could all get frequent at-bats there. They’d be unstoppable.

It’s one of those nearly universally shared opinions that we all wish we never had. Assessing the DH spot in the lineup has been one of the weak points of Billy Eppler’s roster management. They’re paying for the offseason decision to run it back with Daniel Vogelbach.

Worse than Vogelbach was how close we came to seeing Darin Ruf begin the season on the Mets roster. What would’ve happened if he had a hot spring? He probably would have begun the year on the roster and we’d be even more puzzled by what’s going on with this ball club’s assessment of talent.

A DH platoon was never a great plan when the stronger half is someone as limited as Vogelbach. The better plan would have been to not have any specific DH and find a guy at least capable of playing the field. As frustrating as Tommy Pham has been at times this year, he has hit some important home runs, provided the team with good speed, and found himself playing defense regularly. If free agent options were limited, the Mets should have gone hard after a trade target.

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