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3 pointless Mets trades fans will never let the team live down
There are bad New York Mets trades. And then there are pointless ones.
Why make a deal for something when you appear to already have the answer on your ball club? The purpose of making a trade should be to make your team better or at least set yourself up for more success.
Some of the worst Mets trades can be justified even if we don’t agree with them. A Mets trade as epically infuriating as the Tom Seaver one at least came down to money. In these three instances, the Mets looked in all of the wrong places for a solution.
1) Pointless NY Mets trade: Rusty Staub for Mickey Lolich
Rusty Staub was one of the most important position players for the Mets from 1972-1975. After four seasons in Flushing, the team sent him and Bill Laxton to the Detroit Tigers for Billy Baldwin and Mickey Lolich.
The trade was a failure for a number of reasons beyond just performance. Staub continued to produce while Lolich never wanted to be on the Mets roster in the first place. He originally refused the trade, a right he had as a veteran player. He gave in and the Mets made what became one of the more pointless trades they ever did.
Pitching was plentiful for the Mets already. Tom Seaver, Jerry Koosman, and Jon Matlack all had awesome years. Craig Swan was decent. Even Lolich performed well.
It’s understandable why the Mets felt they needed to subtract an outfielder from the roster. Dave Kingman became the starting right fielder in place of Staub. They had Ed Kranepool and John Milner covering first base and left field with Joe Torre getting his licks at the former often.
The Mets had far greater needs than an aging veteran pitcher who didn’t want to be on their team. Third base and center field stand out as the two most obvious.
A lot was wrong with this Mets trade. Staub may have needed to be traded. It shouldn’t have been for Lolich who chose to retire after the season.
2) Pointless NY Mets trade: Juan Samuel for Lenny Dykstra and Roger McDowell
This trade is equally as pointless as it is annoying. The 1989 Mets were competing for a playoff berth and yet they managed to ruin a perfectly good platoon in center field. Mookie Wilson and Lenny Dykstra had shared duties at the position for several seasons. Something told them to end it. Wilson was traded to the Toronto Blue Jays. Much worse, Lenny Dykstra and Roger McDowell were traded to the Philadelphia Phillies for Juan Samuel. The Mets also had to toss in a minor leaguer because apparently they wanted to get robbed even more.
The trade aged terribly with Samuel struggling in his few months in New York while Dykstra and McDowell eventually took off with the Phillies. Most questionable of all was why the Mets thought they needed Samuel. He spent most of his career as a second baseman only to recently become a center fielder. He wasn’t even that great of a hitter. He was a strikeout machine with league leading totals from 1984-1987.
Dykstra could’ve been a perfectly acceptable center fielder for the Mets well into the 1990s. They pulled the ripcord far too soon and took on an experiment the Phillies began.
The only thing Samuel did well was steal bases. He swiped 31 for the Mets in 86 games played. It hardly made up for his .228/.299/.300 slash line. New York quickly tried to erase this deal by trading Samuel the following offseason to the Los Angeles Dodgers.
3) Pointless NY Mets trade: Darin Ruf for J.D. Davis
It wasn’t just Darin Ruf for J.D. Davis that made this one of the worst Mets trades in recent memory. Even if you have been with the team since 1962, this is a perplexing one.
In need of a right-handed DH, the Mets sent three minor leaguers and Davis to the San Francisco Giants for Ruf. Couldn’t they have just kept Davis instead? Ruf wasn’t having a particularly good year with the Giants anyway. His defensive limitations were greater than Davis. The team would have benefitted far more if they paid for a more flexible defender rather than try to upgrade with an aging player who had us scratching our heads about the moment the deal happened.
Because this happened so recently, we all know where we were and the questions we asked ourselves to try to understand this one. Ruf’s history of hitting left-handed pitchers well was about it. As we witnessed, it wasn’t meant to be in New York. He was horrendous at everything other than perhaps masking Daniel Vogelbach’s own shortcomings.
The Mets made a half-hearted attempt at improving the team at the 2022 trade deadline with this pointless trade standing out as the worst and most aggravating. None of us need hindsight to understand this was a bad idea on paper.
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