Last year Robertson was traded for Ben Brown, who at the time was the Phillies’ **26th** ranked prospect. He is now the number 70 prospect in ALL of baseball.
This shows 2 things
1: People expecting a massive return for Robertson were deluding themselves because this is arguably a better return than what he yielded last year.
2: People take these prospect rankings as gospel but they are far from that. Players, especially young players, can rocket up rankings quickly. And both of these guys have OPSs above .899 in rookie ball albeit.
If you want to criticize the fact that we didn’t get any pitching prospects, or the fact that we traded him in division when we probably didn’t need to, and the fact that we made this trade with 3 days to go before the deadline go right ahead. Those are all fair points.
**But please, don’t just look at prospect rankings and declare this a shitty trade.** They are not gospel. And, again, the 2 prospects the Mets got have really good rookie ball stats.
Edit:
#[Baseball Prospectus is very bullish on Marco Vargas, ranking him as their No. 7 prospect in the Marlins system](https://twitter.com/fishonfirst/status/1615710282524803072?s=46&t=BgnIV_MCsNfOncLyhHDz1g)
29 comments
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Ben Brown’s already in triple A. We’ll be lucky if these guys are called up by 2026.
Ben Brown was not the 26th ranked prospect. MLB.com takes forever to update their rankings.
Eppler should have waited for the deadline. No team is going to offer their best package without knowing what the status of Hader and Bednar are. If those 2 stat put(which is likely), Robertson is immediately the most desirable bullpen piece.
Phillies were a playoff hopeful desperate for a closer.
There are no teams like that this year, so you’re not going to get a bidding war that lands you a steal.
I agree with this post. However I do want to say here that I think the idea that we have to trade players solely for pitching prospects is a bit ridiculous. For starters, most of the players in our top 30 prospects are pitchers and we drafted a ton of pitchers in the top 10 rounds this year. So the FO has devoted a ton of resources to pitching prospects. We might not have a potential superstar that we know of yet but you can blame that more on our development, not a low volume of pitching prospects.
Also teams don’t just make trades solely off of minor league positions that they think they need. They try to get the best talent available given what they’re offering. Eppler felt that Vargas(Fanduel’s 10th best Marlins prospect) and Hernandez(25th best) fit that mold. I think it was a decent return for 2 months of a 38 year old reliever who will sign with a contender next year.
It’s been 10-15 minutes, how can anyone have such strong feelings about others opinions being wrong? Who the hell knows yet.
I think it’s frustrating to see because these guys won’t have any impact to the Mets until 2027 at least (unless if in a trade package), which isn’t necessarily bad, but isn’t going to help turn around the team in the short term.
Too bad the Marlins subreddit is basically a ghost town. I’d be interested to know how they are reacting to this since they would know these prospects better than we do.
Honestly, you know why the reaction is so strong?
It’s because it’s a white flag.
Granted, that might entirely be the completely correct thing, but it stings. Some of us were still in the “I believe” delusions, and sure we’re going to sweep the Nats and Royals, somehow win the series with the Cubs, and be right back in the WC which we’d take in September from the Marlins…
That dream is dead now, so you get an angry reaction
Eppler should have packaged in Vogelbach and tell the Angels to reconsider taking Ohtani off the market.
Thing is, if he waited till the deadline it’s likely this deal or something similar would exist. But, Eppler might have gotten an MLB-ready piece. This is serious jumping the gun for no reason.
I’ve been checked out for a few months at this point so I’m pretty meh on all this but what did you guys expect to get back for a 40 year old set up man rental lol
One thing that I wonder about with these two guys being former IFAs and in rookie ball. Were the Mets interested/scouting them before the Marlins signed them?
Just curious how much background research they have on them since both players have about 100 games in organized baseball under their belts.
I was irrational when I first saw the trade. The truth is that ~98% of us are completely unqualified to say shit about this. I had seen Vargas’s name on fangraphs and that’s about it. Had never even heard of Hernandez.
But why should we have faith in Billy Eppler exactly? He was the GM of the angels for 6 years, they never made the playoffs once, they consistently spent a good amount of money, and their farm system was always dreadful.
So far let’s go through his biggest moves
Signing Scherzer (hard to call this a total failure but certainly underwhelming)
Verlander (same as above)
Canha (good, no complaints)
Escobar (failure)
Marte (looks washed in year 2)
Last trade deadline was a disaster. Sold low on JD, gave up a good controllable reliever for a career journeymen. Givens and Naquin aren’t even in the show this year.
Only moves by Billy you can point to and say good job are the Bassitt trade and Senga signing. It’s been a lot more bad than good. And his previous job he sucked. The highest payroll in baseball 88-74 should be considered a failure. The Mets are gonna finish 15 games worse than that.
As much as it hurts given the expectations, selling is the right move at this point. These two players they got in return are young enough and stat-wise seems solid, even if it’s a gamble. There’s also no guarantee the Mets can’t use them as trade chips in another year or two if the Mets are really close to a title run. On the bright side, this is a great opportunity to get the young players experience and know what we have for a roster next year.
Billy Eppler wouldn’t shut the fuck up last year about not trading to get 1% better only to sell the best reliever on the market this year for prospects who won’t make this team any better in 2024. No reason to believe they’ll attempt being competitive next year.
This is epic delusion – I’m going to assume you all loved the ruf, naquin and Vogelbach deals as well and thought the Mets were headed to the post season this year. Mmmm, kool aid is yummy
“Elite contact, elite decision making, high onbase” and at such a young age is what ur getting with Vargas. Is that guaranteed to translate all the way to the MLB? Of course not I’m not naive. But I can see now why they wanted him.
Marlins twitter liked him so could end up being our PCA. And if Robertson is back for 2024.. Well we just got two prospects for free
This is only the first move. We got more to go and who knows, we might actually improve the team for the stretch run =]
Predicting how good a prospect is going to be is damn near impossible unless said prospect is the best of the best. It’s a lottery ticket and at this point we need a miracle to turn this team around for 2024 so let’s get all the lottery tickets we can without getting rid of the core players.
Think about this, we had two choices.
– Stick with DR, and still miss the playoffs… and he leaves in free agency.
– Trade DR, and get $3.5 million off the books plus 2 prospects. Robertson still leaves in free agency and there’s nothing stopping us from signing him again.
This really wasn’t a bad move, just a kinda small move with little immediate impact.
I don’t think that the Mets did too badly here.
Ronald Hernandez has three seasons in with a relative consistency in RBI production, even with a dip in batting average last season. He gets hits with men on base, which is a good thing. His fielding seems OK, though he’s spent more time this season at DH. He struck out at a 2:1 ratio to walking last season, which isn’t unheard of. This season, he’s returned to a level of almost one to one on walks to strikeouts. To me, this means he’s got some plate discipline. He’s showing improvement as he goes along, and that’s what a good prospect should be doing.
Marco Vargas is a little greener, but he maintains a high OBP across two seasons in spite of a lower batting average facing harder pitching. He also maintained some consistency in doubles production. So he still hits the ball hard. He has some speed, stealing 14 bases last year, and he’s substantially reduced getting caught stealing this season, which is good. He’s already walked more this year than last year with harder pitching, so there’s some batters eye for you. His fielding needs improvement with 7 errors at shortstop this year. He’s better at second base.
We’ll see what happens.
The return is fine, it’s what u expect for a rental reliever.
The problem is trading him after he said he didn’t want to be traded. The Mets should try to be good again next year and thus, they should want d-rob back. That is now torpedoed after trading him against his wishes. All for the return of a couple very low level prospects that in all likelihood will never make it to the bigs, let alone actually contribute. I hope they trade some guys, but they need to be big enough to get impact prospects back or shed salary and are easily replaceable next off-season.
We traded an older veteran closer on a one year deal…we got better prospects that are far away from the bigs, rather than lesser prospects closer to the bigs. It seems we are playing the long game, and I agree with it.
If you can resign Robertson this off-season, this trade becomes very very good.
Both positions are spoken for for the next several years when you factor in Parada and Mauricio in addition to the contracts on the ML level, so this deal probably means that Eppler is looking to make at least one or two major trades in the next 12 months, and that scares me.
Either that or they’re really buying into Cohen’s vision for a deep farm system, which makes sense to a certain degree, but I gotta wonder what the long-term goal is here. Yeah we keep hearing Houston this and Los Angeles that, but those teams were built with strong drafting and international scouting, not by parting out the big league club for middle tier prospects.
Bottom line is that this deal can’t be evaluated for at least a few seasons, but I seriously doubt we’ll be seeing it show up in those “top ten worst trades in Mets history” clickbait posts in the years to come.
Baseball is such a weird sport because 95% of fans don’t know anything about prospects and they are such a hit and miss thing that you can be really high on a guy like Vargas and get him now while he’s not rated as high and he can become a top prospect in 2 years. Also mlb doesn’t updated prospect rankings that often so that’s all people look at when in reality he’s probably a top 10-15 guy in the marlins farm and instantly is a top 6 guy in our weak farm
I agree. You are not going to get a blue chipper for two months of an aging reliever who is having a good season so far. Like all trades involving young talent, it will take a few years to know if these guys are prospects or suspects. Also, we can always re-sign Robertson in free agency to be the set up guy next year.
This is the white flag going up. We were not making the playoffs this year. If you disagree, you are fooling yourself. If we do make a run, it’s because a bunch of trades wake up a team that has been sleepwalking through this season.
Remember Ed Hearn for David Cone.
Bob Bailor for Sid Fernandez
Lee Mazzilli for Ron Darling
None of those guys were finished products when acquired.
Can’t believe Mets are throwing. What happened to YA GOTTA BELIEVE? Hopefully this lights a fire under them and they play better. Wild card is not out of reach yet