In many ways, our current sports culture was shaped by passing through an era in which unsophisticated jocks with impatient plans to dominate via brute force were supplanted by Ivy League nerds with an eye toward the longview. That’s how we got tanking, the consumer backlash to tanking and the realization that even the implementation of a draft lottery can’t undo self-aware non-winning. That’s why, increasingly, baseball operations executives seem like main characters with unique fandoms and also why they’re forced to take responsibility for making baseball bad.
The game is in a weird place. We can’t stop measuring the impact of rules designed to put the outcomes back in the hands of athletes, rather than analysts. “Optimization” is a bad word often referenced in a list of modern afflictions, yet the teams that eschew it are punchlines to people in the know. One of the more persistent effects of the intellectualization of baseball is the belief that smart teams are willing to temper their dominance now in favor of the future — and that it is stupid to sacrifice the future for immediate success.
The fallacy, as far as I can tell, is that front offices operate under the assumption that the future is more controllable if you get a jump-start on trying to control it. Plan to be good later, and you’ll be the only one ready when we get there. Most years, even the best teams aren’t willing to openly prioritize capitalizing on their position; it’s more important to chase some ideal state of sustainability. Everyone is planning for a future in which they alone are prepared to settle into a comfortable state of continuous contention. But the math won’t allow that, even if it is well-intentioned.
(A quick caveat: If every team wanted to approach free agency blind to the possibility that their division might already be largely spoken for, that would be great fun. “Every team has hope on Opening Day” is a good operating philosophy for a league, especially as an ultimately unachieved ideal. At some point in the season, however, fates diverge.)
Last year, the New York Mets were enjoying a gloriously charmed season, on pace for 103 wins on the morning of the trade deadline — the most since they’d won the World Series in 1986 and the second-most in franchise history. After four straight years of the Atlanta Braves finishing first in the NL East, the Mets looked poised to take the division and kick off what would surely be a long and illustrious reign of dominance under new owner Steve Cohen.
Then they were conservative at the deadline (and the moves they did make fell flat, but that’s a different story), with general manager Billy Eppler openly addressing the areas of apparent need that went largely unfilled. He chalked it up, explicitly, to weighing what the cost of any moves might mean for the team’s future probabilities.
“If you’re subtracting a percent or a percentage and a half aggregate over a four or five-year period to move up one percent now, I don’t think that’s how sustainability is built,” Eppler said. The Mets’ ownership and executive were in agreement that they would “do everything in service to that sustainability.”
For the Mets in particular, Cohen’s deep pockets were supposed to be able to fund short-term aggressiveness, allowing them to simultaneously build toward a better future without spending their prospect capital. It’s an approach that affords them a lot of leeway in the free-agent market. But the opportunity to build for October comes in-season, when you have to deal prospects to get back immediately impactful players.
Now, it’s impossible to say if the Mets’ un-made trades would’ve been the difference between 101 wins with a first-round exit and 102 wins (enough for a bye) with a deep October run. The 2022 Mets were not wrong to think there were more good years to come — there are! That principled approach last summer will serve them better now if they remain focused on the farm system amid daily thinkpieces about what a disappointment the major-league club is — but for at least one team every season, the present just is brighter than the future. There’s no virtue in contending teams waiting patiently just to get another opportunity to do the same.
The trade deadline binary of Buying or Selling elides the fact that both options involve an exchange of players from one organization to another. Everyone hopes to get what they need for a price they can stomach. The differentiator is when they need the deal to pay off. Perhaps, then, the better way to categorize teams as we approach this deadline is by when their wins will matter the most: Is it in the medium future, 2025 and beyond? Is it next year? Are they truly in a position to balance bolstering their current club and building the next wave of talent?
Or is it right now, in 2023, that they have the best shot to win a championship? In other words, is it actually worth mortgaging their future for incremental gains this year? The rising tide of the Texas Rangers, the fluky success of the Miami Marlins, even the red-hot start of the ever-competent Tampa Bay Rays: It’s not an indictment of anything to say that for some, this might not be the beginning. It might be their best chance.
Recently, I was talking about the upcoming trade deadline with a National League manager in the way that everyone who cares about baseball does these days: by issuing and soliciting proclamations about what different teams should do. After a particularly emphatic “they should go for it!” evaluation of some team or another, he tempered that kind of consequences-be-damned armchair general managing. No one, he explained, wants to be the GM who traded away a prospect that turned into a truly great player.
That’s always the fear, isn’t it? That you’ll look stupid or silly or short-sighted in hindsight. You could’ve had all that (cheap! controllable!) future value if not for servicing your team’s needs in the moment. That this kind of thinking is pervasive is evidenced by the returns — teams don’t give up top prospects for so-called rentals. And if that’s simply the modern market everyone agrees to operate within, sure!
But a message for the GMs: You’re not all going to win more games next year or three years from now. This could be the peak, the right time to push all your chips to the middle of the table.
