Hello all and Happy Thanksgiving – it’s Niko again with another guest post. It’s been a busy week for the Mets with the Nimmo for “35-year old-I’ll-learn-about-in-March” trade.
Obviously, as with any trade, there are some split emotions but this trade seems to have divided the fanbase more than the average trade, mainly due to Nimmo’s status as a “good guy” and longest tenured Met.
To be truthful, I do like Nimmo. He’s the last Met to have played on Mets when I was not a legal adult (so technically from my childhood) and I remember watching him as a kid when I attended the Futures Game in 2013. Was he my all-time favorite Met? Probably not, but I certainly appreciated his personality and I concur with the masses that he really did seem to enjoy his relationship with the fans. I used to see him sign more autographs for kids during pre-game activities than the average player, and I always appreciated that he valued fan retention and loyalty.
Another aspect of the trade that is turning heads is the return value, if we had somehow traded him for a boatload of young prospects, I would’ve been sad but understood – baseball is a business; I remember being disheartened when the Mets let R.A Dickey go to the Blue Jays, but given that 2012 was unlikely to be repeated from the aging knuckleballer, I took Sandy Alderson’s logic at face value.
With David Stearns, it’s hard to come to that same conclusion.
Let me give you an example: Suppose for a second that the Mets compile 26 brand new, completely unlikable players, but they win the World Series in 2026. Would you be rooting for that team? I wouldn’t.
David Stearns, on the other hand, would.
Now let me ask you a different question – a team with Jacob deGrom, Pete Alonso, Nimmo, Soto, Diaz, etc. wearing different colors than orange and blue wins the World Series. Would you not root them on during the postseason?
Yes, in baseball, we often root for laundry, but we are also nurtured to root for a certain type of laundry. 45,000 people came out to watch David Wright on his last game in September 2018 (with the Mets wearing pinstripes. Sorry, David) not because they were interested in the Mets playing the Marlins, it was because of David.
Now, would Brandon Nimmo attract 45,000 people? No, definitely not. Should you keep every ballplayer you have that is special to your franchise? No. When Wilmer Flores walked, it was rather understandable given the Mets rising talent (McNeil and Alonso, etc.) but there is a balance here.
It’s hard to describe fully, but it almost feels like Stearns doesn’t beat to the same drum as the rest of us.
I would love to be proven wrong, maybe the 35-year-old will do all the right things, visit the FDNY on 9/11, hit a pennant clinching home run, and become a fan favorite. Or maybe he won’t, after all that’s why we watch the games – part of the fun of watching sports is experiencing the good and the bad. But I don’t find enjoyment in blindly rooting for players just because your favorite team is written on the front of their jersey.
One of Shannon’s greatest hits is panning Lindor for his thumbs down antics in 2021 with Javier Baez. Stuff like that doesn’t make me want to spend three hours in the evening turning the baseball game on the next day; I turn the TV on to see the prospect make his debut after I watched him play on the Cyclones in-person three summers ago, to see an all-time great try to break a franchise record, and of course, hopefully see winning baseball in the process.
While teams always have a combination of homegrown and acquired talent, it seems like Cohan year six is going to be smiling and clapping for whoever and whatever.
