Verlander’s Houston Return Cools Cohen’s Spending Fever
The financial purge that began weeks ago when New York Mets owner Steve Cohen traded Eduardo Escobar to the Los Angeles Angels is wrapping up, with Tuesday’s near-deadline deal that sent veteran right-hander Justin Verlander and his big-money contract back to the Houston Astros for a pair of minor leaguers.
The Verlander trade followed Max Scherzer to the Texas Rangers, Dave Robertson to the Miami Marlins and Mark Canha to the Milwaukee Brewers, as Cohen tries to pare down the club’s record $345.6 million payroll.
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Verlander left the World Series champion Astros after last season as a free agent, signing a two-year guaranteed deal with the Mets for $86.7 million. Cohen was still on the hook for the $14.4 million owed to Verlander for the final two months of this season and $43.3 for next season, a total of $57.7 million. Cohen was also liable for a vesting option based on performance clauses for the 2025 season worth $35 million.
No more.
Mets general manager Billy Eppler said he told both Scherzer and Verlander that the immediate goal in 2024 may not be to win the World Series. All the big spending hasn’t worked. When told that, both players waived their no-trade clauses to go to teams that are currently competitive.
“You have to go through some pain to get where we want to go,” Eppler said during a Zoom call on Tuesday evening. “I think by doing all these things we’re making strides toward a better future. Going into 2024 we don’t see us having the same [preseason] odds [to win it all] we did in 2022-23. But we will field a competitive team.”
With Scherzer and Verlander off the books, the Mets now have just $179.9 million committed to players for the 2024 season. Their highest-paid player projects as shortstop Francisco Lindor, earning $33.8 million of his 10-year, $341 million contract that lasts through 2031.
Scherzer and Verlander were each earning $43.3 million a year in guaranteed money. Verlander threw his 250th career victory Sunday for the Mets as he heads to toward 300. No. 251 will come for Houston after his trade back to the Astros.
To divest himself of Scherzer, Cohen paid $36 million of the $59 million the right-hander is still owed. He bought high on Scherzer, signing him to a two-year deal that included a third-year player option worth $130 million after the 2021 season. He sold low, getting Luisangel Acuña, the 21-year-old brother of Atlanta Braves superstar Ronald Acuña Jr., for the 39-year-old Scherzer.
Texas agreed to absorb about $23 million of the money owed to Scherzer. It’s being reported that the Mets will similarly eat a good portion of the money on Verlander’s deal. According to the New York Post, if Verlander pitches 140 innings next season and ends 2024 healthy, that will trigger his 2025 option, meaning the Mets will owe $52.5 million total to the Astros. That is $35 million for the next two years and half of his 2025 option.
In return for Verlander, the Mets obtained two outfield prospects—Drew Gilbert, Houston’s top-rated minor leaguer, and Ryan Clifford—to beef up a depleted farm system.
“This allows us to allocate some of those resources to building that farm system,” Eppler said. “That’s the ultimate goal. We’re just trying to restock.”
The Mets, at 50-55, trail the first-place Atlanta Braves in the National League East by 17 1/2 games. They are also six games in arrears of the last of three NL Wild Card spots with four teams ahead of them.
Cohen, who’s worth $17.5 billion, does everything with a splash. He bought the Mets in late 2020 at the height of the pandemic for a record $2.4 billion and promised big things in his quest to overtake the crosstown Yankees. That’s a difficult task considering the Yanks own 27 World Series titles while the Mets have two, the last in 1986.
The owner’s brief tenure has included the signings of Lindor, Kodai Senga, Brandon Nimmo, Edwin Diaz, Scherzer and Verlander, among others, to contracts worth hundreds of million dollars.
Last year, his second owning the team, the Mets led the Braves by seven games in the NL East as late as Aug. 10, but lost that lead for good when the Braves swept them in a three-game series at Atlanta the final weekend of the regular season.
Subsequently, the Mets lost a Wild Card Series at home in three games to the Padres.
Cohen kept spending, but nothing has gone right since then, leading to this trade deadline purge.
“Clearly the season didn’t work out as planned,” Eppler said. “There were high expectations and we looked good on paper. But it didn’t translate to consistent wins.”
(This story was updated throughout to add quotes from Eppler.)
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