“Atlanta needs an outfielder.” “The Nationals need a bat.”
A trio of teams in the NL East sits four and four and a half games back of the Mets entering play today. None has a playoff probability, per FanGraphs, higher than 13.1%. At least two of the three are getting tossed about as trade deadline buyers.
To be fair, it’s early, and if you’re these teams and you want your players to feel good about their chances you leak rumors about you trying to buy. It’s a harmless, smart thing to do. You can even have buying discussions, and if you can find a buying deal you love at this point, you make that deal, with the plan being to sell what you’ve acquired in three weeks if things haven’t gone to plan.
But realistically, unless the Mets have a terribly difficult time against the…*checks schedule*…Pirates and…*doublechecks that the schedule’s built this way*…Pirates over the next week and a half, the picture, at best (for these teams), is going to look very similar to how it looks right now when discussions really start ramping up. The Mets are flawed, but part of that is a cosmic thing, they’re the best team in that division, they’ve got a comfortable-enough lead, and even if they do start to fall apart, there’s only a one-in-three shot that any of these individual teams is the one that catches the bouquet. None even has a winning record right now.
We’ll see if this narrative corrects itself, and it’s possible the teams in question will do something dumb and chase ghosts (which seems like something the Cardinals could do), but for the time being, there are five buyers in the National League, and these three teams are none of them (Reds aren’t either but they at least control their situation a little this weekend).
