Trading Harvey becomes an Amazin’ victory
CINCINNATI — For Matt Harvey, this is a good-news, bad-news, worse-news scenario. The good: the Reds are an awful team with an abysmal starting rotation. There will be plenty of opportunity here. There are plenty of innings available for a starting pitcher trying to prove he’s still a starting pitcher.
The bad: The 2018 Reds are worse, far worse, than even the 2012 and 2013 Mets teams in which Harvey cut his teeth, and they play in a stadium, Great American Ball Park, which is a hitter’s paradise. And for a guy who had grown so vulnerable to the long ball, this isn’t exactly ideal office space.
The worse: Have you ever tried to find a good time after midnight in Cincinnati? (Actually, upon further review, maybe that’s one you can file into the “win” column for Harvey, who could probably use more nights at home.) For the Mets, who traded Harvey to the Reds for Devin Mesoraco about an hour before getting slapped around by the worst team in baseball, 7-2? Look, they aren’t receiving the Mesoraco of 2014, when he was an All-Star, when he finished 21st in the MVP balloting, when, at age 26 he looked on the verge of becoming one of the best catchers in the game, hitting .273 with 25 homers and 80 RBIs. That was one year after he (along with Todd Frazier and Jay Bruce) helped lead the Reds to their last winning season, 90-72, and an NL play-in game loss to the Pirates. But, then, the Reds aren’t receiving the Harvey of 2013. And it’s a sad little irony, isn’t it? All those nights early in his career when Harvey lit up Citi Field and so many thought they were seeing the second coming of Tom Seaver? Seaver wound up being traded to the Reds, too. It’s unlikely May 8, 2018 will resonate for decades the way that June 15, 1977 still does for Mets fans, unless you’re talking about whatever lingering regret exists in the minds of those fans for what Harvey’s career in Flushing was supposed to be and how it ultimately wound up.
As much as it was clear the Harvey-Mets marriage dissolved as it should have, it does remain shocking to see it end this way. Remember, it was as recently as 2015 when there was a legitimate debate among baseball people — though it never got close to consummation between the clubs — if the Mets and Red Sox should swap Harvey for Mookie Betts.
Betts is a perennial MVP stalwart in Boston now, and he won’t be going anywhere for a decade, if ever. Instead, Harvey yields Mesoraco, and on one hand that seems like manna from heaven — the Mets are beyond desperate for a professional catcher, and the very notion that there were teams willing to bid against each other for Harvey’s services given his profound struggles does feel like an enormous win for the Mets.
Still, when you look at Mesoraco’s baseball plight since that wonderful 2014, it reads like something out of the Travis d’Arnaud Blueprint — only worse. In 2015 his season ended after only 23 games because he needed hip surgery. In 2016 he was limited to 16 games thanks to a torn labrum in his left shouder. And in 2017 he was hit by a pitch in the left foot, ending his season at 56 games.
In truth, as popular as Mesoraco was with Reds fans, he became very much a symbol of franchise frustration — similar to Harvey, in fact — because after his breakout year in ’14 he signed a four-year, $28 million contract ($13 million of it remains, of which the Reds will pay the full freight) and his numbers for the life of that contract have been startling: 277 atbats total, seven homers, 20 RBIs, a slash line of .197/.291/.318, an OPS+ of 63.
“When he’s healthy he’s still a productive player,” Mets assistant GM J.P. Ricciardi said, and loosely translated that means: despite all of it he’s a clear step up from the two-headed catching monster of Tomas Nido and Jose Lobaton that has helped reduce the lower third of Mets’ lineup to a black hole for over a month.
Mesoraco looked at it a different way: “I picked up an extra 15 or 20 wins.”
Actually, after Tuesday’s grotesque loss, it’s really just nine. Though the Mets, on a day when they needed some form of good news, got some. The Harvey Era is officially over. Everyone can get on with their lives now.