New York Mets: Trading Seth Lugo would be a mistake

Seth Lugo was the lone bright spot in an otherwise unimpressive 2018 New York Mets bullpen, so, of course, they’re probably going to trade him.

Last year the Mets had one of the worst bullpens in baseball. They finished the season with a bullpen ERA of 4.96, which put them in front of only the bullpens of the Marlins and Royals; that’s not exactly great company.

So far this offseason they’ve made some solid moves to correct this, acquiring two of baseball’s premier relievers by trading for Edwin Diaz and signing Jeurys Familia. This pair will bring some consistent late inning relief to the team, but don’t totally fix the bullpen problem; there’s still plenty of holes that need to be filled with quality middle and long relief pitchers.

One current Met who can help out with this is Seth Lugo. Lugo had a great 2018, finishing the year with a 2.66 ERA and 103 Ks in 101.1 innings pitched, and was versatile enough to make a few decent spot starts when injuries ravaged the Mets rotation. Lugo’s going to be 29 next year and is under team control until 2022, so you might think that he’d be a lock to be part of the bullpen rebuild.

Well, maybe not. Check out this tweet sent out on Saturday by Marc Craig of the Athletic:

So, there’s nothing set in stone here; we don’t even fully have a handle on who the Astros would send to the Mets or what the Mets would ask for Lugo. Still, for Mets fans this is something to worry about.

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GM Brodie Van Wagenen’s pick up of Robinson Cano was pretty universally viewed as a “win now” move; Brodie sent some of the Mets top prospects to Seattle to acquire a veteran who may only have two or three good years left, which isn’t something you do if you’re thinking in the long term.

Lugo fits perfectly into this win now attitude. After some 2017 growing pains he showed major improvement last season, jacking the max velocity on his fastball up from 91.97 MPH to 94.91 MPH. This was an improvement that was necessary if Lugo wanted his stuff to play against big league hitters, and the results showed that.

Because batters now have more reason to worry about Lugo’s fastball his breaking stuff had a major improvement in effectiveness, and the batting average of opponents facing his curveball fell from .288 in 2017 to .181 in 2018, a difference of more than .100. This came while he almost doubled his usage of the pitch.

This change in repertoire shows that Lugo’s improvement last year has clear cause, and isn’t a fluke; if he works this offseason to improve his sinker alongside his fastball he’ll have a pretty dominant three pitch mix next year, and because he’s under team control for so long the Mets likely aren’t going to find a reliever of similar quality for similar money.

David Robertson, a free agent reliever some have speculated the Mets could replace Lugo with, wants something like $25 million for two years. Lugo probably won’t get more than $1 million in arbitration this year, so that would be financially ludicrous.

If the Mets are serious about contending next year they need to build a core of middle relievers around Lugo, not cast him to the side. Moving him would just create another hole that would be expensive to fill, taking away money that could go to the outfield free agent the Mets desperately need.

Unless the New York Mets can get some major league level outfield talent from a deal with the Astros, this thing should be a no go.