Max Scherzer frustrated some Mets fans on Tuesday when he told reporters that Mets brass made it clear to him that 2024 would be a year of transition in Queens, and his now former team wouldn't expect to compete until 2025, or more likely 2026.
Asked about Scherzer's comments after Tuesday's trade deadline, Mets GM Billy Eppler did hint that 2024 would likely be a step back, but that the Mets still planned on fielding a competitive team.
"Any of the conversations I had with him leading into his last start as a Met, and any conversations after, I want to honor those conversations we had, and I don't want to talk about them publicly," Eppler said. "I did state with a lot of you, when we were talking about it, that going into 2024, we wouldn't have the same odds that we did going into 2022 or 2023…but I articulated that going into 2024, we don't see ourselves having the same odds that we did in 2022, 2023. But we will field a competitive team in 2024.
"Now is a time where we start to think about what opportunities can exist in the winter time, what resources we will have at our disposal, and put our best foot forward."
In selling off pieces like Scherzer, Justin Verlander, and David Robertson, the Mets were able to replenish their farm system in a matter of days. It will take years for those prospects to reach the majors, but Eppler is now preparing to "organically" build a winner in New York, though not by way of a prolonged rebuild.
"To get to the sustainability that we always talk about, we were gonna have to do that organically," Eppler said. "There's lots of ways to do that, and some of the traditional ways have been when teams, for lack of a better word, tanked, and put themselves at the top of the draft order every single year. That can take five, six, seven years to do, and we don't want to endure that. We don't think you have to endure long stretches of that to build something sustainable. That's ultimately what our goal is, to build that sustainability."
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