Mets Aggressively Pursued Francisco Lindor
Ken Rosenthal of The Athletic reports that the New York Mets aggressively pursued a Francisco Lindor trade with the Cleveland Indians this past offseason at the Winter Meetings in December.
According to Rosenthal, the price tag to acquire Lindor from Cleveland would have been Amed Rosario plus two of the Mets’ top prospects.
MLB Pipeline currently has three Mets prospects in their top 100 list with Ronny Mauricio (80th), Brett Baty (81st), and Andres Gimenez (92nd) listed. Matthew Allan and Francisco Alvarez likely were prospects discussed in that tier as well.
Lindor, 26, has been one of the premier shortstops in the game over the last five years and 2019 was no different as he hit .284/.335/.518 with 32 home runs, 74 RBI, and 22 stolen bases to give himself a 114 wRC+ and 4.4 fWAR. His best season was in 2018 when he had a 130 wRC+ and 7.6 fWAR.
In addition, he’s proven to be one of the elite defenders in baseball as he registered 11 OAA at shortstop in 2019.
If the Mets acquired him, they would have had two years of team control with the switch hitter making $17.5 million in 2020 before his final season of arbitration in 2021.
The presence of Rosario probably gave the team less incentive to make a deal of this magnitude as he is still set to make the league minimum in 2020 and is under team control through the 2023 season, with his first season of arbitration being in 2021.
Rosario, 24, is coming off the best year of his career to date as he hit .287/.323/.432 with 15 home runs, 72 RBI, and 19 stolen bases. That gave him a 100 wRC+ and 2.7 fWAR on the year.
Defensively, he had -6 OAA at shortstop, which is arguably the biggest separator between himself and Lindor.
However, Rosario showed significant improvement on both offense and defense throughout the season, especially in the second half.
After having only a .713 OPS and 88 wRC+ in the first half, Rosario registered a .804 OPS and 114 wRC+ in the second half. At shortstop, he went from having -6 OAA just in the month of April to +3 OAA combined between the months of August and September as detailed by Mike Petriello of MLB.com.
