For the second straight offseason, Yoenis Cespedes surveyed the free-agent market, weighed his options and decided he was best off returning to Queens. And boy are the Mets glad he did.
Per Fox’s Ken Rosenthal, the slugging outfielder has agreed to a deal with the Mets worth $110 million over four years, preserving the core of the 2015-16 Mets and setting up the 2017 iteration to contend for an NL East title.
This signing was an absolute necessity for the Mets, who limped into the Wild Card Game last year despite a shaky, homer-dependent offense and a battered pitching staff. What had once seemed like an up-and-coming roster destined for a decade of playoff appearances suddenly looked like an aging group with enough injury questions to fill a medical handbook. During the worst moments of 2016, the Mets’ run as title contenders appeared just about over, only a year after it had begun.
The Cespedes signing does not fix all the Mets’ woes—they still could trot out an Opening Day lineup featuring no position player under 30 years old—but it does hold them in place as a potential playoff team with the chance to be more than that. Without Cespedes, this was a team with a rotation full of lottery tickets and a lineup full of cast-offs. With Cespedes, the lineup looks passable, good enough that if Matt Harvey, Noah Syndergaard and Jacob deGrom can stay healthy, the pitchers’ efforts won’t go to waste.
Cespedes’ contract certainly comes with risks for the Mets. Though Cespedes was the Mets’ best hitter in 2016 and should be their best hitter in 2017, there’s no guarantee he maintains the .282/.348/.554 slash line he has put up in a season and a half in Queens at age 31, let alone 34. And with his speed and defense already diminished from a couple years ago, Cespedes should only become more one-dimensional as this contract progresses. There’s also the question of whether signing Cespedes long-term will hinder, or even halt, the development of Michael Conforto, whom the Mets seem to have mis-managed from a budding star into a bust.
But those concerns are all secondary, because with the injury concerns in the rotation, plus Harvey’s impending free agency, the Mets’ time to win is now. If the only way to sign the best player on the market was to give him the second highest average annual value of any position player in baseball history, so be it. The Mets needed Yoenis Cespedes, and on Tuesday they made sure they got him.