Mets Open to Long-Term Contracts for Pitchers

Sandy Alderson said Wednesday he is open to signing his young pitchers to long-term contracts.

“When you’re talking about long-term deals with younger players, there needs to be sort of a mutual interest in doing so,” Alderson said after the news conference to formally announce the deal with Yoenis Cespedes. “And typically we find out about that mutual interest a little bit later, closer to spring training or even in spring training. So, we’ll just see if that happens.”

Matt Harvey would be the first target, what with him being the closest to free agency. However, his agent is Scott Boras, and he loves taking his clients into the open market to wring ever last dollar from the process. Jacob deGrom is a definite possibility, while it is probably premature for Zack Wheeler, Noah Syndergaard and Steven Matz.

“We’d love to keep them all, and we just have to make sure that we’re providing for that as we go forward,” Alderson said. “We recognize there’s a ‘quote’ window, but we want to have a sustainable operation beyond that. So this is not about being all in in a three or four-year cycle and then back to bust.”

It would be nice to see the Mets have a sustained period of winning; they have never done that in their history, always going through those boom and bust cycles (more busts than booms, unfortunately).

It is unlikely the Mets, or any team, for that matter, would be able to hold onto five pitchers of this caliber. Let’s hope the Mets make the right decisions, and let’s enjoy this while we can.