MIAMI, : New York Met's catcher Mike Piazza (L) is greeted at the plate by teammates Edgardo ... [+]
The Mets awarding Max Scherzer the most lucrative contract in Major League Baseball history — at least in terms of average annual value — has yielded a bit of harmless revisionist history from fans and observers accustomed to watching the Wilpon-era Mets spend their winters shopping the cutout bins instead of investing in the highest-end talent possible.
But Steve Cohen is not the first Mets owner to write a check that reverberated throughout the industry. Scherzer’s three-year, $130 million deal — which gives Scherzer an average annual value of $43.3 million, shattering the previous high AAV established two winters ago by Gerrit Cole ($36 million) — marks the third time the Mets have, by at least one measure, handed out the richest contract in baseball history. (The hedging is necessary because Bryce Harper also has a pretty good case for declaring himself the recipient of baseball’s richest contract)
It’s also the fifth time they have set the market with a free agent player. And then there’s the four times they were Forrest Gump-ian background characters in negotiations that yielded another player the biggest contract in history from a rival team.
The good news is Scherzer doesn’t have a high bar to clear in order to make a case as no worse than the second-best big investment in Mets history. Of course, that's also the bad news…which began right away!
Bobby Bonilla (signed a five-year deal worth $29 million on Dec. 2, 1991): The Mets, having broken up the 1986-88 core way too soon and flailing after a franchise-record streak of seven winning seasons ended in 1991, didn’t just make Bonilla the richest player in baseball history, they made him the richest athlete in AMERICAN history. Bonilla’s deal average annual value of $5.8 million per year nudged out the $5.5 million per year Patrick Ewing was due to make in a contract extension he’d inked with the Knicks fewer than two weeks earlier. It seemed to be a pretty good investment on a player fresh off back-to-back top-3 MVP finishes. Upon signing the deal, Bonilla said all the right things, emphasizing his status as a native New Yorker and his easy-going, big-smile personality. But it turned out Bonilla was a classic second fiddle — in this case to Barry Bonds, who shattered Bonilla’s record by signing a six-year, $43 million deal with the Giants following the 1992 season — who wasn’t equipped to be the star, especially in New York. While Bonilla put up decent numbers in the Big Apple (he hit .278 with 91 homers and 277 RBIs before being traded to the Orioles in July 1995), his performance was overshadowed by the Mets’ poor performance and Bonilla’s inability to handle the game’s biggest market. It wasn’t great, but at least the Mets weren’t on the hook for annual $1.2 million payments into the 2030s. (That came upon the end of their second stint together!)
Mike Piazza (signed a seven-year deal worth $91 million on Oct. 26, 1998): The Bonilla experience (as well as the Eddie Murray and Vince Coleman free agency experiences) wounded the Mets, who stayed out of the high-end talent market and seemed content with the 88-win ceiling displayed in Bobby Valentine’s first full season as manager in 1997. That all changed in one wild week in May 1998, when Nelson Doubleday took to the airwaves to declare that Fred Wilpon and Steve Phillips were wrong (he surely enjoyed publicly disagreeing with one more than the other) and that the Mets should in fact acquire Piazza even though they already had Todd Hundley. Piazza seemed shell-shocked for most of his first summer with the Mets and still sounds sometimes as if re-signing with the Mets was a fate he had to endure, but his tenure with the Mets was an unqualified success that featured one World Series and 220 homers, including perhaps the most famous one in New York City history. Piazza went into the Hall of Fame wearing a Mets hat in 2016 and has seamlessly moved into the dignified role of greatest living Met following the death of Tom Seaver. Scherzer’s advanced age and his standing as the the Nationals’ likely inaugural Hall of Fame representative means it will be tough for him to top Piazza’s legacy, but becoming their second-best big signing ever will be a perfectly fine outcome for the Mets.
Ken Griffey Jr. (signed a nine-year, $116.5 million deal with the Reds on Feb. 10, 2000)/Mike Hampton (signed an eight-year, $121 million deal with the Rockies on Dec. 12, 2000)/Manny Ramirez (signed an eight-year $160 million deal with the Red Sox on Dec. 19, 2000)/Alex Rodriguez (signed a 10-year, $252 million deal with the Rangers on Jan. 26, 2001): Let's just group all the Mets’ Forrest Gump-ian experiences into one graph, shall we? Phillips tried acquiring Griffey following the 1999 season, but the superstar centerfielder had no interest in playing in New York. Phillips did acquire Hampton in December 1999, but Hampton parlayed a strong season in New York into that record deal in Colorado and the infamous quote in which Hampton said one of the reasons he signed with the Rockies was to keep his children in the same school system year-round. That yielded this classic retort from Sandy Alderson, who was then an executive vice president with MLB: “It’s a lot of money. Case closed. I don’t want to hear about the Wheat Ridge school system.” Ramirez then supplanted Hampton as baseball’s highest-paid player a mere four years before he almost got traded to the Mets (and five years before he almost got traded there again). All those deals were couch change compared to the deal Rodriguez got from the Rangers more than two months after the Mets, who were supposedly his favorite childhood team and the one he wanted to join in free agency, declared they were out of negotiations because Rodriguez wanted a bevy of perks. Will Scherzer be getting a marketing office?
Johan Santana (signed a six-year, $137.5 million deal on Feb. 2, 2008): The Mets, fresh off their epic September collapse and just before the Bernie Madoff scandal permanently changed their finances, outbid the Red Sox and Yankees to acquire Santana from the Twins and then signed him to the biggest contract ever given to a pitcher. Santana posted a 3.18 ERA with the Met and generated two of the all-time great moments in team history — his shutout on three days rest in the penultimate game of the 2008 season, which kept the Mets in the playoff hunt, and of course his iconic no-hitter on June 1, 2012. But Santana, who missed the 2011 season with a shoulder injury, made just 11 more starts after the no-hitter before his career was ended by another shoulder injury. It’s still a Mets Hall of Fame-caliber tenure for Santana, and it’ll be a pretty good sign for the Mets if Scherzer makes 88 starts in the next three years — as many as Santana made in his first three years with New York.
Yoenis Cespedes (signed a four-year, $110 million deal on Nov. 30, 2016): This deal stretches our already loose definition of the richest contract in baseball — Cespedes merely tied the record for the highest AAV earned by a free agent — but it’s notable enough to include given what a departure it was under the Wilpons, who operated the Mets in a decidedly austere fashion post-recession. Re-upping Cespedes for the long-term felt like a huge victory at the time for the franchise, which was jolted to life by Cespedes’ trade deadline acquisition in 2015 and made the World Series that fall before qualifying for the NL wild card game in 2016. But Cespedes played in just 119 games the next two years due to a variety of lower body injuries before missing all of 2019 recovering from heel surgeries and an encounter with a wild boar on his farm (really). Things got even weirder in 2020, when Cespedes homered for the game’s only run on Opening Day before bolting the team a mere nine days later, never to be seen again. It should also be the last time the Mets’ fortunes — literally — will ever be so dependent on a single highly-paid player.
