Brodie Van Wagenen’s time as Mets General Manager was an unusual baseball experiment that yielded uninspiring results. The former CAA agent replaced Sandy Alderson in October 2018, inheriting a team that already included several of his former clients: Jacob deGrom, Todd Frazier, and Yoenis Céspedes. Transitioning from the agent role to a prominent executive position was unprecedented, raising concerns about whether the move was a conflict of interest.
The handsome, Stanford-educated Van Wagenen was a polished spokesman, and his early press conferences suggested that he was savvy enough to help pull the Mets out of their doldrums. While Van Wagnenen presided over the Mets for their respectable 86-76 finish in 2019, his two years at the helm failed to result in a postseason appearance — even when half the teams in the NL reached the playoffs in 2020’s pandemic-shortened season.
Now that Van Wagnenen has been dismissed by new owner Steve Cohen, we’re left to wonder if he could have built a championship ball club with a few more years to shape the roster. Unfortunately, Van Wagenen’s legacy in Queens is as a GM who sacrificed minor league depth for futile short-term solutions at the big league level.
Van Wagnenen’s most hotly debated move was also his first: his trade for aging All-Star Robinson Canó and closer Edwin Díaz from the Mariners in the winter of 2018. To use a baseball metaphor, Van Wagenen was swinging for the fences, doing everything within his power to demonstrate that this time the Mets were fully embracing a “win now” mentality. The problem was that, in addition to ridding the team of two bad contracts in Jay Bruce and Anthony Swarzak, he also dealt top prospect Jarred Kelenic and two promising pitchers in Gerson Bautista and Justin Dunn.
The Canó-Díaz deal immediately blew up in Van Wagenen’s face. Díaz was disastrous in 2019, blowing save after save and setting a dubious record by allowing 15 ninth-inning home runs. Canó wasn’t much better, and with another four years on his massive contract, his acquisition felt like a noose around the team’s neck. Though both players would rebound with much better performances in 2020, the trade highlighted Van Wagnenen’s worst trait: short-sightedness.
Even a cursory glance at BVW’s transaction history shows that he was far too willing to part with useful minor leaguers for players that made little impact. Rather than signing a player of equal value, for example, he traded two minor leaguers to the Astros for Jake Marisnick — including reliever Blake Taylor, who posted a 2.18 ERA for the Astros in 2020. He gave 23-year-old lefty Kevin Smith to the Orioles for the volatile Miguel Castro, and also dealt three minor leaguers for Keon Broxton, who lasted just 34 games for the 2019 Mets before being designated for assignment. And while it was impossible to predict a global pandemic that would cause Marcus Stroman to opt out of the 2020 season, Van Wagenen traded pitching prospects Anthony Kay and Simeon Woods-Richardson for just 11 Stroman starts.
Perhaps the best defense of Van Wagenen’s tenure is that he did his best to work around the financial constraints imposed by Wilpon ownership. One could certainly argue that, had he been given more payroll flexibility, he could have signed more depth pieces rather than always resorting to the trade market. The problem with Van Wagenen was not that he traded for fourth outfielders and bullpen arms, but that the players he jettisoned — almost all of whom have several years of team control remaining — may prove more valuable than the short-term options they brought back. Brodie is a personable, intelligent man who will land on his feet; unfortunately for him, it’s unlikely he gets another chance to be a general manager.
