Hold off on grading the Yoenis Cespedes and Carlos Gomez trades

When the history of 2015 is written, when the confetti is swept up and the championship T-shirts are all sold, we’ll get a chance to reflect on all the special baseball stories and sort them in order of importance. There’s a chance that Yoenis Cespedes will be upstaged by another team’s championship run, or even by a teammate on his own team’s championship run (“What Madison Bumgarner did last year was cool, but what Matt Harvey did in those last three games of this World Series, boy ...”) Regardless of exactly what happens, though, Cespedes is already one of the biggest stories of the season. He’s already in the collage on the cover of the 2015 book.

In the back of that book, under a picture of security chasing a squirrel around a field, there’s a chance that Carlos Gomez’s name will appear under a heading of “Also Appeared.” There might not be a picture of an Astros player on the cover, even though they were the best Horatio Alger story for five of the six regular season months. The perennially awful Astros were good again, don’t you get it? They were blowing the division away. What a story.

The Mets since acquiring Cespedes: 32-17

The Astros since acquiring Gomez: 22-28

Which means by my calculations, Cespedes is worth 10 WAR. Let me know if my math is wrong in the comments.

You don’t want to pin all of the success or blame on either player, but there’s certainly some correlation. Cespedes is a renegade MVP candidate for the kids experimenting with narrative at college for the first time, and Gomez has hit .234/.282/.379 for the Astros, making some poorly timed errors along the way. Now he’s hurt.

Normally, this sort of woulda-coulda-shoulda would be pointless. “What if team acquired other player.” Except in this case, the Mets really did almost have Gomez instead of Cespedes. The players were agreed upon. There was a dude crying on the field because the Mets were being weird, and then they doubled-down on the weird by finding a hip problem with Gomez that no one else was really worried about. It was so easy to laugh at the Mets on July 30. Except they made a brilliant series of decisions to get them where they are, primed to win the NL East.

Now imagine a big red button in the middle of a room. It’s labeled “Trade Deadline Reverse Button.” It does exactly what you think it does. In this otherwise empty room, someone places Mets GM Sandy Alderson and Astros GM Jeff Luhnow, then locks the door behind them. The situation would be one man trying to push the button, and one man trying to prevent him from pushing the button. There are cameras. There’s pay-per-view. You would watch and put your money on the ex-Marine. But if the Astros could turn back time and end up with Cespedes instead of Gomez, they might claw through another human being to get there.

Hold on, though. We’re at a funny point in the baseball season. Right now, the Mets are up and Cespedes is a hero, and everything is great. Right now, the Astros are down, Gomez is a bust, and everything is ruined. But in the next six weeks, entirely new narratives will emerge, stronger than the ones that preceded them. Every postseason surprises, annoys, devastates, and uplifts. And it almost always makes us forget whatever we were thinking about on Sept. 24.

What we’re thinking on Sept. 24 is that the Mets are lucky to have Cespedes, and the Astros were unlucky to get Gomez. That might be how we’ll always feel. It sure looks that way right now. But it’s also worth remembering a larger truth: Carlos Gomez is still probably a slightly better baseball player than Yoenis Cespedes.

If healthy! There can’t be a bigger caveat than that, and it’s implied with every sentence until the end of the article. The Mets didn’t like what they saw with Gomez, and for as much guff as they get for their odd injury history, it’s still reasonable to assume that they weren’t freaking out over a smudge on the X-ray. If healthy, though, Gomez is almost certainly better at baseball. This is a point that shouldn’t be overlooked in the postseason, and it shouldn’t be overlooked next year.

The two are similar players, really. Both have 20-plus home run power, and both are extremely aggressive hitters who aren’t worried so much about striking out. They’re both tools monsters with similar offensive profiles. The difference is that Gomez runs a tick better and plays a better outfield. If healthy.

Right now if I’m drafting a team for the rest of 2015, I’ll take Cespedes over Gomez, don’t get me wrong. There’s the chance that the 20-homer power has morphed into sustainable 30- or even 40-homer power, and that “if healthy” caveat doesn’t apply. This all isn’t to suggest that the Mets should be pining for Gomez. It’s to remind you that there’s still a lot of time for these particular deadline crossroads to be remembered in a very, very different light.

The postseason is cruel and unforgiving, except to the teams and players to whom it’s kind and welcoming. One hot series, one LCS MVP, one big postseason hit, and suddenly Gomez is the best Astros acquisition since Jeff Bagwell. That’s one way the Gomez/Cespedes sliding doors can still favor the Astros, but also remember that Gomez is under contract for next year. The Astros will have all next season to reclaim some value from their bold move. And either the Mets will be without Cespedes, or they’ll have him on a ghastly long-term contract that won’t make sense. Not unless they decide to spend like a real New York team when building around a big-ticket Cespedes salary.

That button looks like an obvious push for the Astros right now, and it makes sense for Alderson to want to keep things the way they are. I’ll set a reminder, though, for Sept. 24, 2016, and revisit what Button Thunderdome looks like in a year. It might be Luhnow trying to stop Alderson from pushing it.

Right now, the story of 2015 has a lot to do with the different paths of two teams after they acquired similar outfielders. Don’t assume it’s the story we’ll still be telling in 10 years, though. There’s a lot of time left, even if there are just a dozen games remaining in the regular season.