The MLB General Manager meetings are being held in Scottsdale, Arizona this week and one very popular GM is the New York Mets’ Brodie Van Wagenen.
BVW, as he is known to some, is coming off a season where his team won 86 games. Not enough to shake things up (even though manager Mickey Callaway was fired after the season) but also not good enough to qualify for the postseason.
One area Van Wagenen knows he has a bullpen issue and is hoping to solve it by adding some new names this offseason. But he’s still confident his signings from last winter are going to play off.
Who is the Mets closer for next season? “We don’t play our first game until the end of March,” Brodie Van Wagenen said.
— Mike Puma (@NYPost_Mets) November 13, 2019
“I think the combination of Edwin Diaz and Jeurys Familia and Seth Lugo and Justin Wilson, we’ve got four guys that have closed games on the major league level,” Van Wagenen told Mike Puma of the NY Post.
Last week, BVW suggested that Lugo could end up in the starting rotation, a concession that he has no intention on bidding for Zach Wheeler in free agency next month.
With a rotation that is headed by Jacob deGrom, Noah Syndergaard, Marcus Stroman and Steven Matz, it doesn’t appear that the Mets are shopping for a starter at the moment. That means they could be looking to snare a big name for the bullpen.
The Mets’ bullpen, particularly Diaz, was downright awful from most of the season with a save percentage of 58% and 27 blown saves that hurt the team’s bottom line. Many of those games were key losses.
The Mets missed the playoffs by three games.