I mentioned nine potential trading partners in my silly little Roy Halladay post yesterday, but I didn’t mention the Mets who, unlike most of those other teams, apparently received and rejected a proposal from the Jays. The rumor comes via TwitterSpeak from Jon Heyman:
#mets rejected request of package of f-mart, niese, parnell and ruben tejada for halladay. #jays
That would be Francisco Martinez, Bobby Parnell, Jon Niese and Ruben Tejada. Which, despite what Mets fans will tell you, is not some elite package or anything. If that’s all it takes to get Halladay, I’m going to have to revise my “Halladay is not going anywhere” mantra.
I’m more interested in this from the Mets’ perspective. I suspect saying no to this means that the Mets are acknowledging the reality of their situation, and that’s that they’re not in the playoff race this year. I further suspect that their saying no means that the Jays are making good on their “no one gets to talk to Halladay about extensions” threat from last week and/or that the Mets don’t have the dough to spend on a Halladay extension. After all, the Mets have to do this deal if they think they’re contenders or if they can be assured of having Halladay around for a while, because really, the requested package is less than they paid to get Johan Santana.
Of course there’s one final possibility: The Mets are simply broke and can’t pay the dude.
UPDATE: OK, maybe all of this is bogus.
(link via BTF)