Culture
Mets shouldn't be buyers. They should be aggressive buyers at the deadline
NEW YORK — On Wednesday, in discussing how his bullpen plans shift moment to moment over a nine-inning game, Carlos Mendoza chuckled at the idea of forming a pregame plan and sticking to it.
“I don’t know that there’s ever a time you come up with a game plan and stick to it,” the Mets manager said. “Every time you make an adjustment because the game unfolds. … You have an idea, but then you have to make adjustments.”
Perhaps Mendoza’s boss, David Stearns, should take that advice when it comes to this season.
The Mets entered 2024 with a clear, consistent plan from ownership down to the clubhouse. While they did not possess the high expectations of previous spring trainings, they thought they could be legitimate contenders for the postseason while preserving a sustained window of contention in the future. And here they are, days ahead of the trade deadline, as legitimate contenders for the postseason who have preserved a sustained window of contention in the future.
But after another memorable win Thursday night, a walk-off 3-2 victory over Atlanta that felt like the inverse of so many nightmarish nights at Turner Field, maybe it’s time for Stearns and the New York front office to get a little greedy about 2024. Yes, the Mets are going to be buyers at the trade deadline. But let’s make a case for the Mets to do more than add a reliever in the next week, a case for the Mets to be aggressive buyers like they last were en route to an unexpected pennant in 2015.
The Mets are good enough
Let’s do some blind resumes for teams on the morning of July 26 over the years.
Blind resumes
Team
|
W
|
L
|
Pct.
|
RD
|
NL Rank
|
GB of Playoffs
|
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
A |
56 |
46 |
0.549 |
85 |
5 |
— |
B |
55 |
47 |
0.539 |
9 |
T5 |
— |
C |
55 |
47 |
0.539 |
49 |
T3 |
— |
D |
54 |
48 |
0.529 |
23 |
5 |
— |
E |
50 |
46 |
0.521 |
46 |
7 |
0.5 |
F |
48 |
51 |
0.485 |
36 |
10 |
6 |
OK, blindfolds off! What do those pretty similar teams all have in common? They all won the pennant.
NL pennant-winners (plus the Mets)
Team
|
W
|
L
|
Pct.
|
RD
|
NL Rank
|
GB of Playoffs
|
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
56 |
46 |
0.549 |
85 |
5 |
— |
|
55 |
47 |
0.539 |
9 |
T5 |
— |
|
55 |
47 |
0.539 |
49 |
T3 |
— |
|
54 |
48 |
0.529 |
23 |
5 |
— |
|
50 |
46 |
0.521 |
46 |
7 |
0.5 |
|
48 |
51 |
0.485 |
36 |
10 |
6 |
They were also pretty aggressive at the trade deadline. I classified the 2018 Dodgers (Manny Machado) and 2022 Phillies (David Robertson, Brandon Marsh and Noah Syndergaard) as All-in Buyers — teams that surrendered significant prospect capital for the present. The 2019 Nationals added three relievers, including the guy who would record the final out of the World Series. In 2021, Atlanta brought in four outfielders, including the NLCS and World Series MVPs. In 2023, Arizona dealt for a closer to better position itself for the postseason.
(For what it’s worth, the 2015 Mets, another All-in Buyer, were 50-48 with a negative-seven run differential on July 26.)
No, the Mets lack the kind of rotation and bullpen you generally rely on to carry you in October. However, New York possesses an offense that appears built for the postseason. As evidenced by its bashing of Gerrit Cole twice in the last month, the Mets’ lineup can go deep with the best of them. Only Baltimore has hit more homers since the Mets’ hot streak started May 30, and they’re tied for fourth in the majors in homers on the season — ahead of everyone but the Dodgers in the National League. On Thursday, New York was in the game against a dominant Chris Sale because Francisco Lindor turned one Sale mistake into two Mets runs.
Homers carry offenses come October. The similarly productive but differently constituted offense in 2022 tied for 15th in the league in home runs, then watched Atlanta and San Diego outhomer it in the biggest games of the season. This Mets offense can swing a short series with its power.
The National League is open
Here’s an important caveat: If I covered the Pirates or the Reds or the Padres or the Diamondbacks, I’d probably be making the exact same case. Because the National League is as open as it’s been in years.
Los Angeles and Atlanta have been the two best teams in the senior circuit for the last several seasons. Both are enduring more turbulent regular seasons than they’re accustomed to. The Dodgers continue to have health questions about their rotation, a dynamic that doomed them last October. Atlanta’s best hitter and best pitcher are out for the season. Its lineup looks like a shell of what the Mets are used to confronting.
While the Phillies have taken the mantle of the NL’s team to beat, they’re a team the Mets are pretty good at beating. They memorably went 14-5 against Philadelphia in 2022, and even during a down 2023 went 6-7 against it. This year, the Mets are 2-4 against the Phillies. And remarkably, since the start of the 2022 season, New York is 10-3 when facing either Aaron Nola or Zack Wheeler.
The timing actually clicks
It’s really tempting for teams to try manipulating their window of contention — to be cautious this year to put more eggs in a basket down the line. In doing so, however, they often miss the year to win.
The 2015 Mets could have been more cautious: Syndergaard and Steven Matz were rookies, Wheeler was hurt, the NL had several very good teams — surely the Mets’ best chance to advance in October would be down the road? As it turns out, that young rotation was never as healthy or as dominant as it was right then and there, and the Mets’ aggressiveness paid off in a pennant.
(Contrast that with the 2013-2015 Pirates, who never made the big move to push a very good team over the top. They still haven’t won a postseason series since 1979.)
For the Mets, it’s also fair to ask: What year, specifically, are they waiting for? Injuries to some key prospects this year mean New York won’t head into spring training 2025 planning to give an everyday spot to a talented rookie. The full incorporation of guys like Jett Williams, Drew Gilbert, Luisangel Acuña and Ryan Clifford won’t happen until 2026 — by which point Lindor will be 32 and Brandon Nimmo 33, on the outskirts of their primes.
The goal is to open a sustained window of contention and pounce on legitimate opportunities to win divisions, pennants and championships. The Mets are there. The two players they have signed long-term are having career-best years. Their cornerstone first baseman might not be here next year.
The window of contention is already open.
What does this mean?
Let’s be honest: This is where most columns like this end. There’s all that reasoning for going for it, now it’s Stearns’ job to turn that into something.
But I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention that the current shape of the deadline market makes it difficult to go for it. Teams like the Pirates and Reds and Padres and Diamondbacks are all still in it in the National League, and the number of sellers is tinier than usual. The best starter likely to be traded may not be able to start much more this season. The best reliever likely to be traded has a walk rate you wouldn’t comfortably hit on in blackjack.
It’s harder to provide the kind of blueprint for the deadline that I do for the offseason because acquisition costs in trades are so much more difficult to project than open-market salaries. So I’ll settle for suggestions that would fit more of an all-in approach.
1. Engage the White Sox on Garrett Crochet with the understanding you’d be acquiring him to pitch out of the bullpen in 2024. The Athletic reported Thursday that Crochet would prefer to stay on a starter’s schedule (albeit with limited innings) down the stretch of this season unless an acquiring team signs him to a contract extension.
As I outlined Thursday morning, the Mets could use a long-term ace. Here’s a 25-year-old left-handed All-Star who leads the league in strikeouts and is interested in a long-term extension. Those all feel like good things. (Like Wheeler, Crochet’s likely arbitration salaries for the next two seasons will be suppressed by his lack of availability up to this point in his career. Thus, a long-term extension would cost less against the luxury tax than it might otherwise.)
Trade for Crochet, extend him and make him a multi-inning reliever with scheduled appearances the rest of the way. Imagine him coming in behind your right-handed starters in the postseason and serving as a one-man bridge to Edwin Díaz. Put him back in the rotation in 2025 and beyond. That might be worth the significant package of prospects it would require, as it would mean the Mets wouldn’t have to dive into the deep end of the starting pitching market this winter for a free agent already in his 30s.
2. If Crochet proves too much, combine a rotation upgrade — chiefly, a pitcher who misses more bats than the current starters — with two additions in the pen and one to the bench.
In the rotation, Detroit’s Jack Flaherty and Toronto’s Yusei Kikuchi come to mind. Flaherty will cost a good amount, but he too could become a viable option to re-sign.
For the bullpen, one high-leverage lefty should be the priority. Scroll past Tanner Scott to his teammate Andrew Nardi or to The Athletic’s years-long target Andrew Chafin of the Tigers. Another multi-inning arm could help keep the group fresh, as well. Cincinnati’s Buck Farmer or Detroit’s Alex Faedo could work there.
The final piece would be a versatile bench contributor who could protect the Mets against regression or injury at a few different positions. Detroit’s Andy Ibañez, Tampa Bay’s Amed Rosario, Toronto’s Isiah Kiner-Falefa and Oakland’s Abraham Toro could fit that role.
(Photo of José Buttó: Adam Hunger / Getty Images)
Culture
How Silence Improves Pico Iyer’s Life
Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | How to Listen
For decades, starting in 1991 after his house in Santa Barbara burned to the ground, the travel writer and essayist Pico Iyer has taken regular silent retreats at a Benedictine monastery in Northern California as a way to recharge himself through solitude. He writes about those retreats, and the lessons they’ve imparted, in his new book, “Aflame: Learning From Silence.”
Iyer joins us on the podcast this week to talk about his new memoir and his life’s journeys.
“I’m a writer, so I spend most of my day alone,” he tells the host Gilbert Cruz. “And it’s true that even from a young age, I only had to step into the silence of any monastery and convert, and I felt a kind of longing, the way other people feel a longing when they see a delectable meal or pistachio gelato or some such. But I’d always felt this longing.”
We would love to hear your thoughts about this episode, and about the Book Review’s podcast in general. You can send them to books@nytimes.com.
Culture
Emma Raducanu and Iga Swiatek’s Australian Open match reunites two teenage Grand Slam winners
MELBOURNE, Australia — In 2020, Iga Swiatek won her first Grand Slam title at 19.
The following year, Emma Raducanu won her first Grand Slam title at 18.
The pair of teenage major winners have followed divergent paths since then. Swiatek has added four more Grand Slam titles to her tally, spending over 100 weeks as world No. 1 in the process; Raducanu hasn’t reached the final of a single WTA Tour event, let aloneanother major.
Their Australian Open third-round match on Saturday is one of the most consequential of Raducanu’s career since winning the U.S. Open in 2021. She has gone deeper in a Grand Slam before, reaching the Wimbledon fourth round last year, but she has never played an opponent ranked higher than world No. 7 at a major.
Raducanu’s career record against top-10 players is 2-7, with an 0-3 head-to-head against Swiatek, but she has won her last two matches against top-10 opponents at Eastbourne and Wimbledon respectively. After a heavily disrupted 2024, 2025 brings an immediate test against one of the best players in the world.
Swiatek and Raducanu, now 23 and 22 respectively, took very different trajectories en route to their first Grand Slam titles. Swiatek’s breakout tournament at the 2020 French Open came on the back of numerous Grand Slam main draw match wins and a junior Wimbledon title, while Raducanu won the 2021 U.S. Open as a qualifier, a once-in-history tennis moment.
Raducanu laughed Thursday when talking about breakthroughs in the wake of beating friend Amanda Anisimova 6-3, 7-5 to set up the meeting with the world No. 2.
“I know that she was playing since a very young age and my hours in comparison were probably a bit comical when I was 17 or 18, playing six hours a week,” she said in a news conference.
“I don’t think it was the same trajectory.”
In that junior Wimbledon title run, Swiatek met Raducanu in the quarterfinals. She won 6-0, 6-1.
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The contrast has persisted since their respective first major titles, with Swiatek winning Grand Slams on multiple surfaces (clay and hard courts) while Raducanu either flattered to deceive in the wake of suddenly and infinitely increased expectations or suffered continual misfortune with injuries. Her career has been one of consistent rebuilds, while Swiatek has won at least one major in each of the past three seasons, picking up 22 singles titles and the 2024 United Cup’s “most valuable player” title after winning all of her singles matches.
In 2022, when Swiatek won both the French and U.S. Opens, Raducanu was having her first proper season on the WTA Tour — as a Grand Slam champion. Her results were good when presented as a rookie player trying to navigate a full season for the first time, with one semifinal and a couple of quarterfinals. They were less good by the normal standards of a Grand Slam champion. Raducanu ended the year ranked No. 75 after a first-round exit at the U.S. Open saw her lose 2,030 points and plummet from No. 11 to No. 83 in the space of two weeks.
It was a year of frequent coaching changes for Raducanu. Having won the U.S. Open with Andrew Richardson, she replaced him with Torben Beltz just two months after winning the title. By April 2022, Beltz was out and Dimitry Tursunov, who had worked with Annett Kontaveit while she reached No. 2 in the world, was in.
Tursunov didn’t continue beyond a trial period of a few months, telling Tennis Majors that there were “red flags” he could not ignore. Sebastian Sachs arrived in December 2022 and lasted until the following June, making it five coaches in less than two years for Raducanu. Richardson had replaced Nigel Sears in July 2021, just two months before her U.S. Open win.
“Anything that’s not necessarily serving me, I’m just pretty savage in terms of just prioritizing myself and focusing,” Raducanu said on Thursday in Melbourne. “Anything that wants to try and affect that, I don’t have time for it. No hate. I just don’t want to kind of let that in.”
Coaches are asked to put together PowerPoint presentations to explain their thinking — she has always had an incredible focus and demand for excellence. Even as a junior, she would seek out coaches who could help her with specific shots. She’s obsessed with the why of things and won’t just jump because she’s told to.
She said on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme in October 2023: “l ask my coaches a lot of questions. On certain occasions, they haven’t been able to keep up with the questions I’ve asked and maybe that’s why it ended.”
Beltz was brought in to improve her forehand and when that wasn’t happening, Raducanu saw little point in carrying on.
A big moment in the next Raducanu rebuild came at the end of 2023 when she hired Nick Cavaday as coach. The pair worked together when Raducanu was a junior and had discussed a possible partnership earlier in her senior career, with the timing on both sides not working out. He joined her team towards the end of a 2023 season that had been dominated by another recurring theme in her career: injuries.
She missed the majority of the season after double wrist surgery and an ankle operation, which together meant she played just five events and ended her season in April. While Raducanu was in the early stages of rehabilitation, Swiatek was scooping up a third French Open, her second in two years, and a fourth Grand Slam title overall.
Cavaday is still in place 13 months later, an eternity compared to how long her previous coaches have lasted. Raducanu responds to his clarity of thinking and style of communication, with a focus on offering evidence and data to support what he is saying. Cavaday’s technical expertise also allows them to work on specific shots — especially the forehand and serve — which has been a key factor in Raducanu’s previous coaching decisions.
At this year’s Australian Open, the forehand has been potent, but the latter is a work in progress. Raducanu will meet her opponent on Saturday with the more settled team, as Swiatek eases into life with Wim Fissette. Fissette has coached former world No. 1 players Naomi Osaka, Kim Clijsters and Angelique Kerber, winning six Grand Slam titles in total, and looks to be returning Swiatek to the devastating but controlled aggression that has seen her dominate the sport. Her succession of too-similar defeats under former coach Tomasz Wiktorowski, in which she descended into a tailspin of overhitting groundstrokes in the face of peaking opponents, looks a long way away.
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Swiatek is yet to suffer a defeat to Raducanu; Raducanu is yet to win a set against her. They crossed paths in 2024 for the third time after the Brit moved her ranking up from No. 285 at the start of the season to No. 58 by its close. She met Swiatek at the WTA 500 Stuttgart quarterfinal, which Swiatek won 7-6(2), 6-3.
Raducanu entered the tournament as a wildcard because she is a brand ambassador for Porsche, who also sponsor the event. Later in the year, Raducanu posted a picture of herself driving her £100,000 Porsche Cayenne after rumours spread that the company had taken back a car they’d gifted her when she was spotted taking a public bus in London. In December, Raducanu told a small group of reporters that she would cut down on sponsorship days.
Last year also brought that run to the Wimbledon fourth round, but it was overshadowed by her decision to withdraw from her mixed doubles with the retiring Andy Murray to protect her wrist ahead of her fourth-round match.
Raducanu felt she had no choice. Murray was gutted. His mother, Judy, called it “astonishing” on social media. Raducanu faced a lot of criticism for doing what most players would have done in the same situation before she said tennis “doesn’t feel different at all” when asked about Murray’s absence at the U.S. Open. She added that the way tennis works means that even someone like Murray moving on is “old news the next day.”
Even without that episode, Raducanu has faced challenges in connecting with the wider sporting public. In Melbourne, she spoke about the Murray situation in a less matter-of-fact way than previously.
“Afterwards, I sent him a long message, basically: ‘If I caused any trouble I guess at Wimbledon, that’s definitely the last thing I want,’” she told a small group of reporters.
“He’s someone that I’ve grown up looking up to and I don’t want any bad blood or harsh feelings with him.”
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Raducanu is aware of the importance of an athlete’s public image and met with a group of British journalists for an interview and an informal lunch in December in which she explained some of her goals for 2025. After hiring fitness trainer Yutaka Nakamura, who has worked with Grand Slam champions and world No. 1s Maria Sharapova and Naomi Osaka, Raducanu said: “I think I can become one of the best athletes in tennis. I think he’s really going to help with that.”
At that time, Raducanu had only just returned from a couple of months out after spraining foot ligaments at the start of September. She’d had a tricky period before that, too, opting against trying to qualify for the pre-U.S. Open hard-court swing and then arriving at the U.S. Open undercooked.
In her pre-tournament news conference, Raducanu spoke of how good she was feeling, but after losing to Sofia Kenin, Raducanu cried in her post-match duties. “I feel down, I feel sad,” she said.
Raducanu arrived in Melbourne under similar circumstances after a back spasm picked up while tying her shoelaces meant she arrived at the Australian Open with no match practice.
Both of her victories to date, against No. 26 seed Ekaterina Alexandrova and then former French Open semifinalist Amanda Anisimova, have been scrappy but clutch when necessary. She has won her last eight tiebreaks, including two against Alexandrova. Her tweaked serve has been shaky, but she has relied on her ground game and worked through physical issues to shield the problems with her serve. Raducanu received treatment on her back when 0-3 down in the second set against Anisimova, before winning seven of the next nine games to take the match.
Her defensive tennis was outstanding against Anisimova, hustling across the baseline to draw errors by forcing one more shot out of an increasingly erratic opponent.
“I was able to get to some balls that maybe I wouldn’t have been able to previously,” Raducanu said afterwards.
When asked about their divergent paths over the past few years, Swiatek was philosophical. “Everybody’s story is different and everybody struggles with different stuff,” she said in a news conference on Thursday.
The expectation is that Swiatek will be too strong, but being in the position to take on the world’s best players feels like an important step for Raducanu.
“When we’re going to be out there on the court, whoever is going to play better will win, and that’s it,” Swiatek said.
(Top photo: Robert Prange / Getty Images)
Culture
Book Review: ‘Scattergood,’ by H.M. Bouwman
SCATTERGOOD, by H.M. Bouwman
Narrated by 13-year-old Peggy Mott, part of a loving, tight-knit farm community, H.M. Bouwman’s new middle grade novel brims from the get-go with engaging details — the particulars of milking cows, snooping on telephone party lines, bathing without indoor plumbing — that pull us easily into the frugal yet comfortable world of West Branch, Iowa, in 1941.
But Peggy’s world is about to change.
In the same week that a dreamy 16-year-old German boy named Gunther arrives at Scattergood (a local Quaker school turned hostel for refugees fleeing the Nazis), she learns that her 14-year-old best friend and cousin, Delia, has been diagnosed with leukemia. In short order, Peggy’s interest in Gunther leads her to another man at the hostel, a Dutch professor whose family, like Gunther’s, is “disappeared.” (“Even I knew what disappeared meant,” Peggy notes ruefully. “Hitler. The war.”)
Just as “the Professor” (with a capital P) refuses to give up the search for his wife and children, Peggy decides she will find a way to save Delia, who’s back in the hospital. Never mind that when she goes in search of a treatment for her friend’s disease she discovers pretty quickly that there isn’t one.
As Peggy scours the local library and the nearby college town of Iowa City for a cure, and then turns briefly to prayer, life continues in West Branch. Social dynamics shift and teen affections are rebuffed. People quarrel while pumpkins grow round on thick green vines.
Meanwhile, Delia grows sicker as Peggy and the Professor play chess and unpack their respective pain.
This mingling of tragic plotlines might sound a little heavy for middle grade readers, but in fact these intersections are the greatest strength of the book.
On its surface, “Scattergood” is both a cancer novel and a Holocaust narrative, but rather than weigh each other down these threads create a sort of shared logic — because while cancer and the Holocaust signal looming devastation, Peggy and the Professor continue to search, if not for a happy ending then for meaning and comfort within their pain. There’s a symmetry to that.
As Peggy exhausts the usefulness of science and prayer, she struggles to help her sick friend.
She writes Delia a note each day, which keeps her connected and forces her to see her own world more clearly: “Birds are the most beautiful animals, don’t you think, Dee? (Except chickens.) … Come home soon, strong and healthy, so you can watch them with me in the field behind your house.”
But letters can’t stop cancer, so when Delia leaves the hospital she asks Peggy for a different kind of help: “Find out something that can make me feel better. More — more ready.”
This is where “Scattergood” truly shines, because on some level it investigates not only whether we can survive great loss, but also how.
When Peggy turns to the Professor for guidance, he offers no satisfying answers, only Hasidic tales he himself doesn’t seem to believe. Then, in a sudden twist, Peggy’s first kiss sends her running once more to him, just as he has received terrible news from home. Swallowed by grief, he fails her, and what results is a sort of unleashing, as Peggy reels and acts out, setting off a chain of shocking and disastrous events.
Honestly, I was unprepared for this plot turn — blindsided. But then I stopped to think: Isn’t that precisely what happens in moments of tragedy? We falter in ways we couldn’t have anticipated, and emotions spiral beyond our control.
What is the proper response to a child’s pain at a time when she is growing into herself, seeking both care and independence? “I wondered,” Peggy tells us, “if there was any comfort that could last and that could be enough and that could work perfectly, without ruining everything around it.”
But that isn’t the end of the book! As we all must do in the aftermath of disaster, Peggy wakes the next day, picks up the threads of her story and continues. There is still tragedy to face, only now she faces it with a little more wisdom. The fact that she can’t fix everything doesn’t mean she can’t fix anything. As the Professor has explained it, “Free will versus providence. The age-old paradox … something that seems like a contradiction — but might not be.”
In this spirit of paradox, the end of “Scattergood” feels more like a beginning. Peggy has only just begun to understand herself, her power, her responsibility to others, and the journey ahead. The novel closes not with a prayer but with “a picture of a prayer, the kind of prayer you might make if you hoped, against your better judgment, that someone was listening.”
“Scattergood” is a brave, beautiful book, wise enough to reach for something beyond certainty.
SCATTERGOOD | By H.M. Bouwman | (Ages 10 and up) | Neal Porter/Holiday House | 320 pp. | $18.99
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