One way or another, for a baseball team to succeed, it has to have a fairly steady influx of talented players at the start of their peak years (say, around 25 years old). The trade market for players like this is thinning pretty dramatically in this decade, it seems to me, and teams are looking more and more to develop players from within. I think Eric is right to say that the Mets have not been a great success at player development in this environment where youth is becoming more valuable. All of Omar’s best moves as Mets GM have been trades, in which he grabbed other teams’ undervalued young players for less than their real worth (Perez, Maine, even Santana fit this category). The one counterexample I can see, as I said a while ago, is Pelfrey: the Mets accurately decided he was the one young pitcher they wanted to hang on to and develop, while letting guys like Humber and Bannister go, and (at least right now) it looks like they made the right decision.

If the team manages to guess/know better than other teams what the actual value of its prospects (and theirs) is, it can make good decisions in both directions—keep the future stars and sell high on the “promising” ones that aren’t as likely to pan out. It’s the same thing either way; trades and development from within both hinge on accurate evaluation. What burned so badly about the Kazmir thing was precisely that the average fan had a better sense of the mismatch in value on both sides of that deal than the Mets front office, or Al Leiter, or whoever made the decision there.

Count whoever you want—if we have to reach as far back as Isringhausen then Eric’s point is made anyway. But somehow pondering the talents of Scott Kazmir doesn’t make me feel any better about the Mets’ ability to develop young players.