Zack Scott is owning the Mets trade that keeps getting worse with time.
The former acting Mets general manager, who sent Pete Crow-Armstrong to the Cubs in the 2021 Javier Báez deal, admitted he “misjudged” the now-star center fielder and let the pressure of a pennant race influence the deadline move.
“Everyone still brings up the Pete Crow-Armstrong trade. He’s a star, and I moved him,” Scott wrote on X on Wednesday.
“Easy version: I misjudged him. I did. But the real miss is that we were in a pennant race, and the pull to ‘do something big’ moved me off the discipline I’d usually hold.
“A better scouting report doesn’t fix that. Building the decision so the urge to act doesn’t set the terms does. I own it.”
Leading the National League East at the time, the Mets acquired Báez and right-hander Trevor Williams from the Cubs in exchange for Crow-Armstrong, the No. 19 overall pick the previous summer.
After pulling the trigger on the deal, then-team president Sandy Alderson said it wasn’t “easy for us to give up prospects.”
“But in this particular case when you are a few games ahead in the division and we’re at roughly Aug. 1, we needed to do something, not only to improve the team, but to demonstrate to the players that we had their back and were attempting to make the team better for the next 60 games,” Alderson said at the time.
Báez spent only two-plus months with the Mets and put up an .886 OPS before leaving for Detroit in free agency that winter.
Painfully, the Mets’ 2021 season collapsed almost as soon as Báez joined the club.
The team, which was 56-49 when the calendar turned to August, finished the season 77-85 and well outside the NL playoff picture.
To make matters worse, Crow-Armstrong, 24, has emerged as one of the best young players in baseball.
Last year, he made his first All-Star team and won his first Gold Glove award.
Crow-Armstrong has looked even better this season, hitting .293/.383/.525 with 19 home runs and 23 stolen bases.
Scott was elevated to acting general manager in January 2021, one week after Jared Porter was fired over revelations that he had sent lewd text messages to a female journalist while working for the Cubs in 2016.
Before joining the Mets, Scott spent 17 seasons in the Red Sox front office, where Boston won three World Series titles during his tenure.
He was hired by the Mets in December 2020 to oversee the club’s analytics and systems departments. Scott was not retained after the 2021 season, after being placed on administrative leave following a DWI arrest. He was later cleared of all criminal charges.
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