SAN DIEGO — Seth Lugo's phone rang more than few times over the offseason. The Mets were never on the other end of call, perhaps because they eyed much larger prizes to fill the vacancies left by Jacob deGrom, Chris Bassitt and Taijuan Walker than moving their longtime reliever into the rotation.
First, they signed Justin Verlander to a two-year, $86.6 million deal.
Then they inked José Quintana for $26 million over two years and Kodai Senga for $75 million over five years.
Those additions to a 101-win team helped push Steve Cohen's 2023 payroll to $348 million.
The Padres, the team that bounced Lugo's old friends from the NL wild-card series last October, trail by some $100 million but still rank third in the majors behind the teams from Queens and the Bronx.
Yet the Mets and Padres are a combined 11 games under .500 entering the final weekend before the All-Star break and much closer to reasonably selling than pushing more chips in for another postseason run.
How does that figure?
Lugo shrugged.
"That's the thing about baseball; a lot of it doesn't make sense," Lugo said. " … Baseball's messed up like that. That's all that makes sense, because nothing else does."
Yet both teams are doing what they can to again make sense of their worlds, with the Mets carrying a four-game winning streak to the West Coast and the Padres coming off their first three-game sweep of the season.
Given their proximity to their respective division's cellars, there is quite a bit more work to do to right ships that have similarly veered off course.
Mets closer Edwin Diaz was lost for the year with a freak knee injury sustained during a World Baseball Classic celebration. The Padres have been waiting on Drew Pomeranz's elbow for years.
Max Scherzer was popped 10 games for sticky stuff. Fernando Tatis Jr. missed the first 20 games due to performance-enhancing stuff.
The Mets went 7-19 in June. The Padres went 10-16 in May and then lost the final six games of last month.
The All-Stars who've hit the Mets' injured list (Pete Alonso, Omar Narvaez, Verlander and Quintana) is longer than the Padres' (Manny Machado, Joe Musgrove and Michael Wacha). The players who've underperformed on both sides — Machado (.731 OPS), Alonso (.810 OPS), Xander Bogaerts (.750 OPS), Francisco Lindor (.749 OPS), Jake Cronenworth (.684 OPS), Yu Darvish (4.84 ERA) and Scherzer (4.04 ERA) — run the gamut, all of it forcing high-profile owners to provide a state of the organization address as the Aug. 1 trade deadline approaches.
"If we don't get better, we have decisions to make at the trade deadline, and that's not my preferred end result," Cohen said. "I'm preparing all contingencies, and we'll see where it goes. I'm a realist. … We got to get going."
On the surface, that's a far more ominous position than that of Padres Chairman Peter Seidler, who said "I'm on the train that says we're gonna catch up." Seidler's words seem to resonate in the home clubhouse at Petco Park as the Padres try to pull this season together.
"The only reason you would sell is if you didn't believe in the product that you're putting out there anymore. Which I don't think is Peter's mindset," Musgrove said. "I don't think that's A.J. (Preller's). I don't think anybody in here is worried about us selling. … We've got a lot of ground to make up and very little room to do it. I don't think anybody has thought we need to win games if we want to keep players here.
"Winning games is a necessity regardless of the situation."
For both teams.
The Padres are one of six teams the Mets would have to leapfrog to get into a postseason position. The Padres have three teams ahead of them and three teams breathing down their neck, including a similarly underachieving Mets team that begins an important weekend just a half-game behind San Diego.
"We know they're a good ballclub and they're trying to make it somewhere, like us," Machado said. "So we just have to go out there and take care of our business and go out there trying to play the best baseball we possibly can."
