Mets must not buy too hard into recent success from J.D. Davis and Dominic Smith

The duo of J.D. Davis and Dominic Smith took too long to heat up. Through being benched, demoted, and clobbered on social media, the two ill-fitting members of the New York Mets slumped through most of the 2022 run without producing much offense.

Lately, this has changed. The two are surging just as trade rumors about the team searching for a DH upgrade are making the rounds.

Should the Mets buy into this recent success or proceed with adding a bat at the trade deadline? Not a chance.

There are a couple of suitable DH candidates out there for the Mets to target. Guys like Nelson Cruz and Trey Mancini have been mentioned plenty. Even Josh Bell is a candidate as a first baseman/occasional corner outfielder. He’s having the kind of year Mets fans always hoped Smith would.

None of those guys are ideal fits for a Mets team that might want to continue carrying Davis and Smith. Having someone with minor league options would be great, but it’s probably not going to happen. Those guys aren’t typically available and/or come with too high of a cost.

In buying a bat for mostly DH duties and occasional appearances in the field, the team would then have a limited bench. Davis is best utilized as a DH and isn’t much of a defender—news so old that it could have easily appeared in the framed newspaper article during scene from Dumb and Dumber and Lloyd Christmas finally learns at an Aspen hotel that we landed on the moon.

But a bench of Davis, Smith, Luis Guillorme, and Tomas Nido isn’t such a bad idea. It’s more productive than what most teams can put together. And with Jeff McNeil able to give them innings as an outfielder, they’re stacked enough with depth.

The trade deadline plan must not sway simply because Davis and Smith have started to hit. It can, at any moment, stop dead in its tracks.

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