ORLANDO, Fla. \u2014 This was not a megamarket day for the Mets. This was not a step toward being the East Coast Dodgers.<\/p>\n
Not when the Dodgers beat you by relative pennies to steal a player you want. Not when the team that has nearly everything \u2014 including the last two championships \u2014 keeps you from retaining what you need so badly.<\/p>\n
Depending on which side you asked, there is a fog of war in the endgame whether the Mets were actually given a chance<\/a> to improve their three-year, $66 million pact for Edwin D\u00edaz to beat the three-year, $69 million deal of the Dodgers<\/a>. But know this \u2014 up until Monday night, Los Angeles officials were sure whatever they did, the Mets would just beat them.<\/p>\n Yet, the Dodgers did what a superheavyweight fixated on historic greatness should \u2014 they stayed in the ring. They had told D\u00edaz\u2019s camp from the outset that they would stand on an aggressive (read a record annual value for a reliever) three-year bid, even when the closer\u2019s side was initially fixated on a five-year contract. Still, even when a three-year structure became more palatable, the Dodgers awaited word that never came \u2014 that he was going back to the Mets. Thus, sometime as Monday night turned into Tuesday morning, they experienced shock, then elation.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"ORLANDO, Fla. \u2014 This was not a megamarket day for the Mets. This was not a step toward…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":66491,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[19920,14766,20,9,11,320,10,319,431,428,33298],"class_list":{"0":"post-66490","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-new-york","8":"tag-david-stearns","9":"tag-edwin-diaz","10":"tag-mlb","11":"tag-new-york","12":"tag-new-york-headlines","13":"tag-new-york-mets","14":"tag-new-york-news","15":"tag-sports","16":"tag-sports-columnists","17":"tag-sports-plus","18":"tag-winter-meetings"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66490","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=66490"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66490\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/66491"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=66490"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=66490"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=66490"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}