Major League Baseball’s offseason is still in its infancy, yet the New York Mets and Texas Rangers shook its pillars late on Sunday evening. The two sides came to an agreement on a deal that sent second
baseman Marcus Semien to Queens and outfielder Brandon Nimmo to Arlington, an extremely rare one-for-one swap of nine-figure contracts that featured both a former 1st round pick and a three-time All Star.
Semien, 35, is fresh off a season that saw him valued at 3.3 bWAR despite posting just a .669 OPS – the worst full-season mark of his career. He still landed a Gold Glove award for his excellent work at 2B, however, and that (alongside a hopeful offensive rebound to something akin to the .783 OPS he posted across 2021-2024) is why New York took a chance on him. He’s due $26 million a season through 2028.
Nimmo, 33 in March, is a former 1st round pick of the Mets who spent some 14 years in the organization prior to Sunday’s trade. He’s fresh off a season where he posted a career high 25 dingers alongside a 114 OPS+ that was a click below his career mark of 126 entering the season, and that’s largely due to a walk rate that plummeted to just 7.7% in 2025 after having sat between 10.5% and 18.1% during the previous six seasons. He’s owed $20.5 million through the 2030 season.
From a pure monetary perspective, this is a deal that lowers the annual salary of the Texas Rangers and raises it for that of the New York Mets, but only over the course of three years. Texas is taking on the larger overall amount of cash, but it’s spread out over five seasons instead of three. For luxury tax purposes, that’s a decided consideration, especially for a Texas team that just non-tendered knowns like Adolis Garcia and Jonah Heim rather than pay them for relatively expensive final arbitration years in hopes of a rebound.
It’s a posturing move from two of the most high-profile, big spending teams in the baseball landscape. Texas gets a corner outfielder to backfill where Garcia left off, slicing off some of their luxury tax payroll and opening up a middle-infield spot for either one of their top prospects or an outside addition. New York, meanwhile, picks up a defender who’ll complement Francisco Lindor up the middle with elite defense while potentially freeing up an outfield spot for a pursuit of, say, Kyle Tucker in free agency.
The latter seems to also open up a pretty obvious path to another trade. The Mets now boast the likes of Lindor, Semien, Brett Baty, Ronny Mauricio, Luisangel Acuna, Jeff McNeil, and Mark Vientos as additional infield options, with only McNeil boasting legitimate experience on the outfield grass. That’s a logjam that screams trade, potentially with New York looking to bolster a starting rotation that woefully underperformed last season.
(I’m not saying the Cincinnati Reds are perfectly aligned for a deal here, per se, but I will point out that Mark Vientos brushed off a slow start to the 2025 season to post an .801 OPS over his final 48 games and isn’t even arb-eligible until the 2027 season.)
Anyway, it’s clearly a big deal in terms of dollars and name-brand talent, but it also seems a need-for-need deal between two teams that clearly have a lot more up their sleeve. That’s always some good intel for the rest of the clubs in baseball as they try to find angles to exploit in both free agency and trade as the hot stove season begins to heat up.
