Mets players prepare for 'human side' of trade-deadline fire sale: 'It's much more difficult on families'
Mets pitcher Brooks Raley delivers against the Los Angeles Dodgers during the seventh inning of an MLB baseball game at Citi Field on July 24, 2026. Credit: Kathleen Malone-Van Dyke
Brooks Raley doesn’t know where he’ll be next week, but the Mets lefty, who has little experience with midseason trades, knows one thing for certain.
“It’s going to be interesting,” he told Newsday Thursday afternoon - an acknowledgement of the obvious, his time in Flushing is limited.
“I will be buckled up.”
There can be a sort of antiseptic quality to the trade deadline, which hits this coming Monday at 6 p.m. Players are treated as assets, moving from city to city after what could be a single phone call, a few texts, an agreement that one person is worth this much or that.
But there are of course living, breathing human beings behind every tweet announcing that a player has been dealt away.
There are those, like Raley, who will have to navigate the logistics of possibly moving a family to parts unknown. There are players like Marcus Semien, who, much like he did when he was on the A’s, is likely to be one of the remaining pieces on whatever skeleton crew is left once the fire sale ends. And there’s interim manager Andy Green, who needs to somehow make these last few months mean something – both to salvage whatever pride this team has left, and to ensure the Mets’ young talent isn’t unduly burdened by the organization’s failure.
“It’s much more difficult on families,” Daniel Murphy told Newsday in a phone interview. After beginning his career with the Mets, Murphy signed with the Nationals in 2016, and was traded to the Cubs ahead of the 2018 waiver trade deadline. “For myself, there was some sincere sadness that you’re leaving this group, this team that you’ve been with…and that came in with all these expectations and hopes…
“But when you get to your next [destination], in a snap, you’re in a pennant race…but it ends up being [more of] a big deal [to families] and getting them settled.”
Murphy said the Cubs were highly welcoming to his wife and family, and put them up at a hotel until they secured their housing situation – in his case, taking over Yu Darvish’s lease.
Raley said the general expectation is that the club you’re traded to will set you up for a period of time before you make some pivotal decisions. Where are you going to live? If you’re about to hit free agency, do you take your family with you? Do you have kids, and if so, will they have to adjust to new environments, new friends and new schools?
“This one will be interesting because there’s a vast change,” said Raley, who expects this move to be far trickier than the offseason trades he's been a part of (he was designated for assignment in the opening weeks of the 2020 COVID season, but had just moved back to the United States after pitching in the KBO).
“That first homestand, you’re kind of covered by the team so it gives you a little time to talk to some players, talk to the staff, try to figure out where they live, where the good places are and deciding if your family is going to come join you or if they’re going to stay home.”
The upside is that, “as a player, you always want to be wanted,” he said. “But [as for the other stuff], there are so many variables at play that I try not to put too much thought into it, because there’s so much speculation out there.”
And then there are the unraptured - the ones who remain.
“I didn’t anticipate sitting here at the present,” Green said. “But I think the job is pretty obvious – win as many games as possible, create an environment where guys thrive and put them in a position to succeed and meet [them] with some understanding and empathy that these times are a little less certain for this guy…
“Nobody wants to be on this side of a trade deadline,” he continued, addressing the impact it may have on younger players. “That also doesn’t mean that there’s not a lot of meaningful games to be played before the season ends.”
Semien was on the A’s in 2015 when they shipped off Scott Kazmir, Ben Zobrist and Tyler Clippard, and again in 2017 when they parted ways with Sonny Gray, Yonder Alonso, Ryan Madson and Sean Doolittle, among others.
“It was a lot of veteran players I looked up to,” he said, still noting that it opened the door for promising talent Matt Olson and Matt Chapman. “So there was a turnaround there, but it was tough to lose veteran guys…
“You still keep in touch,” he added. “It was tough…but just because somebody leaves the clubhouse, it doesn’t mean you’re not friends with them anymore. You’re always pulling for guys that you went to battle with every single day.”
Though Semien has never been traded midseason, he did note that there’s naturally going to be pressure on new acquisitions. “You go right in…and you’re trying to perform the best you can. There are a lot of logistics behind the scenes and hopefully, you have a lot of help.”
And in the end, “we signed up for every bit of this,” Murphy said.
“Major League baseball and the clubs – at least in my experience – did a wonderful job on both ends to get the player and the families settled,” he said. “And that’s a choice [they make] because that’s an extra responsibility they’re willing to take on…It’s easier to play well when you feel like people [are helping] you handle a huge life transition…
“It’s a different lifestyle,” he added. “That’s why there’s such a good fellowship among the players and their families and wives, because it’s a shared experience. We live life a quarter mile at a time.”
Murphy’s children were young during his playing career, but things can get thornier as “you get into older children and [navigate] school. There are some serious, real-life problems that people deal with.
“What I will say, is that we get paid well for it, so there are different problems that we’re able to solve in different ways,” he said. “Sometimes the price of that is that we don’t sleep in the same house for more than four months at a time in any given year, but again, we chose it.
"There are different sacrifices.”
Laura Albanese is the Mets beat writer for Newsday. She's been covering MLB since 2014 after starting at Newsday as an intern seven years earlier.
