“You know,” Jim Duquette said as we left the Baseball Night in New York set on Thursday evening, two days before David Wright’s Mets Hall of Fame induction and number retirement ceremony. “I had the chance to trade David.”
“For who?” I asked, as anyone would.
A twinkle seemed to appear in Jim’s eye before he said the name: “Beltran.”
What?
Imagine that. David Wright for Carlos Beltran. Two of the best players in Mets history, traded for one another before they even became teammates.
“Is that known?”
“Nope,” Jim said.
He was right. Not even Beltran or Wright had heard of this before Thursday. We checked.
Now rewind to the summer of 2004. Duquette was the Mets’ general manager and looking to improve a team on the fringes of contention. He would trade pitching prospect Scott Kazmir to Tampa Bay for veteran Victor Zambrano (don’t even start; Jim has answered for that), but had bigger ambitions.
“It was the ‘04 trade deadline,” Duquette said. “That was when we traded Kazmir for Zambrano, but we were looking to improve both pitching and offense. Kansas City had Carlos Beltran available. Pittsburgh had [pitcher Kris] Benson. We really felt like we needed pitching before anything else.”
Still, Duquette was seeking a hitter. Several times, he called Kansas City Royals GM Allard Baird about Beltran, a free-agent-to-be on the trading block.
“Every time I would ask about Beltran, Allard said, ‘Well, I’ll trade you Beltran, but we want David Wright in return.’”
Wright was a top prospect who made his MLB debut right around the time of that trade discussion, on July 21, 2004.
“We were not trading David Wright at all,” Duquette said. “So, we would hang up the phone. We would call back and say, ‘Hey, any other thoughts about Beltran?’ And he would say, ‘David Wright.’”
Reached via text on Friday evening, Baird -- who later became a key member of general manager Brodie Van Wagenen’s Mets front office before departing when the team was sold in 2020 -- confirmed the talks, and elaborated on his interest in Wright. It cut far deeper than even Duquette realized.
“He was a complete player!” Baird wrote. “Besides the easy offensive and defensive projection, he was team above oneself. A winning player.
“In A-ball, he came out on the field all alone an hour before anyone else was there. All for what looked like was just the joy of being on the field. On a night he didn’t perform at the plate, he was the first one out of the dugout every inning to go play defense.”
Duquette was not going to trade Wright, so Baird instead sent Beltran to Houston in a three-team deal in which the Royals landed catcher John Buck, infielder Mark Teahan and pitcher Mike Wood, and the Oakland Athletics got reliever Octavio Dotel.
After that season, Omar Minaya replaced Duquette as Mets GM and signed Beltran as a free agent.
Wright became the face of the franchise — the Mets, that is. Not the Royals.
Beltran went on to become one of the greatest players Flushing has ever seen, and was Wright’s teammate for nearly six seasons. He now works in the front office.
