At this point, it had to happen. The Mets were becoming a disjointed, expensive mess. They had to be sellers at the deadline.

The magnitude of the sale wasn’t known, even after the David Robertson trade broke first. Steve Cohen and his front office assembled MLB’s largest payroll ever and then watched it all unravel. They hoped, though, and kept hoping. Cohen even called a crisis press conference for June 28 to give that optimism — “we still have time,” he said — as prominent a megaphone as possible.

But then came the Robertson deal. The Max Scherzer trade. The Justin Verlander deal. Even Tommy Pham, Mark Canha and Dominic Leone.

There would’ve been risk involved with trying to run it back in 2024 with mostly the same underperforming group — including Scherzer, Verlander and others — because at some point, their value would diminish to the point where Cohen couldn’t get the same return. There was a below-average farm system to roll with. It was just a disastrous scenario, and a sale became necessary.