Kenny Rogers brief stay with the Mets is over. Late Tuesday night Mets general manager Steve Phillips rescinded his offer of salary arbitration, meaning the Mets can not negotiate with Rogers until May 1, even if they wanted to.
By then he will have signed a lucrative multi-year deal with another team, and the Mets had no plans to bring him back anyway, as exclusively reported in The Post on Nov. 19. The only way Rogers would have remained a Met would have been if the market price for him were so low the Mets would have dipped into the bidding. But with Scott Boras as his agent, that was never a real possibility.
In fact, the main reason the Mets offered Rogers arbitration at all was to be eligible to receive draft picks in return from the team that eventually signed him. Now they won’t get that. The secondary reason was to be able to negotiate in the unlikely event the asking price was far lower than anticipated. The risk was that if Rogers accepted arbitration, they would have had to pay a lot of money for a pitcher they didn’t want back.
When asked if all this meant Rogers will not be a Met in 2000, Phillips said yes.
“It absolutely does,” he said.
Rogers went 5-1 with a 4.03 ERA after being traded to the Mets July 23. He had two complete games and a shutout and helped the Mets get into the playoffs.
But once there he was awful, going 0-3 with a 6.75 ERA and reinforcing the commonly held notion from his Yankee days that he is incapable of pitching in high pressure situations. His bases-loaded walk to Andruw Jones in the 11th inning of Game 6 of the NLCS ended the Mets’ season.