The Dodgers didn’t blink when the Mets tried to sneak Christian Cairo through the system.
After New York signed Cairo to a major league split contract and then waived him, Los Angeles stepped in and claimed him, taking the late-season pickup off the Mets’ hands. The whole point of the move was to make Cairo less appealing to other clubs by attaching the split deal, which pays a player a higher minor league salary than average. It didn’t work this time.
Cairo had been claimed by the Mets on waivers from the Philadelphia Phillies, but now he’s headed to the Dodgers. New York’s attempt to stash him as depth ran into a team that wasn’t bothered by the salary structure.
The Mets did manage to keep Kyren Paris, at least for now. Paris cleared waivers and will stay in the organization, even though he’s out of options. Cairo, by contrast, has yet to appear in a big league game.
This kind of maneuvering has become familiar for a Mets team led by David Stearns. They’ve already used multiple split contracts this offseason, and Cairo is just the latest example of how the strategy can go sideways.
It also isn’t new. Last year, Richard Lovelady got the same kind of deal from the Mets before being claimed by the Washington Nationals, who were willing to take on the higher minor league salary and see what he could do at the MLB level.
The timing fits the moment, too. Early November is when this sort of roster churn starts to heat up, with three weeks left before the MLB lockout. It’s the prelude to a much bigger reset.
Robert Stock is another Mets player on a split contract, and the expectation is that he’ll be DFA’d before the team tries to sneak him through waivers as well. His situation looks more like Paris than Cairo, since anyone who claims him would have to keep him on the active major league roster because he has no options. The idea, plainly, is to keep him around as minor league depth.
Split contracts usually don’t pay much on the minor league side, often less than a million dollars, while the major league portion lands somewhere between $1-2 million. That minor league number is what tends to scare teams off.
For now, Cairo is gone, and the Mets lose a depth piece they were clearly hoping to keep close. The Dodgers don’t have to play the waiver game to hold onto him, so there’s a real chance he stays put in their system and New York never gets another shot at him.
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