The facts:

1) The Mets signed Michael Cuddyer to a two year deal -- $8.5 million in year one, $12.5 million in year two -- and gave up the 15th overall pick in next year’s draft to do so.

2) The Mets are poor.

Shortly after the deal hit the wires, most of the sabermetric community -- myself included -- expressed a mix between frustrated disbelief and LOL Mets. Joe Sheehan summed up my initial take pretty nicely:

That's the new #Mets, though: get middling players at excessive prices because they won't compete for the best ones. — Joe Sheehan (@joe_sheehan) November 10, 2014

And you know what? I'm wrong. We're all wrong. Maybe.

The "maybe" part deals with how you think of or value Cuddyer -- he's on the wrong side of 35, has a not-so-great health history, can't really play defense all that well, and his numbers may be more Coors (the stadium, not the beer) than talent. He's a bit of a lottery ticket in that regard, and $21 million plus your top draft pick (and, importantly, the $2.5 million in draft pool associated with it) seems like a high price to pay for such a gamble.

But maybe we're thinking about this all wrong. Let's start with the second fact. The Mets are poor.

Joe's right -- the "new Mets" overpay for mediocre bcause they can't compete for the best ones. That's the life of a poor person. In June of 2013, NPR ran a fascinating and depressing story about a pivoting business in the United States -- tire rentals. For years, that niche industry was renting out tricked-out rims -- it was, effectively, making a luxury good more accessible to those with mid-ranged incomes. But in recent years, the tire rental businesses has been catering to low-income households.

It's tragic. To pay the bills, one needs a job. To get to the job, one needs a working vehicle. A working vehicle needs tires. And new tires are expensive -- $400 or more for a set. If you're making $10 an hour -- that's more than minimum wage -- that's a whole week of wages, pre-tax and more importantly, pre-rent and pre-groceries. So instead of blowing the entire paycheck on tires, you rent them at about $30 a month for 18 months. That's manageable within the family budget, but it comes at a long-term cost. The $400 tires cost about $540, long-term. The family ends up giving up future value in exchange for a lower cost today.

The tragedy of this -- and again, we're talking about the actually-poor family NPR spoke with, not the actually-rich Wilpon family -- is that you end up in a poverty spiral. You can't miss work because if you do, you don't get paid and may very well get fired, so you end up reducing your household income by $30/month for six months starting a year from now. But you have no reason to believe that your wages are going to increase $30/month after that year-long period, which makes you effectively worse off and more vulnerable to problems such as needing new tires tires or a new refrigerator or whatever. Sooner or later, you're already precocious financial situation collapses.

The Mets aren't in this downward spiral, and it'd be horrific to compare their situation with the family that needs to rent tires at a markup of 35% or more in order to put food on the table -- please don't imply that I'm doing that. (If anything, I'm taking this opportunity to raise some awareness about the working poor who, through no fault of their own or laziness on their part, are unable to emerge from poverty.) The only point I want to make here, in regard to the Mets, is that short-term and relative to other MLB teams, they're poor, and giving up future value for present-day cost savings is a perfectly reasonable, albeit suboptimal, avenue.

And that's exactly what the Mets are doing here. They're giving up a draft pick -- future value -- in order put an asset in the outfield which could lead to more wins and, ultimately, more revenue. For 2015, Cuddyer's net budget impact is $6 million -- his salary is $8.5 million and the Mets save the $2.5 million they would have likely invested in the 2015 draft. For a poor team, buying a lottery ticket of Cuddyer's quality for $6 million is a good risk. It allows other moves which could take the Mets out of the "poor" category and move them into the "mid-market budget" one, if things go right. (The future value of a playoff apperance, for the Mets especially, is likely greater than the $10 million forgone by the lost draft pick.)

And yes, things can go wrong. Most likely, they will, speaking as a long-tortured Mets fan. But if they do, the Mets aren't all that worse off than if they traded Dom Smith to the Rockies for Cuddyer at $18.5 million over two years. That seems like a reasonable risk -- one the Mets should do more of -- if they ever want to reach the postseason and increase revenues.