PORT ST. LUCIE, Fla. — There are few general managers in baseball who would not readily trade their starting rotations for the Mets’ low-cost, high-powered staff.

They may not acknowledge it publicly, but the Mets have exactly what teams crave: a crop of young, talented players whom they control contractually for years. “Everybody aspires to that,” Brian Cashman, the Yankees’ general manager, noted Wednesday.

With Matt Harvey, Noah Syndergaard, Zack Wheeler, Steven Matz and Jacob deGrom, who started Wednesday’s game against the Yankees, the Mets are the envy of almost every team.

But Cashman, while sitting in the visitors’ clubhouse at the Mets’ spring training ballpark, also pointed out that the Meets needed remarkable patience to assemble that quintet. It is a level of patience the Yankees are never afforded.