An annual offseason occurrence for fans of all 30 teams is to look at the roster and decide who the biggest burden is. If you take a look at the New York Mets roster, the answer is pretty easy.

Despite now having just one year remaining on his contract, Starling Marte no longer has a role with the Mets. He has been overtaken as the starting right fielder by Juan Soto. Handing him DH duties seems unsatisfying as he’s now a singles hitter who won’t offer much power at all. A DH platoon involving Marte feels like a last resort. It’s, for lack of a better made-up word, Wilponian.

The reported two-year offer the Mets made to Teoscar Hernandez before he signed with the Los Angeles Dodgers suggests something pretty important about Marte. Co-existing on the same roster would be even more unnecessary. The Mets must be pretty confident they can trade him away or are at least willing to eat the remainder of his contract.

Teoscar Hernandez on the Mets roster would have made Starling Marte even more irrelevant

Wherever the Mets may find a place to send Marte, they’re going to be left picking up the tab. Even a bad contract swap will likely have the financially mighty Mets taking on the larger burden of the cash. Frankly, with all of the other moves the Mets have already made this offseason, there probably isn’t a good enough match to swap one bad deal for another anyway. They’ve filled the rotation. What purpose would it serve to add another bad position player to the roster with an overpriced contract?

The Mets have had success when it comes to “dumping” contracts in the recent past. James McCann had most of his salary catapulted onto the Baltimore Orioles. Far more famously and successfully, they ate money owed to Max Scherzer and Justin Verlander in order to receive top prospects in return. The situation with Marte is far closer to the one with McCann where they paid a significant portion of the remaining money while the Orioles got a backup catcher at a low cost.

Dumping salaries isn’t always the easiest task. Undoubtedly, the Mets hoped to do so with Omar Narvaez before last season. When the player isn’t very good, which is the case more often than not in these types of deals, finding a taker is much more difficult. This isn’t the Miami Marlins trading Giancarlo Stanton to the New York Yankees. A deal involving Marte feels like an attempt by the Mets to upgrade a spot on the roster they no longer have much use for.

Ideally the Mets find a situation where they aren’t adding more dead money to the books. But as we saw during year one of David Stearns, this isn’t a team unafraid to send players packing if it means improving the team’s chances of winning.