Alderson won't trade top prospects away

DALLAS -- The Mets opened these winter meetings by refusing to outbid the Marlins for Jose Reyes, but another thing they won't do is mortgage the future to compensate for his departure. With little money to spend on improving the club for 2012, Sandy Alderson insisted Tuesday that he would not use any of his top prospects as trade chips for a quicker fix.

"We're not going to compromise the top end of our player development system," he said. "If you want to look at the top four or five prospects in our system, they're not going anywhere. Beyond that, I'll talk about it. But I'd be surprised if we take many of our prospects and turn them into very experienced regular players. I don't think that's what we're looking at."

By rule, the Mets can't trade anyone from this year's draft class, so that excludes their two first-round picks, outfielder Brandon Nimmo and righthander Michael Fulmer. Beyond that, Alderson's untouchables list most likely includes Zack Wheeler, Matt Harvey and Jeurys Familia, with Jenrry Mejia still recovering from Tommy John surgery.

That group remains the building blocks -- relatively cheap, under team control -- from which the future rotation will be constructed. Obviously, there are no guarantees each of those prospects will pay off at the major-league level, but that's what the front office is banking on. If the Mets figured they were close to being a contending team, they could use one as a trade chip, but that's not reality at the moment.

"I think that fans understand that we have a general direction that we're taking," Alderson said. "I think that most fans, understanding that general direction, would be shocked if we traded one of those three, four, five guys. And are we one player away? I think we need more than one player to assure ourselves of success in 2012. The fact is that no team apparently is one player away. It didn't work for some teams that last year thought that they were that close."