Curse of PCA? Ex-GM talks Pete Crow-Armstrong trade with Cubs that Mets would obviously like to have back

The Red Sox traded Babe Ruth to the Yankees and were cursed for nearly nine decades.

The Mets traded Pete Crow-Armstrong to the Cubs and … well, who knows what will happen?

Or not happen.

Comparing Crow-Armstrong, the Cubs’ All-Star center fielder, to the Great Bambino has been common of late, after the 24-year-old put up a spectacular June that stood alongside months from Ruth and Lou Gehrig as one of baseball’s all-time statistical best.

And with the last-place Mets reeling — they fired manager Carlos Mendoza after the Cubs pulled off a dominant four-game sweep last month — maybe it’s time to wonder if a team dealing away a star is about to create a new baseball curse.

Zack Scott was the Mets’ acting general manager at the trade deadline in 2021, taking over after many years in the Red Sox front office. He acquired 2018 MVP runner-up and two-time All Star shortstop Javier Baez — who helped end another infamous baseball curse in 2016 — to give the Mets a late-summer boost, sending Crow-Armstrong, then a prospect just one year removed from being drafted No. 19 overall, to the Cubs in return.

That boost never came, the Mets finished the season below .500, and Baez left for the Tigers in free agency the following winter, turning out to be nothing but a rental in Queens.

“When we did that trade, I heard from some of my friends with the Red Sox, who said, ‘I can’t believe you traded for a rental because you hate rentals,’” Scott said in a clip from the “Break It Down Show” he posted to the social media platform X. “It was often my position in the room in Boston to be really opposed to doing anything big for a rental player because it’s such a lopsided future-value negative.

“That said, when you look at it at the time, when I dissect it and look back and see where did things go wrong, part of that was my bias coming from Boston. [The Red Sox] did not like PCA in the draft. We didn’t like Matt Allan in the draft, either, and that was actually the player the Cubs wanted. So in hindsight, that would have obviously been the much better deal.”

Allan, a righty pitcher and third-round pick of the Mets in 2019, never pitched above Class A in their system.

Crow-Armstrong, meanwhile, is an MVP candidate for the Cubs, leading baseball’s position players with 5.8 fWAR.

“Everyone still brings up the Pete Crow-Armstrong trade,” Scott wrote on X. “He’s a star, and I moved him. Easy version: I misjudged him. I did.

“But the real miss is that we were in a pennant race and the pull to ‘do something big’ moved me off the discipline I’d usually hold. A better scouting report doesn’t fix that. Building the decision so the urge to act doesn’t set the terms does. I own it.”