It's been 10 years since the Brewers had to scramble at the trade deadline when a pact with the Mets got vetoed under strange circumstances.
Carnevor bills itself as "Milwaukee's Premier Steakhouse," right around the corner from the famous (and perhaps haunted) Pfister Motel on Milwaukee Street downtown. Members of the Milwaukee Brewers front office went there to celebrate the night of July 29, 2025, and the food was probably superb as always.
But a little extra salt made a world of difference.
Brewers general manager Doug Melvin and staff members believed they had reached an accord with the New York Mets earlier in the day to send outfielder Carlos Gómez to the Mets in exchange for infielder Wilmer Flores and pitcher Zack Wheeler.
On the team plane as the Brewers returned from San Francisco, players took a farewell photo with Gómez. The Brewers were 44-58, well off the pace of again capturing the flicker of postseason experience that had blessed the franchise in 2008 and 2011. Melvin's tenure as GM was winding down, but he had seemingly swung a deal to position the Brewers for the future.
The Mets front office planned to wait until after the game to inform players that they'd been traded. But Flores caught wind of it mid-game, first realizing something was amiss when he was given a strange standing ovation by Mets fans.
"It definitely caught me by surprise," Flores told MLB.com in 2020. "That was one of the reasons I got a little bit emotional, because I didn’t know I could get traded. A lot of players feel that way when you play five or six years in one place, especially the place that signed you for the first time. You come up with all of your teammates, and that’s where you want to stay and where you think you’re going to play forever."
With Flores visibly upset as he took the field, cameras fixated on the tears welling in his eyes. And in Milwaukee, puzzled why Flores was still in a game, Melvin received a call at the restaurant from Mets general manager Sandy Alderson. The deal was off.
To this day, Mets officials insist the trade torpedoed over a possible Gómez hip injury, not that Flores' reaction inspired a change-of-heart among Mets brass. Gómez never missed a game with the hip and insists he wasn't hurt.
"Jeff Wilpon was the owner at the time, and owners do get (say over) these big deals. They're run past them when they're done. ... I've had three or four deals over my career that were nixed by ownership," Melvin recalled on the Microbrew podcast in 2022. "That's fine. Owners own their club. They get to have their say over things."
Whatever the reason, the deal was off, forcing an immediate Brewers pivot with 36 hours to go before the trade deadline. Wheeler was recovering from Tommy John surgery at the time and ultimately suffered setbacks that kept him out of the big leagues until 2017, after which he evolved into one of the best pitchers in the National League. Flores, who hit an emotional walk-off home run July 31 for the Mets, stayed in New York until 2018; he's in his sixth season with the Giants in 2025.
But the Brewers' pivot proved fruitful and wildly consequential.
Melvin said he told his scouts at the restaurant to go home and come back for an early start to work out a trade with the Houston Astros, a team that had already expressed interest in Gómez.
That's what the Brewers did one day later in consummating the trade with the Astros — a team whose front office included David Stearns, the man who would replace Melvin by season's end as GM.
In exchange for Gómez and Mike Fiers, the Brewers received outfielder Domingo Santana, outfielder Brett Phillips, pitcher Adrian Houser and left-handed pitcher Josh Hader.
Hader, obviously, became the centerpiece. He made four All-Star teams in Milwaukee, became a central figure in the team's playoff run in 2018 (and 2019, for that matter) and became one of the most dominant arms in baseball. His trade to San Diego in 2022 might be the second-most-memorable Brewers trade over the past 10 years, behind the one that brought him into the organization.
Santana started through 2017 and bounced back from a 2018 season spent largely at Class AAA to deliver some big moments late in the year. Phillips was part of the package sent to Kansas City for Mike Moustakas, and Houser made 97 starts for the Brewers over seven seasons.
More than that was how it impacted Houston, and not because of Gomez. Fiers threw two no-hitters with Houston but, more consequentially, became the whistleblower on Houston's garbage-can cheating scandal, a revelation that has tainted Houston's surge as one of the MLB's best franchises in the past decade.
This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Mets player Wilmer Flores' tears changed Brewers history 10 years ago
Category: Baseball
