With FA, if they are any good you always overpay. Does that mean you should never sign a FA. Heck we already seen the great Heaney get 8.5 million dollars and I question whether he should be pitching in the majors.
Pitching contracts are often bad, but if your a team like the mets. If you want to compete in the next 5 years you are going to have to find some pitchers. It is not in there farm right now. I know they got allen, but he is hurt, and who knows how he bounces back.
You can make an arguement to be patient with position players, because there are thing coming, Alvarez at C, Vientos for LF, Maurcio For SS, AND Baty for 3b for starters.
But if there is nothing coming, it is hard to be patient, it doesn't help when you draft a pitcher this year and than don't sign him either with your 1rst round pick.
My point I'm trying to make is there is no retool like you said, either you completely rebuild, or you buy FA to fix past mistakes. If we had a ton of prospects in double and triple A you can retool, but if you have no pitchers essentially (I guess we have peterson and Megill who are young). You either buy them or you trade degrom and rebuild there are only two choices, and considering you gave lindor that outrageous contract the idea that your not gonna compete the first 1/2 of his contract, where he will be his best, is yet another problem as welll with trying to rebuild. You can rebuild, You can Buy like crazy and over pay for FA, what you can't do if your the mets is retool, they don't have the pitching to do anything other than the two options I said.
Overpaying for Ray is more than 5 years in my opinion, he is the best pitcher on the market. Gausman is more than 4 Years. I happen to think Gray and Pineida are very underrated if you can get them on reasonable two/three year deals. I wouldn't hesistate to take a chance on scherzer on a two year deal with large money, a three year deal is where it gets real iffy for me in my opinion.