Cowtipper

Call me a dang dingus but I didn't even know he was in the system.

Xzavion Curry has elected free agency.

Chapter 32: The Players We Remember Summary: As the Mets turn toward another season, their winter conversations range from Juan Soto’s effort to become a better outfielder to the possibility of bringing back two aging champions, while the departure of an erratic reliever stirs memories both bitter and unexpectedly tender. Beneath the statistics and roster speculation lies a larger truth about baseball: the game belongs not only to its stars, but also to the forgotten players, the loyal witnesses, and the moments that refuse to leave us. There are baseball players you remember because they were great, and there are baseball players you remember because they were there. The distinction is important. Greatness has its records, its plaques, its ceremonies, and its place in the long arithmetic of the game. Presence is a more elusive thing. It may be a pitcher who appeared 65 times in a season and seldom gave you peace of mind. It may be a player whose final appearance coincided with the end of a pennant race. It may be a man who wore a major-league uniform for a single season in an empty ballpark, where the silence was so complete that even the sound of a baseball striking a catcher's mitt seemed to belong to another world. Ryne Stanek was not a Mets legend. He threw hard, wore his hair long, and could make a hitter look helpless one afternoon and a spectator look helpless the next. His fastball could inspire hope. His command could extinguish it. He finished his Mets tenure with a 5.47 earned-run average, a figure that does not require much literary assistance to explain itself. Yet he led the Mets' pitchers in appearances with 65. He was there, again and again, a familiar figure summoned from the bullpen. The refrain of a season became less he pitched well than well, he pitched. A relief pitcher can become a kind of household weather: everybody knows he is coming, and everybody wonders what sort of conditions he will bring. Stanek had his admirers, too. One remembered an important hold late in the previous season. Another remembered his involvement in games that seemed to grow complicated whenever he entered. These are not necessarily contradictory memories. Baseball is full of players who inspire affection and exasperation in equal measure. We do not always love a player because he makes us happy. Sometimes we love him because he gives us something to argue about. One fan who attended the Mets' September 1 game in Detroit received an unusually durable souvenir of Stanek's contradictions. The Mets had been through a miserable stretch, and the fan wanted to see at least one victory in person. By the bottom of the fifth, New York led 6–5, thanks to a grand slam by Juan Soto. The Tigers threatened. Gregory Soto, the Mets' reliever, gave up a single, struck out a batter, then allowed another single that put the tying run at third. Stanek came in. His first pitch was wild, and the runner scored. A game can turn on something so small that, had it happened in another inning or another contest, nobody would remember it. But the Mets eventually won, 10–8, with Juan Soto driving in six runs. The fan went home with the memory of a victory and, later, ordered a game-used baseball from the Tigers' collection. The ball that arrived was the one thrown for Stanek's wild pitch. There is a certain poetry in that. The souvenir of a game the Mets won was a physical reminder of the moment when they nearly let it get away. A baseball does not know whether it has been part of a triumph or a disaster. It remembers neither the score nor the crowd. It is a white object, marked by the seams, carrying its own small history in scuffs and dirt. The fan placed it in a display holder and looked for a Mets card of Stanek to accompany it. There was none to be found. A player could appear in 65 games, supply a season's worth of anxiety, and still leave behind no ordinary baseball card in the uniform he had worn. That is one way a man disappears from baseball: not all at once, but in the small omissions that follow him out the door. Stanek was headed to St. Louis on a one-year contract. His next season would be played under different lights, before different fans, with a new manager deciding when to summon him. The Mets would find another hard thrower. The bullpen would acquire another set of promises and apprehensions. In New York, the old argument would soon belong to somebody else. But the baseball from Detroit would remain. Juan Soto, meanwhile, was thinking about a part of the game that has never come as naturally to him as hitting. Soto had made a career of understanding the strike zone, of recognizing pitches and making decisions that other men could not make quickly enough. At the plate, he possessed the patience and precision of a man solving a problem whose answer he had already begun to suspect. In the outfield, the questions were different. A ball rose into the air, spun against the sky, and demanded an immediate judgment about where it would land. Soto had stretches in which his defense looked detached, and the available measures placed him near the bottom among outfielders in 2025. He also made some excellent throws. He had athletic ability, a strong arm, and legs that had remained healthy. He had even stolen 38 bases, a reminder that baseball players sometimes reveal new dimensions when we have grown accustomed to thinking we know them. Now he wanted to make defense a cornerstone of his development. The skeptics had a reasonable question: can a player learn, late in his career, to read difficult fly balls? Routine plays are one thing. A ball hit hard with unusual spin is another. Some people believe the ability to judge those trajectories is an instinct, like recognizing a breaking ball or knowing when a runner has taken too large a lead. Yet baseball has never been entirely kind to the argument that a man must remain what he was when he arrived. Wade Boggs and Tony Gwynn were celebrated first for their bats, and Cal Ripken did not win his first Gold Glove until he was 30. History offers examples of players who improved their defense after becoming established hitters, although history does not promise to repeat itself for Juan Soto. There was also the practical question of position. If the Mets acquired a more natural right fielder, Soto might move to left. Some wondered whether first base would eventually suit him better. He threw left-handed, moved well, and appeared coordinated enough to learn the position. But first base is where many players are sent when the alternatives have run out. There is only one place there, and a man who can still improve in the outfield has reason to try. This is what makes the winter interesting. In January, a player is not yet the sum of his coming season's failures and successes. He is a collection of possibilities. Soto might become a better outfielder. He might steal fewer bases, or more. He might discover that the hardest part of defense is not the throw but the first step, taken before the ball has fully revealed its destination. A great hitter trying to become a better fielder is a reminder that even the richest talent in baseball is unfinished. The game keeps asking questions. The player keeps trying to answer them. The Mets' winter also brought the possibility of old history returning in familiar uniforms. There was talk that Max Scherzer or Justin Verlander might be available for a one-year contract, perhaps at a salary around $15 million. Not so long ago, either pitcher commanded more than $40 million. They had been aces, champions, and men whose names alone could make a rotation seem formidable. Now the question was whether they had enough left to justify another season in the major leagues. The argument was not simply about age. A one-year contract is a different animal from a five-year commitment. It asks a club to accept uncertainty for a limited time. If the player succeeds, the arrangement may look inspired. If he fails, the club has not chained its future to the decision. The Mets had reason to be cautious. A rotation can appear crowded in January and become desperately thin by June. Last season had reminded everyone that a club needs more starting pitchers than it expects to use. Five healthy starters are not five guaranteed starters. There are sore shoulders, tired arms, awkward landings, and the mysterious discomfort that turns a scheduled outing into a bullpen game. A team might need twelve candidates to keep five men on the mound. But a rotation is not a warehouse where you can stack as many valuable objects as you like. Guaranteed contracts occupy space. Young pitchers need innings. Prospects need opportunities to discover whether they can handle major-league hitters. A veteran with a famous name can help, but he can also block the path of a younger man who needs to pitch. The question was whether Scherzer or Verlander would provide enough value to justify the expense and the disruption. Some wanted no part of either. Others thought there was unfinished business, particularly if the coming season seemed less promising than the Mets' supporters had hoped. One-year gambles, they argued, were preferable to long-term commitments. Age alone was not disqualifying. Baseball has never lacked for old men who could still throw a baseball. The difficulty was knowing which old man you were buying: the champion who remained inside the veteran, or the veteran who had finally overtaken the champion. That distinction is not visible in a contract. It emerges over time, one start at a time, in the interval between the first pitch and the manager's decision to take the ball away. There is another kind of old baseball story, one that has nothing to do with a player's remaining fastball or the number of innings his shoulder can endure. In January, a gathering of baseball researchers planned to discuss a book by Jay Horwitz, the longtime Mets public-relations director whose life in the organization had brought him close to generations of players. The meeting would be held online, an arrangement that made it possible for people far from New York to take part. Horwitz had spent years in the peculiar position of being both inside baseball and outside the lines. He knew players as public figures and as men who had to be called, found, reassured, questioned, and occasionally rescued from the small absurdities of daily life. The public sees a player walk to the plate. The people who work around the club see the thousand things that happen before he gets there. A book about such a life is also a book about the things that do not appear in a box score. Baseball's official records are meticulous about hits and errors, innings and earned runs. They are less equipped to record the jokes, the favors, the awkward conversations, the friendships, and the odd moments that make a team feel like a family. There was humor in the announcement of the meeting, including a question about whether Horwitz had devoted a chapter to an infamous accidental phone call. The joke belonged to a long familiarity with the club's history, the kind of familiarity that permits a fan to remember not only the great moments but also the embarrassing ones. In baseball, affection is often expressed through the willingness to laugh at what one loves. The meeting also offered a replay for those who could not attend. Even the conversation about baseball had become a game with its own schedule, its own audience, and its own archive. Perhaps the most poignant baseball story of that winter concerned players who had reached the major leagues in 2020. Twenty-four men had appeared in only one major-league season, and that season was unlike any other. The ballparks were empty. The familiar roar of the crowd had vanished. A player could make his debut at Fenway Park and hear something close to silence. One pitcher recalled that the experience felt like a spring-training game. The competition was elite, the margin for error was narrow, but the atmosphere lacked the force that ordinarily tells a player he has crossed into another world. The game was being played, yet some of the things that made it feel like the major leagues were missing. Imagine spending your life trying to reach that stage and then arriving when the stands are vacant. You have done the work. You have earned the opportunity. You step onto the field, and the place where thousands of people should be is empty. For a young player, the major leagues are supposed to offer a revelation. The lights are brighter, the opponents more accomplished, the consequences more severe. But the crowd is part of the revelation. It is the noise that follows a home run, the collective groan after a missed chance, the applause that rises when a man leaves the field for the final time. Without it, the game can seem strangely unfinished. Those players were major leaguers, whatever the length of their careers. Yet some would never return. Their one season became a footnote in a year that had already broken the usual measures of time. Baseball has always been cruel to players whose careers end before they can establish themselves. The 2020 class faced a particularly strange version of that cruelty. They reached the destination in a year when the destination itself had changed. This is the material out of which a baseball winter is made. A reliever leaves town, carrying the memory of a wild pitch and a missing baseball card. A superstar resolves to improve a weakness that threatens to diminish him. Two future Hall of Famers hover at the edge of a roster discussion, their names heavy with the weight of former glories. A public-relations man prepares to tell the stories that official records cannot preserve. A group of players remembers the season when the major leagues were real but the ballparks were empty. They are different stories, but they share a single concern: what remains when the moment has passed? The answer is not always a statistic. Sometimes it is a baseball in a plastic holder, its scuffed surface preserving a brief disaster in a game that ended in victory. Sometimes it is the recollection of a pitcher who made a fan nervous every time he entered. Sometimes it is the hope that a great hitter can learn to catch a difficult fly ball, or the suspicion that an old champion may still have one more useful season in him. And sometimes it is the memory of silence, of a ballpark that should have been full and was not. Soon the Mets will play again. There will be new box scores, new injuries, new heroes, and new disappointments. Another reliever will be judged after a bad inning. Another prospect will begin to look like a star. Another veteran will be asked whether he has enough left. The game will continue to produce more stories than anyone can remember. But the fans will keep what they can. They will keep the great moments, naturally. They will also keep the small ones: the ball that got away, the player who tried, the season that went strangely wrong, the man who stood on a major-league mound before an empty grandstand and wondered whether he was really there. Baseball's history is made by the men who play it. Its memory belongs to everyone who has watched.

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Wait a minute, the season's not over, the World Series is still going on. I still have plenty of time to become the season's most prolific poster. It's easy. I just gotta do

I'd like the Brewers to win. I've rooted for them in the past and I'm glad they finally made it. It's weird when teams like the Rays, D-Backs and Marlins make the World Series. It's strange seeing such "new" teams making it.

Chapter 31: The Men Who Wait for the Game Summary: As the Mets prepare for another season, the calendar fills with familiar hours, young players negotiate the price of their labor, and forgotten relievers drift toward new opportunities. From a prospect piling up hits in winter ball to a pitcher who reached the major-league roster without ever appearing in a game, the story of a baseball team is also the story of all the men who wait for their moment in the sun. Baseball begins before the first pitch. It begins in the winter, when the games exist only on paper, when a schedule is announced and a man can look at a Thursday in March and imagine the smell of the grass. It begins when the first salary figures are released, when a pitcher somewhere in Venezuela sends a baseball over a fence, and when a young man who spent September in a major-league uniform wonders what it might have felt like to take the mound. For the Mets, the announcement of the 2026 schedule was a small ceremony of anticipation. The weeknight games would begin at 7:10, as they had for years. Saturdays would mostly belong to the late afternoon, Sundays to the early afternoon. Opening Day, originally set for 3:10 on March 26, would eventually be moved to 1:15. The season would begin when the calendar and the business of baseball said it could begin, not when the heart, impatient as ever, demanded it. There are people who will argue about a start time as if the fate of the republic depended on it. They have their reasons. A 7:10 game means one thing to the man leaving work, another to the parent with a child who must be in school the next morning, and something else again to the fellow who has spent decades measuring his life in innings. The first pitch is a fixed point around which a thousand private arrangements are made. Yet baseball's calendar is not entirely ours to command. There are the requirements of the collective bargaining agreement, the length of the postseason, the World Baseball Classic, the weather in New York, and the increasingly powerful hand of television. A season cannot simply begin in February because somebody is eager to see a ball hit into the right-field corner. The winter must have its innings, too. And then there is television, which has its own idea of when a baseball game ought to happen. The Mets' Sunday-night appearances would bring new starting times, national audiences, and the familiar trade-off that accompanies the privilege of being selected for the big stage: the home viewer might see the Mets, but not necessarily through the voices that have become part of the experience. Gary, Keith, and Ron would be absent from those broadcasts. This is one of baseball's quieter changes. A game is never just a game. It is also the people who explain it, the habits that surround it, the hour at which it arrives. A fan can know the score and still feel that something is missing. The calendar, meanwhile, moves the players toward another kind of reckoning. In January, the Mets reached salary agreements with their arbitration-eligible players. David Peterson would earn $8.1 million, Tylor Megill $2.5 million, Francisco Alvarez $2.4 million, Luis Torrens $2.275 million, Reed Garrett $1.3 million, and Huascar Brazobán $1.05 million. These are handsome sums to people who have never earned a major-league salary. They are also the figures of a system in which a player's value is not determined solely by the quality of his work. Service time matters. The years spent in the majors matter. A backup catcher with more than five and a half seasons of service can come close in salary to a starting catcher who has yet to reach three. The numbers may look peculiar to an outsider, but baseball has always been a place where the past follows a man into the present. The salary is not merely a reward for what he did last season. It is a marker of where he stands in the long procession of professional baseball. One player has accumulated years; another is still moving through the machinery. The club and the player arrive at a figure that says something about both the work already done and the work still expected. There was a small complication in the arithmetic. Tyrone Taylor, whose projected salary had been part of the winter's calculations, accepted an initial offer of $3.8 million. Max Kranick and Nick Madrigal, whose names had appeared in earlier projections, were no longer part of the same conversation. Such is the business of baseball: a spreadsheet can preserve a man's place long after the roster has found a way to do without him. The money was good, but the timing was strange for two of the men receiving it. Megill and Garrett were expected to miss the entire 2026 season while recovering from injuries and surgeries. Their paydays would arrive without the usual accompanying pleasures of a season: the clubhouse, the bullpen, the slow accumulation of appearances, the satisfaction of getting a hitter to chase a pitch he cannot reach. There is something unsettling about a pitcher earning his salary while his body refuses to let him pitch. It is not a moral contradiction. Injuries are part of the bargain, and the player has earned a measure of security through the years that brought him here. But baseball is a game of motion, and an injured pitcher must live for a time in the opposite condition. He watches. He waits. The season moves around him. Chris Devenski knows something about the uncertainty of that wait. A veteran of parts of ten major-league seasons, he came to the Mets and pitched only 16⅔ innings. In 13 appearances, he recorded a 2.16 earned-run average. Those figures do not establish that he was a star, and no sensible account would make him one. They do, however, suggest a useful pitcher who might have been given more work. Thirteen appearances is a curious total for a reliever with a substantial major-league background. A bullpen is a small society governed by trust, circumstance, and the manager's sense of which arm can survive the next inning. A pitcher can be effective and still find himself watching from the rail. Another man gets the call; another game passes. Before long, a season has become a handful of outings and a line in the record book. Devenski, known as Devo, was on his way to the Pittsburgh organization on a minor-league deal. There was no great ceremony in the departure. Baseball rarely provides one for the men who do not become stars. The game simply moves on, and the pitcher carries his glove somewhere else. This is the difficulty of remembering a season. We remember the great saves, the late home runs, the games that turn a pennant race. We are less likely to remember the competent reliever who appeared thirteen times, did his job, and was never given enough of a role to become part of the season's public story. His statistics remain. The opportunity that might have enlarged them is gone. Meanwhile, thousands of miles away, Luisangel Acuña was making noise in Venezuelan winter ball. His first burst of production included a .276 batting average, a .427 on-base percentage, and a .553 slugging percentage over 96 plate appearances. After a painful blow to the forearm, he kept going. Later, the sample grew to 174 plate appearances, with a .282/.397/.542 line, and a four-home-run game helped make his winter more difficult to ignore. It was tempting to become excited. Baseball is built to encourage such temptations. A prospect begins hitting, the numbers climb, and the future acquires a little color. A fan starts to see the player not merely as he is, but as he might be in Queens, wearing the right uniform beneath the right lights. Then comes the caution. Winter leagues are not identical in quality, and the Dominican league and Venezuelan league do not present precisely the same tests. A player can dominate a small stretch of games without having solved the larger problem of major-league pitching. Even the most spectacular performance requires context. A batting average seen in a brief postseason stretch can be mistaken for a season-long figure. A four-homer game can tell us that a player had a remarkable night; it cannot, by itself, tell us what sort of hitter he will become. Still, there is no reason to dismiss the excitement. The purpose of following a prospect is not to guarantee that he will succeed. It is to watch for evidence that he might. Acuña's winter offered evidence worth watching, even if the final judgment belonged to another day. That is the bargain between a fan and a young player. The fan offers hope before the player has earned it, and the player, if he is fortunate, eventually offers something in return. There may be disappointment along the way. There almost certainly will be. But nobody follows a prospect because the future is certain. And then there is Dylan Ross, whose story offers a different kind of baseball immortality. Ross moved through Brooklyn, Binghamton, and Syracuse during the 2025 season. By late September, he had reached the Mets' major-league roster, eligible for the final two games as the club slid just out of contention. He never appeared in either one. Think about that for a moment. A pitcher can travel through the minor leagues, pass through the levels where the crowds are smaller and the lights less brilliant, and finally reach the roster of a major-league club. He can be close enough to the field to hear the sounds of the game, close enough to imagine the manager turning toward the bullpen. He can make it all the way to the destination without actually entering the contest. There are major leaguers whose careers consist of thousands of innings and others whose time in the big leagues is measured in a few appearances. Ross occupied a still stranger category: he reached the roster and did not get into a game. His achievement was real, even if it never produced an official major-league appearance. A roster spot is not a small thing. It represents the accumulated work of a career, the mornings in the weight room, the bus rides, the long nights when a pitcher has to find something in his delivery that was not there the day before. But the final step is not always a step a man gets to take. The opportunity can be swallowed by the calendar. The season ends. The team goes home. The record book has no box score to preserve the moment. Somewhere in the winter, other pitchers will be preparing for their own chance. Some will earn millions. Some will receive minor-league contracts. Some will recover from surgery, and some will be sent to a new organization in the hope that a different uniform might mean a different beginning. Some will hit four home runs in a winter league and make the future look suddenly generous. Others will be called up and never hear their names announced over a major-league public-address system. They all belong to the same game. That is what the winter teaches, if we pay attention. Baseball is not only the account of those who succeed spectacularly. It is also the record of those who come close, those who do useful work without much recognition, and those who spend their lives waiting for an opportunity that may arrive too late or not at all. The schedule gives us dates. The salary agreements give us numbers. Winter-ball statistics give us reasons to dream. A pitcher leaving town gives us a reminder that even a respectable season can disappear quickly from public memory. A young man reaching the roster without appearing in a game gives us a story that is almost too delicate to notice. Soon enough, the Mets will take the field. The first pitch will be thrown, and the winter's calculations will yield to the simple demands of baseball. Somebody will get a hit. Somebody will miss a sign. A reliever will begin warming in the bullpen. A fan will look at the clock and discover that, for the moment, the world has narrowed to nine innings. And in the stands, as the game unfolds, there will be room for all of them: the stars, the injured, the forgotten, the hopeful, and the men who waited for their chance. Baseball has always had more stories than it has time to tell.

Zack Wheeler is the easy one.

Mike Edwards died. https://www.tributearchive.com/obituaries/49692398/mike-edwards Who was Mike Edwards? Mike Edwards (1952–2026) was a major league second baseman who played for the Pittsburgh Pirates and Oakland Athletics from 1977 to 1980 before spending a season with Japan’s Kintetsu Buffaloes in 1983. The twin brother of fellow major leaguer Marshall Edwards and younger brother of Dave Edwards, he made baseball history in 1978 by becoming the first American League second baseman to turn two unassisted double plays in a single game.

Chapter 30: The Long Memory of the Mets Summary: A debate over the Mets’ all-time number 26 becomes a meditation on memory, from Dave Kingman’s prodigious home runs to Frank Viola’s championship pedigree and the promise of a young Nolan McLean. Along the way, forgotten relievers, obscure prospects, and the changing culture of baseball remind us that a player’s legacy is measured not only in statistics, but in the memories he leaves behind. Every baseball team has its monuments. Some are made of bronze, some of retired numbers, and some exist only in the private galleries of people who remember where they were when a certain ball disappeared into the stands. The Mets have their monuments, too. Tom Seaver stands above them all, an enduring figure in the franchise’s imagination. Jerry Koosman has his number retired. Keith Hernandez, Gary Carter, Mike Piazza, and others occupy their places in the history. But baseball memory is a democratic institution, at least when left to the fans. It allows a man who hit a prodigious home run and a pitcher who labored through an unremarkable season to occupy the same shelf, provided they belonged to the right summer of somebody’s life. So the question was put: Who was the greatest Met to wear number 26? It seemed a simple question. It was not. The leading candidate was Dave Kingman, known as Kong, a man whose relationship with the baseball was often violent and whose relationship with batting average was less cordial. Kingman hit the ball a very long way. He could make a ballpark fall silent with one swing and then, an inning later, make a crowd groan with another strikeout. He was the sort of player who made the game feel larger than its statistics, even when the statistics were doing their best to explain him. Kingman was not everybody’s idea of a baseball hero. One fan remembered liking him as a child, then confessed that he had also liked disco. The comparison was not entirely unfair. Kingman belonged to a baseball age of excess, when power was its own argument and subtlety was sometimes regarded as a weakness. Another observer placed him closer to Foghat than to disco, a distinction that was probably more revealing of the speaker’s musical sensibilities than of Kingman’s hitting. But this is how baseball memory works. A player becomes attached to a period, and the period becomes attached to a person. The boy who read the sports pages before breakfast remembers the home run, the box score, the photograph, the particular shape of the name in the newspaper. Decades later, the adult may know that another player was more complete, more valuable, or more accomplished. It does not matter. The old association has already been made. One fan put it plainly: the best player to wear a number is not necessarily the player who owns the number in your mind. Jerry Grote remained his eternal number 15, even if Carlos Beltrán had been a better Met. Kingman, similarly, would always be number 26. The number had become less a piece of uniform equipment than a small, private deed to the past. There were other candidates. Frank Viola had a stronger résumé than Kingman in several important respects. A three-time All-Star and the 1988 American League Cy Young Award winner, Viola had been the Most Valuable Player of the 1987 World Series with Minnesota before joining the Mets. In 1990, he won twenty games for New York. He was a serious pitcher, a proven winner, and a man whose accomplishments could be recited without the need for sentimental assistance. The Mets had acquired him in a trade that sent Kevin Tapani and Rick Aguilera to Minnesota. It was the sort of deal that invites the usual verdicts. The Mets got Viola, who gave them a twenty-win season; the Twins got players who helped them win a championship. Everybody can find evidence for the proposition that the other club came out ahead. Baseball trades rarely provide the clean moral ending people want. A transaction is a door through which several careers pass, and the value of each career becomes clearer only after the door has closed. Viola had the credentials. Kingman had the memory. Terry Leach had the affection of those who remembered the useful, uncelebrated pitcher who could be trusted to do a difficult job without demanding that anybody write a ballad about it. Orlando Hernández, Jae Weong Seo, Rico Brogna, and other candidates had their advocates, each carrying a different recollection of the Mets’ long and uneven history. Then there was Nolan McLean, whose candidacy was based less on what he had already done in number 26 than on what people hoped he might do. That, too, is a legitimate way to think about a baseball number. A young player arrives carrying no history of his own, so the fans lend him theirs. They look at the number on his back and imagine what it could become. One voter declared McLean the obvious choice. Another agreed, while acknowledging that the decision rested mostly on optimism for the future. There is no shame in this. Baseball is the only business I know in which people routinely invest emotional capital in men who have not yet demonstrated that they can do the job. A prospect is a promise with a uniform number. The fans know the risks. They also know that the game would be unbearable if they refused to hope until all the evidence was in. The discussion of number 26 wandered, as baseball discussions should, into the strange corners of Mets history. Bruce Boisclair, for example, had worn number 26 briefly in 1974 before returning to the organization and emerging in 1976 with number 4. That was the sort of detail that ordinarily disappears beneath the larger stories of the franchise. Yet it raised a question worthy of a baseball historian: Was Boisclair naturally a number 26 who had been displaced by Rusty Staub, or was he a number 4 who had been temporarily assigned the wrong identity before Dave Kingman came along? There are mysteries in baseball that cannot be settled by a statistician. This may be one of them. A number is supposed to be a number. The player wears it, the equipment manager records it, and the official scorer goes about his business. But baseball has never been content with the official meaning of things. A number can become a memory, a superstition, a symbol of a player’s character, or a reminder of a season when everything briefly seemed possible. It can even become a question of institutional manners. In September 2019, the Mets announced that they would retire number 36 for Jerry Koosman, forty years after the left-hander’s final season with the club. The timing created an unusual problem: Mickey Callaway, then the Mets’ manager, was wearing 36. He had to choose another number for the final week of the season. He chose 26. The change coincided with a brief run of success. The Mets went 5–1 while Callaway wore his new number, opening and closing the stretch with walk-off victories. One of those victories included Dominic Smith’s memorable moment of late-season resurrection. For a few days, the number acquired a peculiar second life. Perhaps, someone suggested, Mickey 36 had been Mickey of the Darkness, while Mickey 26 was Mickey of the Light. It was a good joke, but the underlying question was serious enough. A number retirement is supposed to be an honor, a formal acknowledgment that a player has become part of the permanent history of a club. If the number must first be taken away from somebody else, the gesture can feel less like a solemn tribute than an administrative inconvenience. Perhaps the Mets should have allowed a number to remain unofficially retired for a while before making the official announcement. Such a practice would have prevented a manager from being forced to change numbers at the end of a disappointing season and would have given the honor a little more dignity. It would also have required the Mets to plan something in advance, which is not always the organization’s strongest suit. But number 26 is not only a story of old players and old decisions. It is also a story of the minor leagues, where the Mets’ future is distributed among young men whose names may mean nothing to the average fan. One of them was Edward Lantigua, a nineteen-year-old outfielder who had produced a .433 on-base percentage in the Florida Complex League. He did not yet possess much power, and his stolen-base results were not especially impressive. What he did possess was a good batting eye, an unusual ability to make contact, and a willingness to let balls outside the strike zone go by. He had struck out only sixty-six times in his first 383 plate appearances. These are not the numbers that generally sell tickets. They are the numbers that make a patient observer lean closer. The young hitter had the beginnings of a foundation. He reached base, avoided excessive strikeouts, and had played all three outfield positions, mostly center field. His season did not establish that he would become a major leaguer, much less a star. It established that there was something worth watching. A prospect was adopted, in spirit if not in law. The joke was that the young man deserved a feature before anyone had actually committed to raising him. The joke also expressed a familiar truth: fans who follow the minor leagues are often less interested in what a player has accomplished than in what his accomplishments might mean. The rest of the baseball world may be waiting for the next superstar. A minor-league enthusiast can be delighted by a teenager who takes walks. Not every minor leaguer, of course, becomes a major leaguer. Not every major leaguer becomes a memorable one. The distance between those categories is filled with men who spend years working toward a destination they may never reach, or reach briefly and then leave. Sam Coonrod was one such Met. He had been a spring-training standout in 2023, a hard thrower whose fastball seemed to announce a future. An injury intervened. He appeared in ten games for the Mets, recorded one hold, and endured a particularly ugly outing in which he entered an 11–1 game in the eighth inning and surrendered four runs without recording an out. Two more appearances followed, and then he was out of the major leagues. By 2025, he had resurfaced in the Frontier League, pitching again, still trying to keep a baseball career alive. It was a short major-league story, the sort that can vanish almost completely. One fan did not remember his name. Another offered a brief apology to the player, as though failing to remember him were a personal offense. But there was something worth remembering about Coonrod beyond the results. His career illustrated the modern pitching economy, in which velocity is pursued with extraordinary intensity and the body often pays the bill. Young pitchers are encouraged to throw harder, to add another mile per hour, to develop the kind of power that attracts scouts. They are also encouraged, directly or indirectly, toward relief work, where a single explosive inning can be more valuable than the slower labor of a starter. The system can produce magnificent fastballs. It can also produce pitchers who spend long stretches on the injured list, return to throw hard again, and disappear when the results falter. A reliever may begin a season with a 1.69 ERA and finish it on the wrong side of a roster decision. His decline becomes the last thing anyone remembers, even if it was not the whole story. There is a peculiar cruelty in this. A team needs relievers, but it often treats them as replaceable parts. A pitcher is useful until he is not. Once he begins to struggle, his job can disappear faster than the public memory of his good innings. The final bad outing becomes the defining image, and the rest of the work is swallowed by it. Coonrod was not the first such pitcher, and he will not be the last. His career was brief enough to be forgotten, but not so brief that it lacked meaning. He reached the major leagues, appeared under the lights, and did the work of a professional ballplayer. That is not the same as a long career or a lasting legacy. It is not nothing, either. The Mets’ history is full of men like him. Some have names that appear in record books. Some have a single appearance that makes a statistical oddity. Eddie Alvarez, for instance, managed to produce positive value for the Mets despite going hitless in nine at-bats, with a walk. He had entered a game as a pinch-runner and scored the go-ahead run on a passed ball. He even pitched an inning without allowing a run, although the statistical record did not reward him with measurable positive value for that performance. This is the sort of detail that baseball offers to people who refuse to stop looking. The ordinary fan sees a name on a roster and moves on. The devoted fan discovers a small, improbable story and decides it deserves a place in the record. That impulse is not so different from the impulse that makes a person remember Dave Kingman as number 26, even when another player may have been more accomplished. The number becomes a container for memory. The forgotten reliever becomes a reason to look again. The prospect with a good batting eye becomes a possible future. The old photograph of a player wearing his cap at a peculiar angle becomes a piece of history worth preserving. Baseball is often described as a game of numbers, and in one sense it is. The numbers tell us how often a player hit, how far he threw, how many games he won, how many years he lasted. But the game’s deeper arithmetic is personal. It adds the home run a boy remembers, the pitcher a fan adopted, the career that ended too soon, and the number that belongs to a player long after he has stopped wearing it. The Mets have had better players than Dave Kingman. They have had more complete players, more disciplined hitters, more accomplished pitchers, and more celebrated champions. But the vote for number 26 was never only about identifying the greatest statistical performer. It was about the way baseball embeds itself in memory and refuses to leave. One day Nolan McLean may make the question easy. He may pitch his way into the franchise’s history, turning the optimism of the present into the certainty of the past. Or he may become another name on a long list of players who passed through Queens, leaving behind a few innings, a few numbers, and a few people who remember. For now, number 26 belongs to Kingman in the minds of those who watched him. It belongs to Viola in the ledgers of those who measure accomplishment. It belongs to McLean in the dreams of those who are already looking ahead. And somewhere, in the larger and less celebrated history of the Mets, it belongs to all the other men who wore it. They came through Queens, took their turns, and went on. Baseball kept the numbers. The fans kept the memories.

It's a fun project. It's a good way for me personally to take in basically this entire past year's worth of baseball content on this website in a more palatable form, rather than just reading raw forum posts.

Teruaki? Well now I'm hungry!