Cowtipper

Chapter 33: The Price of the Game Summary: In a winter when the Mets chased Kyle Tucker with hundreds of millions of dollars, added another former Yankee to their bullpen, and tried to replenish their international prospect fund, baseball seemed increasingly like a marketplace in which everything had a price. But amid the contract figures and gambling scandals, the old game remained visible—in the promise of a sixteen-year-old shortstop, the uncertain future of a young pitcher, and the extraordinary numbers Babe Ruth left behind nearly a century ago. There was a time when the winter belonged to the imagination. The ballparks were closed, the fields were brown, and a baseball fan could spend January thinking about what might happen when the weather turned. A young pitcher might become a star. A familiar veteran might discover one last good season in his arm. The Mets, who had so often found ingenious ways to disappoint, might finally assemble the right collection of men. Now the winter belongs to the marketplace, and the imagination must compete with the numbers. How much is a run worth? How much is a year of a player's prime? What is the proper price for a corner outfielder who might improve a lineup, and how many years should a club be willing to promise him before the future begins collecting its debt? For weeks, the Mets' pursuit of Kyle Tucker supplied New York with a running education in the economics of hope. At first, the silence was striking. Tucker was the leading free agent on the market, yet there were few of the familiar spectacles: no dramatic procession of rumors, no obvious bidding war, no parade of reports about private meetings and contract demands. Then the whispers began. The Mets were interested. The Blue Jays were interested. The Dodgers were interested. Every few hours, a new report seemed to redraw the map. The Mets needed outfield help, and Tucker was a logical target. He was an accomplished hitter, still young enough to contemplate another trip to free agency in his prime, and potentially a better fit than a long-term commitment to a player whose best years might already be behind him. He could join Juan Soto and Francisco Lindor in a lineup that would make opposing pitchers reconsider their evening plans. There were complications, naturally. Tucker had suffered a hand injury in the preceding season. The Mets had prospects approaching the major leagues, and those young players would eventually need room. A long contract could become an obstacle just as the next generation arrived. There was also the question of whether Tucker wanted a short, extraordinarily lucrative deal or a longer agreement offering more security. The Mets appeared to favor the shorter route. Reports suggested an offer of roughly $50 million per season, perhaps for three years, then four. The Blue Jays were said to be more willing to offer a longer commitment. The Dodgers, as they have so often in recent years, remained a presence in the background, ready to enter the conversation when the moment suited them. Fans began doing the arithmetic themselves. If Tucker opted out after two years, how much could he earn on his next contract? What if he stayed for three? What if he played out four years and entered the market again at 33? A contract became a mathematical puzzle, and the player's future was projected in columns of millions. There was something impressive about the sophistication of the calculations. The modern fan has learned to think in terms of annual average value, opt-outs, deferred money, and the future cost of a player's declining years. But there was also something faintly comic about it. A man had not yet signed a contract, and people were already calculating what he might earn after leaving it. Then came the news. Tucker chose the Dodgers, reportedly on a four-year agreement worth $240 million, with an opt-out after two seasons. The Mets' reported final offer was $220 million over four years, with more of the money paid early and no deferred payments. The difference was not small, though neither offer could be described as modest. The Mets had gone after the player and put a great deal of money on the table. They had not been outbid by some impoverished club from a distant corner of the league. They had been beaten by another wealthy organization that was prepared to pay more. The disappointment in New York was immediate. Some saw the result as another humiliating chapter in the long history of the Mets and the Dodgers, whose rivalry carries memories that extend well beyond any current roster. Others wondered whether baseball's financial structure had become so distorted that a handful of clubs could gather the sport's most celebrated players while everyone else watched. The argument soon turned toward a salary cap. That, too, was familiar territory. Owners have long sought limits on what they must pay players; players have long understood that a cap would restrict their earning power. The question of competitive balance is real, but so is the question of who would benefit from a system designed to limit spending. A salary cap might prevent one club from outspending another, but it would not automatically guarantee wiser decisions, better scouting, or more satisfying baseball. Money can buy talent. It cannot buy certainty. A $240 million contract can look like a masterstroke in October and a burden in April. The figures are exact; the future remains a guess. The Mets had pursued Tucker because they believed he could help them win. The Dodgers signed him because they believed the same. In the end, one club got its player and the other got a winter's worth of arithmetic. Money had entered another corner of the baseball conversation, one that was far less amusing. In November, reports emerged that Cleveland pitchers Emmanuel Clase and Luis Ortiz had been indicted on gambling-related charges involving alleged manipulation of individual pitches for proposition bets. The allegations concerned pitches thrown outside the strike zone and information that could give bettors an advantage. The pitchers had been placed on paid leave while the investigation proceeded. The case raised a question that baseball has faced for more than a century: what happens when a player has a financial interest in something other than winning the game? The modern version is particularly unsettling because the wager need not concern the final score. A gambler can bet on a single pitch, a first-pitch strike, a batter's next plate appearance, or dozens of other events that unfold during a game. The more detailed the betting menu becomes, the more opportunities there are for a person with inside knowledge to manipulate an outcome—or to appear to do so. The allegations against Clase and Ortiz did not establish that every suspicious pitch was fixed, nor did they settle every question about who knew what. But they exposed the vulnerability of a game in which individual actions can be separated from the final result and turned into wagers. A pitcher has always had to decide where to throw the ball. Now, in a world saturated with betting opportunities, someone may be watching not only to see whether he gets the batter out, but whether the pitch lands a few inches beyond the plate. That is a different kind of audience. One of the disturbing details was the relatively small share the pitchers were alleged to have received from the winnings. The reported operation had supposedly produced hundreds of thousands of dollars for its participants, while the players themselves may have received only a fraction. If the allegations are proven, the bargain would have been an extraordinary one: risk a career, reputation, and freedom for money that was modest by major-league standards. But the logic of temptation has never been especially logical. A player on the edge of the sport may fear that his next paycheck will be his last. A debt can distort judgment. A friend or relative can become a source of pressure. In the worst circumstances, threats may reach beyond the player to his family. These are possibilities, not proof of what motivated either pitcher, but they help explain why financial wrongdoing in sports is rarely as simple as a man deciding he wants more money. Baseball's embrace of legal sports betting made the situation more complicated. Leagues have accepted gambling partnerships, betting advertisements, and broadcasts that discuss odds alongside batting averages. They have done so partly because gambling can attract viewers who might otherwise have little interest in a particular game. The wager gives a fan a reason to watch the seventh inning of a contest between two teams he does not care about. The commercial logic is clear. So is the danger. A league can suspend players, cooperate with investigators, and insist that its rules are strict. Yet it must also reckon with the business it has helped normalize. It cannot spend years encouraging fans to bet on the smallest events in a game and then act astonished when those events become objects of suspicion. The consequences reach beyond the integrity of a box score. Ryne Stanek, the former Mets reliever, described receiving death threats from bettors who blamed him for losing their parlays. One message wished death upon his family because a wager had gone wrong. A baseball player can be criticized for giving up a home run. He can be booed for a wild pitch or a blown save. Those things are part of the rough exchange between a performer and a paying crowd. But a threat against a player's family over a lost wager belongs to another world entirely. The fan who once watched a game to share in its uncertainty can now watch it as an investor, measuring every pitch against a private financial outcome. The pitcher is no longer merely trying to get a hitter out. He is performing in front of an invisible audience that may be furious if the wrong kind of ball crosses the plate. Baseball has always carried the possibility of corruption. The Black Sox scandal taught the sport that the public's faith can be damaged by men who treat the game as a commodity to be manipulated. The present circumstances are different, but the underlying principle is not. A contest must mean what it appears to mean, or the numbers lose their authority. Meanwhile, the Mets were doing the smaller, less glamorous work of assembling a baseball club. They agreed to a two-year, $22 million contract with Luke Weaver, a former Yankee reliever who had pitched 64 games for New York's other team in 2025. He had recorded a 3.62 ERA and struck out 72 batters in 64 innings, though ten home runs raised questions about how well his performance might travel to another ballpark. The signing brought the familiar mixture of relief and skepticism. A bullpen needs experienced arms, and Weaver offered a right-handed option for the late innings. Yet some observers wondered whether his favorable batting-average-on-balls-in-play numbers with the Yankees were sustainable, and whether the Mets had paid more than necessary for a reliever who had not consistently held onto the closer's role. Such is the life of the relief pitcher. He can be very good for a month, miserable for a week, and indispensable by the time the next injury arrives. His work is too specialized to be judged by reputation alone, yet too unpredictable to be measured confidently by a handful of statistics. The Mets had also been reluctant to trade promising young pitcher Jonah Tong merely to obtain bullpen help. There was good reason for the caution. A young starter may become a mainstay of a rotation for years, or he may never quite solve major-league hitters. Trading him too soon can look foolish. Holding him too long can look equally foolish. The only certainty is that a prospect's value is greatest before the future has revealed what he is. Weaver's contract was modest beside Tucker's, but the decision involved the same problem: how much should a club pay today for what it hopes a player will do tomorrow? The Mets' international dealings offered a different glimpse of the machinery behind a major-league roster. Cleveland acquired left-handed minor-league pitcher Franklin Gomez in exchange for $1.5 million in international bonus-pool allocation. The transaction coincided with the opening of the international signing period, when clubs compete for young talent from outside the traditional draft system. The phrase bonus-pool money has a bureaucratic sound, as if the future could be stored in an account and transferred between organizations with the proper paperwork. In practice, the allocation represents an opportunity: one club gives up some of its spending capacity so another can use it. The money is not simply a check changing hands. It is permission to spend within a system of limits. The Mets had recently committed $3.9 million to Wandy Asigen, a sixteen-year-old left-handed-hitting shortstop regarded as one of the leading international prospects in his class, along with outfielder Cleiner Ramirez. Asigen had been expected to sign with the Yankees before changing course after a change in their international scouting leadership. There was a pleasing irony in the story. A teenager who had not yet played a major-league inning had become important enough to alter the Mets' financial calculations. The club was willing to exchange a pitcher for additional spending capacity because it believed the money might help secure a player whose future was almost entirely unwritten. No one knew whether Asigen would become a star. No one knew whether Gomez would emerge as a useful major-league pitcher. The transaction was a wager on probability, the same kind of wager that informs every draft, trade, and free-agent signing—though without the ugly possibility of a manipulated pitch. Baseball is full of these bets. The wise ones are not the ones that never fail. They are the ones made with an honest understanding of what is known, what is uncertain, and what failure would cost. There is comfort in remembering that the game existed long before annual average value and international bonus allocations. In the winter, one baseball historian began comparing the Mets' use of pitchers with the pitching staffs of Babe Ruth's era. During Ruth's 1927 season, when he hit sixty home runs, he faced 64 different pitchers. The 2025 Mets used 46 pitchers. The comparison led to questions about roster sizes, the changing use of bullpens, and the extraordinary demands of modern pitching staffs. Ruth's Yankees won 110 games in 1927, scored 975 runs, and outscored their opponents by a margin that made the rest of the league seem to be playing a different sport. Ruth hit more home runs than any other individual player, and his total exceeded the home-run output of many entire teams. He homered off 33 of the 64 pitchers he faced. Those numbers remain astonishing because they describe a world in which one man could dominate the sport so completely. Yet they also remind us how much baseball has changed. Ruth played in an era when pitchers were used differently, when bullpens were smaller in purpose and stature, and when a team could rely on a handful of arms to carry much of a season. Today's game requires an ever-expanding supply of pitchers, each with a specialized task and a carefully managed workload. A starter may be removed after five innings; a reliever may be summoned to face one batter. The roster becomes a collection of arms to be deployed according to matchup, fatigue, and probability. The game has grown more scientific. It has also become more expensive, more complicated, and more vulnerable to the demands of the businesses surrounding it. But Ruth's sixty home runs still stand in the imagination as a simple baseball miracle. No one needed an app to explain them. No one had to calculate an opt-out clause. The ball went over the fence, and the crowd understood what it had seen. The winter of 2025–26 offered the Mets a series of reminders that baseball is both a game and a business, and that the two are never entirely comfortable together. The pursuit of Kyle Tucker ended with a more lucrative offer from Los Angeles. Luke Weaver arrived with the promise of strengthening a bullpen whose needs would become clear only as the season unfolded. International bonus money changed hands to help the Mets invest in a teenager who might one day play shortstop in Queens. Elsewhere, allegations involving gambling threatened the trust on which every pitch depends. Each story was about value, but not every kind of value could be reduced to dollars. Tucker was worth enough to command a fortune, yet not enough to make the Dodgers' decision inevitable. Weaver was worth a substantial salary, yet his future performance remained uncertain. Asigen was worth millions before the public had seen him play professional baseball. And a pitcher who threw a single ball outside the strike zone could become the subject of a criminal investigation if the circumstances suggested that the pitch had been part of a scheme. Baseball will always involve money. Players deserve to be paid for their labor, owners will continue to calculate their investments, and fans will argue over whether the price of a player matches the runs he might produce. There is nothing inherently wrong with any of that. The trouble begins when the price becomes the point. A baseball game is not valuable because someone has wagered on it. It is valuable because the outcome is uncertain, because the players are trying to win, and because the people watching have agreed to care about what happens. Once that trust is broken, the sport becomes a series of movements performed for an audience that can no longer believe what it sees. In the end, the Mets will be judged by wins and losses. Tucker will be judged by what he does in Los Angeles. Weaver will be judged by the outs he records in New York. Asigen will be judged, eventually, by the player he becomes. The old records will remain, and future fans will find new ways to compare them. But the game itself is worth more than the sums attached to its participants. It is worth the winter's anticipation, the first warm afternoon at the ballpark, the roar after a home run, and the long memory of a fan who can still recall where he was when something extraordinary happened. Babe Ruth hit sixty home runs in 1927. The number has survived every change in the sport's economics, every new way of measuring a player, every argument about what baseball ought to be. That is the real wealth of the game: the things that money can buy, and the things it cannot.

They also signed youngster Jhon Vale. And so it begins. The Mets... released SS Angel Ozuna. released C Jesus Griman. released RHP Cristian Dudamel. released SS Jose Padilla.

The Mets have claimed utilityman Kyren Paris from the Los Angeles Angels. He had a 100% success rate at going hitless last year, collecting no hits in 15 at-bats for the Angels. In a backwards sort of way, he had an impressively empty line in 2026: I didn't think it was possible to manage that much negative WAR in so limited a stretch, but apparently, it is. On the bright side, he is a former 2nd round pick and is still just 24 years old. He has a .364 OBP in the minors, and there's something to be said for that as his average is just .243. https://www.mlbtraderumors.com/2026/10/mets-claim-kyren-paris-from-angels.html

Kinda hope he opts out. He reminds me of Roberto Alomar. Came on with huge expectations and just let us all down. He was there and there a lot, but didn't do much of anything. He actually wasn't bad per se, but certainly didn't contribute that much either. Bo Bichette, 2026: 160 G, 638 AB, 76 R, 166 H, 25 2B, 18 HR, 78 RBI, 2 SB, 49 BB, 127 K, .260/.312/.390, .702 OPS, 97 OPS+ Roberto Alomar, 2002: 149 G, 590 AB, 73 R, 157 H, 24 2B, 11 HR, 53 RBI, 16 SB, 57 BB, 83 K, .266/.331/.376, .708 OPS, 90 OPS+ Neither were out-and-out terrible, but hardly worth the money or hype, either.

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!

Ted Brazell (1952-2026), father of fellow professional baseball player Craig Brazell, spent ten years in the minor leagues after being selected by the Detroit Tigers in the fifteenth round of the 1970 amateur draft, playing outfield, third base, and catcher but never advancing beyond Double-A. After retiring as a player, he managed the Macon Peaches and Lakeland Tigers from 1980 to 1983, leading both clubs in the Tigers’ minor league system.

Hunter Barco - Mets 24th round pick in the 2019 draft; never played in their system. Went 0-1 with a 7.64 ERA in 7 relief appearances for the Pirates in 2026. Between two minor league stops, he went 4-8 with a 3.83 ERA in 22 games (15 starts). Nabil Crismatt - Mets prospect played in their system from 2012 to 2018. He signed to play in the Rangers system in 2026, but was hurt and didn't appear in any games. He was let go in July. Justin Dunn - Mets first round pick in 2016; played in their system from 2016 to 2018. Sent to Mariners in Edwin Diaz/Robinson Cano trade. Went 0-3 with a 5.96 ERA in 6 starts for the independent High Point Rockers in 2026. Zac Grotz - free agent signee played in the Mets system in 2018. Played in Mexico in 2026, going 9-3 with a 2,91 ERA in 16 starts for Jalisco. Jarred Kelenic - Mets first round pick in 2018; played in their system that year. Later traded to Mariners in Edwin Diaz/Robinson Cano deal. Hit .219/.313/.288 with 1 home run and 6 RBI in 73 at-bats between the White Sox and Rangers in 2026. Between three Triple-A teams -- the other being in the Yankees system -- he hit .280/.367/.508 with 15 home runs, 52 RBI and 21 steals in 82 games. CJ Van Eyk - Mets 19th round pick in 2017; never played in their system. Went 0-2 with a 5.40 ERA in 5 games (1 start) for the Blue Jays in 2026. In the minors, he was 7-5 with a 4.02 ERA in 24 games (18 starts) at Triple-A. Simeon Woods Richardson - Mets 2nd round pick in 2018; played in their system in 2018 and 2019. Later traded for Marcus Stroman. Went 2-7 with a 6.68 ERA in 20 games (10 starts) between Minnesota and Toronto. Between their Triple-A clubs, he went 2-1 with a 3.74 ERA in 9 games (8 starts).

It was 1967.

Chapter 29: The Long Winter of Baseball’s Maybe Men Summary: Baseball’s winter is a season of grand designs and small endings, when rumors of spectacular trades compete with the quiet retirements of players whose names once appeared in box scores every night. Between the dream of acquiring a Mason Miller and the arrival of a Christian Arroyo, the Mets’ offseason reveals baseball’s enduring fascination with possibility—and the melancholy truth that most careers end far from the Hall of Fame. There are two kinds of baseball news in winter. One arrives with trumpets. The other comes in the form of a short announcement, perhaps a sentence or two, informing us that a man who once played in the major leagues will play no more. The first kind makes us dream about the pennant. The second makes us remember the game we have already seen. In December, the Mets were connected to the San Diego Padres in the sort of conversations that cause a fan’s imagination to outrun the available facts. Nick Pivetta might come to New York. Ramón Laureano might fill a hole in the outfield. Mason Miller, a fireballing reliever with the sort of statistics that make a general manager sit up straight, might become a Met. There were names on both sides, young players coveted by one club and established players desired by the other, and the usual suggestion that something large might be taking shape behind closed doors. The name that gave the conversation its emotional weight was Jonah Tong. Tong was young, promising, and not yet fully known. He belonged to that special category of baseball property whose value is measured partly in performance and partly in imagination. A major-league veteran is a collection of established facts: his batting average, his injuries, his salary, the declining speed of his fastball. A prospect is a story still being written. He might become a good pitcher. He might become a great one. He might become the fellow whose name, years later, makes a fan say, “I knew it.” This is why trading prospects is so difficult for people who follow a team closely. They are not merely trading a pitcher. They are trading the future they have privately assigned to him. Mason Miller was a compelling reason to consider such a sacrifice. He was already an extraordinary relief pitcher, and he came with years of team control. But a reliever, however spectacular, generally works in short bursts. A young starting pitcher, if he develops properly, can influence a hundred games over several seasons. The question was not whether Miller was good. The question was whether the Mets should surrender a possible future starter to acquire a known quantity whose usefulness might be limited by injury, workload, or the peculiar volatility of relief pitching. There were other objections. Pivetta could be a bargain, or he could regress. Laureano could supply the right-handed power the Mets needed, or he could revert to the hitter he had been before his recent improvement. Jackson Merrill was an attractive alternative, but there was little reason to believe San Diego would readily part with him. Every proposed solution came with a price, and every price invited a second look. The Padres had their own arithmetic. Their payroll was burdened by expensive contracts, some of them extending years into the future. Yet the club had drawn enormous crowds and remained a genuine contender in a division dominated by the Dodgers. A team that fills its ballpark has reasons to keep trying. A team that has spent heavily on its present may decide that the best way forward is to spend a little more. The Mets, meanwhile, had their own pressure. Their owner wanted results. Their baseball operations department had to demonstrate that patience was a strategy rather than an excuse. The two clubs had reasons to talk, which was not the same as having a trade to make. That distinction was lost, as it often is, in the intoxicating atmosphere of the rumor season. A national baseball writer could imagine a transaction involving nearly every important young Met, Detroit’s Tarik Skubal, San Diego’s Fernando Tatis Jr., and the assumption of an unwelcome contract or two. It was a transaction with the scale of a Hollywood production. It also required so many things to happen that skepticism was the only sensible response. The reporters had found something to discuss, and the fans had found something to argue about. For a few days, the Mets could acquire almost anybody in the imagination. Then San Diego re-signed Michael King, the trade conversations appeared to lose momentum, and the great winter machinery returned to its ordinary rhythm. There is a useful lesson in this. At the beginning of an offseason, everybody talks to everybody about everybody. A name appears in print, another name is attached to it, and a third is supplied by someone who knows what a team needs. The resulting story may be accurate in its broad outlines while remaining nowhere near a completed transaction. Baseball people call it engagement. Fans call it hope, sometimes followed by disappointment. Walking away, too, is a decision. And so the winter continued, full of smaller news that could not compete with the imagined blockbuster. The Mets signed Christian Arroyo to a minor-league contract. Arroyo had once been a prominent prospect, had put together a useful run as a part-time infielder in Boston, and had spent the previous season in the minor leagues. He was the sort of player whose arrival would not ordinarily inspire a celebration. He was also the sort of player who has kept professional baseball functioning for generations. There is a special place in the game for the man who is almost a major leaguer, or who once was one and has not quite stopped being one. He has enough ability to remain employed, enough experience to understand the business, and enough hope to report to another camp. He is a Quadruple-A player, a phrase that sounds like a promotion but describes a peculiar baseball limbo: too good to disappear, not quite good enough to stay. Arroyo had been a first-round pick. That fact once carried the promise of a future. Now it was a footnote to a minor-league agreement. Baseball is full of such transformations. A young man is introduced as a possible star; a few years later, people are surprised to learn he is still playing. There is no disgrace in this. The distance between being talented and being a major-league regular is much greater than the distance between the words makes it seem. The same winter brought the release of a teenage international signing named Vladi Guerrero, who had not progressed beyond the Dominican Summer League. His surname inevitably invited comparisons with the great Vladimir Guerrero family, and there was speculation that the signing might have been connected to a possible pursuit of another relative. No one could know for certain. The facts were simpler and sadder: a young player had been signed with hope attached to his name, and the hope had not survived long enough to reach the lower rungs of professional baseball. At seventeen or eighteen, a prospect is an abstraction. Scouts see the body, the swing, the arm, the possibility. A club may be buying not only a player but a future relationship, a family connection, or the chance that a famous name will produce something beyond the player himself. Sometimes it works. Sometimes the organization discovers that the son or cousin of an extraordinary athlete is merely an ordinary young man who happens to have an extraordinary surname. Baseball does not offer refunds on hope. The winter's most extensive accounting, however, was not of players arriving or being released. It was of players retiring. The list grew through the summer and fall: Nick Ahmed, Jesse Chavez, Kyle Hendricks, Anthony Rizzo, Charlie Morton, and many others. Some had been All-Stars. Some had won Gold Gloves. Some had played for a decade or more without ever becoming famous beyond the circles of people who watched their teams closely. Clayton Kershaw, with three Cy Young Awards, a Most Valuable Player Award, a pitching Triple Crown, and more than three thousand strikeouts, stood apart as a giant among the departing. Yet even his retirement belonged to the same general process as the retirement of a journeyman reliever: the day comes when a man no longer takes the field as a professional ballplayer. The statistics tell us what the great ones accomplished. They are less effective at explaining what the end means. A player can spend eighteen years in the game, wear seven uniforms, and finish with a record that places him among the better pitchers of his generation. Charlie Morton did just that. His career included an outstanding season in Tampa Bay, years of work across the majors, and, at the end, a return to Atlanta, the organization that had drafted him, so that he could retire with the club that first gave him a professional future. There was something fitting about the arrangement. After all the trades and all the miles, he went back to the beginning to close the book. Anthony Rizzo's ending carried a different kind of resonance. He had hit more than three hundred home runs, won four Gold Gloves, played in three All-Star Games, and helped the Cubs win a World Series. He was also a cancer survivor. His career did not last as long as some had once imagined, and his final good seasons came earlier than anyone would have preferred. But the idea that he had somehow failed because he did not become a Hall of Famer was a failure of perspective. Fourteen major-league seasons is not a broken promise. It is a life in baseball. The sport encourages us to confuse potential with obligation. A prospect is projected to become a star, and if he becomes merely very good, people speak of disappointment. A young player appears on a list of future Hall of Famers before he has learned how to survive a full major-league season. Years later, if his career has been merely excellent, the prediction is held against him. We have come to treat greatness as something owed to us in advance. It is worth remembering how little we know at the beginning. The history of the game is filled with players whose futures were misjudged, in both directions. There are late bloomers, early sensations who fade, and dependable professionals who quietly make a living long after the sport's attention has wandered elsewhere. A Hall of Fame career is rare. A useful career is not nothing. Consider Jesse Chavez, who appeared in hundreds of games over a professional life that seemed to renew itself each time someone needed an arm. Or Nick Ahmed, a two-time Gold Glove winner whose career was substantial even if he never became a household name. Or Kyle Hendricks, the quietly excellent pitcher whose command and intelligence gave him a place in the majors for years. These men did not all leave the game with ceremonies and standing ovations. Their names entered the retirement ledger, one after another, as if the sport were closing out a long account. There is a melancholy comedy to the process. A man who has spent years traveling with a major-league club may become an ambassador for his former team. The title suggests diplomatic missions, formal dinners, and the negotiation of treaties. In practice, it may mean putting on the old uniform, appearing at a ballpark, signing autographs, and reminding people that the team once belonged to a different season of their lives. Others simply stop playing. Their names vanish from the daily transactions. They may coach, work in another business, or enjoy the luxury of no longer having to prove themselves every morning. The public notices the great careers because they end in ceremonies. The quieter careers end in the spaces between announcements. Even the game's old photographs acquire meaning in winter. A photograph of Steve Barber, a longtime Baltimore pitcher, showed him wearing a cap perched so high that it seemed to add several inches to his height. It was a small comic detail, the sort of thing that once passed unnoticed in a newspaper or a baseball card and later becomes the subject of affectionate scrutiny. The old ballplayers remain available to us in such fragments: a peculiar cap, a bent brim, a familiar windup, a face preserved in the flat light of an old photograph. The game is made of such fragments. A box score preserves a performance but not the afternoon air. A photograph preserves a face but not the conversation in the dugout. A retirement list preserves a name and a date but cannot tell us how a man felt when he realized there would be no next spring training. For the Mets fan, meanwhile, there is always another winter to survive. The roster needs a starting pitcher. The outfield needs a bat. The bullpen needs an arm that can get three outs without turning a routine inning into a public emergency. A teenager in the minors may become a star, and a veteran on a minor-league contract may become the fellow who saves a season. A trade that appears foolish in December may look inspired in August. A trade that appears inspired in December may become the reason a fan avoids looking at the farm system for several years. This is why the arguments never really end. They are not only about whether a particular player is worth a particular price. They are about the competing clocks of baseball: the clock of the present, which demands a winning team now, and the clock of the future, which asks that something be preserved for the seasons ahead. The temptation is always to solve the present by spending the future. The temptation is also to protect the future so carefully that the present becomes an endless rehearsal. The Mets, like every ambitious club, must decide when a prospect is worth more as a promise and when he is worth less than the player he might bring back. There is no formula that can settle the matter. Statistics can help, contracts can be studied, and scouts can evaluate the arm or the swing. But baseball remains a business conducted under uncertainty, with human beings at its center. A relief pitcher can become indispensable or unavailable. A prospect can become an ace or a name recalled only when someone finds an old transaction record. A journeyman can survive for years by doing one small thing better than the next man. And then, eventually, the journeyman retires. The winter trade rumors fade. The minor-league contracts become spring-training invitations. The old photographs remain. The great players are remembered for their greatness, the useful players for the years they gave, and the obscure players by the small details that keep them from disappearing altogether. The beauty of baseball is not that every career ends in triumph. Most do not. It is that the game makes room for so many kinds of careers, from the extraordinary to the almost-forgotten, and gives each man a chance to leave something behind. Some leave a pennant. Some leave a record. Some leave a photograph of a cap worn too high. And every winter, while the living bargain over the future, the names of the departed remind us that the future is not an endless resource. It is a season, too, and it passes.

Miguel Rojas has retired.

Chapter 28: The Housecleaning in Queens Summary: The Mets’ decision to trade Jeff McNeil for a teenage pitching prospect and cash becomes a meditation on the uncertain arithmetic of baseball, where useful veterans are discarded, distant prospects inspire improbable hope, and every transaction reopens old arguments about what a team is trying to become. As fans debate replacement outfielders, obscure relievers, and the promise of a seventeen-year-old, they reveal the peculiar mixture of skepticism, comedy, and stubborn faith that has sustained generations of Mets followers. There is a particular silence that follows a baseball trade when the player leaving is not a superstar, not a villain, and not a man whose departure can be explained by pointing to a single disastrous season. It is the silence of the fan trying to understand why a useful fellow has been sent away. Jeff McNeil was that sort of fellow. He could play second base, left field, first base, and practically anywhere else the manager required. He could bat first, bat sixth, or be inserted into the lineup wherever a hole had opened. He had won a batting title. He had been part of a Mets club that won 101 games in 2022, a team that now seemed to belong to a distant civilization. Then, on a December day in 2025, McNeil was traded to Sacramento. The return was a seventeen-year-old Cuban pitching prospect named Yordan Rodriguez, along with a financial arrangement that left the Mets paying $5.75 million of McNeil’s salary. The deal would save money, including the cost of a future option buyout. The young pitcher had shown promise in the Dominican Summer League, with a fastball that had touched the middle nineties and a slider that attracted attention. He was, by the standards of baseball’s prospect industry, an unfinished sentence. There was nothing inherently wrong with acquiring a teenager. Baseball is full of men who were once teenagers with promising fastballs. The difficulty was time. Rodriguez might become a major-league pitcher. He might become a very good one. He might also become one of those names that appears in a transaction announcement and then gradually disappears from the public imagination. The fans discussing the deal knew that a seventeen-year-old pitcher could be years away from helping the Mets, assuming he ever helped them at all. McNeil, meanwhile, could help them now. The transaction had the strange quality of a house being cleaned while the family was still living in it. One useful piece of furniture was carried out before its replacement had arrived. The rooms looked emptier, and the people who lived there were told that the arrangement would make sense later. Perhaps it would. Baseball executives are paid to see possibilities that the rest of us cannot see, and sometimes they are right. But a fan is entitled to wonder why a club with substantial resources would surrender a player who offered offensive value, defensive versatility, and a modest salary, particularly when the club was not receiving an established major-league replacement. There were theories. McNeil was an agitator, one fan suggested, and perhaps the Mets wanted to remove a source of friction from the clubhouse. Maybe the trade would keep Francisco Lindor happy. Maybe the organization had decided that the old chemistry needed to be broken up. Nobody outside the room could know for certain. This is one of baseball’s enduring frustrations: the most consequential explanation for a trade may be the one that cannot be measured. The public receives the salary figures, the prospect reports, the batting statistics, and the official statements. What it does not receive is the complete conversation behind a closed clubhouse door. So the arguments begin. The numbers were not especially comforting to the critics. McNeil’s offensive production had been useful even through a slump, and before an injury late in the previous season his OPS had been hovering around .800. He was not a player without flaws. His temper could be conspicuous, his production could fluctuate, and the passage of time was beginning to make its ordinary demands. But a useful veteran is not rendered useless simply because he is approaching thirty-four. One could imagine a club finding a place for him. That was precisely what made him valuable. He could cover second base while a younger player developed, fill in at first, or move to the outfield when circumstances demanded. Versatility is a luxury when a roster is already complete. When a roster is full of questions, it can be a form of insurance. The Mets had exchanged that insurance for a possibility. And so the fans began counting the survivors of the 101-win team. Lindor remained. David Peterson remained. A few young players who had appeared briefly that season could be included with a generous definition of membership. The list was short enough to feel less like a roster than a family photograph taken before several members moved away. A baseball team is not supposed to remain unchanged. Players age, salaries rise, prospects arrive, and front offices discover new ways to make old mistakes. Even championship teams are temporary arrangements. Still, the disappearance of so many familiar names can leave a fan feeling that the club has forgotten the very season that taught him to believe in it. The Mets were not simply replacing players. They were revising the recent past. The destination added a little absurdity. Sacramento? Some fans needed a moment to remember that the Athletics had made their temporary home there. It was a long way from the familiar baseball geography of New York, and the transaction seemed to have sent McNeil not merely out of Queens but into a place still trying to establish its own place on the map. There was an opportunity here for satire, and the fans took it. The trade inspired an imaginary conversation between McNeil and the club’s baseball president, complete with the language of a farewell that was both businesslike and faintly absurd. McNeil was told that his experience and temperament might help younger players. He might be asked to provide leadership, to teach them how to express their grievances with the necessary vigor. It was a joke, but like many baseball jokes it depended on a truth. Teams frequently speak of leadership when they are preparing to remove a player from the lineup, and of culture when they are unable or unwilling to discuss the more ordinary facts of a transaction. A player’s value is never entirely contained in his statistics, but neither is it wise to pretend that personality can substitute for production. McNeil was a difficult player to summarize. He could be admired for the same intensity that irritated people. His visible frustration suggested that he cared deeply about every at-bat, but it also made him a ready target when things went wrong. He was a hitter who could win a batting title and a man who could make a routine failure look like a personal quarrel with the universe. Those are not mutually exclusive qualities. Baseball has never required its players to be easy company. The trade raised another question: who would replace him? The answer was not immediately clear. There were rumors involving other second basemen, including Ketel Marte, and speculation about whether the Mets might rearrange their roster again. But a rumor is not a player, and an anticipated transaction does not fill a position. The club had sent away a known quantity and left the fans to study a collection of possibilities. This is the point at which an offseason can become an exercise in endurance. Every roster vacancy acquires a name, every name a statistical profile, and every statistical profile a set of warnings. A player who once seemed like a plausible bench option becomes a possible starter. A prospect who might need more seasoning becomes the hope of the opening day lineup. The fan begins to wonder whether the club has a plan or merely a list of available telephone numbers. Austin Hays entered the conversation as a possible replacement in left field. He was thirty, right-handed, and available after a stint with Cincinnati. The appeal was understandable: the Mets needed an outfielder, and a right-handed bat could provide flexibility while the organization waited for a younger player, Carson Benge, to develop. But the response was hardly enthusiastic. Hays was described as a depth player, useful perhaps in a platoon, but not the sort of hitter who should be asked to carry an everyday position. His defensive numbers offered little reassurance. One comparison suggested that if McNeil were made right-handed and stripped of his versatility, he might resemble Hays. It was not a flattering comparison. Other names floated through the discussion. Miguel Andujar had produced better offensive numbers late in the previous season and offered a strong throwing arm, though his outfield defense was hardly settled. Cody Bellinger and Kyle Tucker represented the more ambitious possibilities, the sort of players whose arrival could transform the mood of an offseason. Hays represented something more modest: a man who might hold a position until someone better was ready. There is nothing wrong with a stopgap. Baseball teams need them. The trouble comes when the stopgap becomes the destination. Mets fans had seen that movie before. They remembered relievers signed to occupy the margins of a roster who somehow became indispensable figures in the bullpen. They remembered Scott Rice, Carlos Torres, Greg Burke, and the recurring discovery that a pitcher acquired for a few innings might end up responsible for much more than a few innings. A fringe player can become a cog not because the front office intended it, but because the roster develops holes faster than the club can fill them. The fans were not wrong to be wary. They were also not necessarily right to condemn every minor-league signing. Every team brings in players who may never appear in the majors. A December agreement with a marginal reliever does not prove that a club has abandoned its pursuit of a star outfielder. The winter is long, and a major-league roster is assembled from more than its headline transactions. One of the more intriguing names was Ofreidy Gomez, a thirty-year-old pitcher who had never reached the major leagues but was pitching well in the Dominican winter league. He had struck out hitters at an impressive rate and touched ninety-nine miles per hour. His minor-league record, however, included an ugly ERA at Triple-A. The attraction was obvious enough: perhaps he had figured something out; perhaps the velocity was real; perhaps the Mets had found a late-blooming arm who could survive in the majors. The counterargument was equally obvious. At thirty, a pitcher with that record was not an ordinary prospect. He was a wager on a late discovery, a chance that the player who had struggled for years had finally found the right combination of movement, command, and confidence. Baseball is full of such wagers. Some become stories of perseverance. Most do not. The point of a minor-league signing is often to purchase a little time at a low cost, not to promise that the player will become an important part of the club. The danger is not in signing Ofreidy Gomez. The danger is in needing him too much. This distinction was not always easy to maintain amid the winter’s anxiety. When the Mets signed Mike Baumann, another reliever with a modest career record, the familiar complaints returned. Some fans saw the signing as another example of the club’s attraction to pitchers whose numbers suggested trouble. Others argued that every organization needed such players, and that no one should mistake a fringe acquisition for a declaration of the team’s ambitions. Both positions contained some truth. The Mets could sign Baumann and still pursue a major outfielder. They could take a chance on Gomez without deciding that he was the answer to their bullpen problems. Yet a history of small signings becoming large responsibilities had taught the fans to watch carefully. They had learned to distrust the word depth when depth seemed to be all that stood between a contender and a long summer. There was another kind of concern in the winter discussions, one that involved the World Baseball Classic. Nolan McLean and Clay Holmes had been named to the United States roster, and one fan worried about the risk of sending McLean into a demanding international tournament when established starters had not committed. The objection was not to the tournament itself. It was to the possibility that a pitcher with durability concerns might be asked to carry an extra burden before the major-league season had even begun. Another fan dismissed the complaint as an offseason nothingburger, a grievance inflated by the lack of more urgent news. The exchange captured a familiar rhythm. A Mets fan sees danger where another sees noise. One wants the club to protect its assets; another wants to wait until there is an actual problem. Baseball gives both sides plenty of material and rarely supplies an answer before the next argument begins. That may be the real business of the winter: learning to live with incomplete information. The prospect has not pitched in the majors. The free agent has not signed. The young outfielder has not demonstrated that he is ready. The veteran who was traded may still be productive for years. A move that looks foolish in December may look brilliant in 2035, if the seventeen-year-old becomes an ace. Or it may become another entry in the long catalogue of trades that left the club worse off in the present and gained little in the future. A fan can understand all of this and still be angry. There is a tendency to describe Mets supporters as people who expect disaster, but the truth is more complicated. They have been given enough disappointment to recognize familiar patterns, and enough moments of genuine success to know that better possibilities exist. Their skepticism is not always pessimism. Sometimes it is a form of loyalty sharpened by experience. They remember the good teams, especially the ones that seemed capable of becoming great. They remember the players who made those teams work, including the ones whose contributions did not fit neatly into a highlight reel. They remember that a 101-win club can dissolve in a few winters, that a utility player can be more valuable than his title suggests, and that a young pitcher with a promising slider can inspire more hope than a veteran with a long record of major-league competence. The front office sees contracts, options, roster spots, and expected production. The fan sees those things too, but he also sees the human continuity of a team. He remembers who was there when the club was winning, who filled the awkward positions, who made the play that saved a game, and who spent an entire season being more irritating than he had any right to be. When Jeff McNeil left, the question was not only whether the Mets had received enough in return. It was whether the club understood what it was giving up. A player need not be a franchise icon to matter. Sometimes he is valuable because he can do five jobs reasonably well, because he is familiar, because he has been part of a winning team, or because the next man is not yet ready. In baseball, there is always a temptation to trade the present for the future. The future is clean. It has not yet failed, has not been injured, has not made an error in the ninth inning or struck out with the bases loaded. The future can throw ninety-six miles per hour, learn a new pitch, hit thirty home runs, or become the missing piece of a championship team. It is a wonderful place to keep a ballclub. The present is more troublesome. The present comes with salary obligations, temperaments, slumps, and players who are not quite what they were two years ago. It asks a general manager to decide what a man is worth now, not what he might have been worth at his best. The Mets have always been capable of confusing those two calculations. Their fans have always been capable of reminding them of the difference. And so the winter went on. The roster remained unfinished, the rumors continued, and the name of a seventeen-year-old Cuban pitcher entered the Mets’ future, carrying with it the possibility of a fastball that might someday reach the major leagues. Somewhere in Sacramento, Jeff McNeil prepared for a new chapter. In Queens, another set of players would be asked to make the old promise: that the next season could be better than the last. The fans would be watching. They would argue about every signing, scrutinize every statistic, and remember the players who had gone. They would complain when the club spent too little, complain when it spent unwisely, and worry that the inexpensive replacement might become a permanent fixture. They would laugh at their own misery and return to the same questions the next morning. For all their skepticism, they had not given up on the future. They were simply asking it to show its work.