Cowtipper

Two of 2026's top contributors, MJ Melendez and Vidal Brujan, have elected free agency. Melendez played in 56 games for New York, hitting .192/.315/.350 with 4 home runs, 11 RBI and 14 runs scored in 120 at-bats. He had 50 strikeouts, which is 229 in a 550 at-bat season. Equally effective was Vidal Brujan, who in 9 games, hit .091/.167/.091. He did score 4 runs in his 11 at-bats, which is 200 in a 550 at-bat season.

Hint: The team also featured Tommy Davis.

1962 is correct, but 1969 is a little off.

I received his autograph on a postcard through the Mets in 2008.

Correct and correct! Well done. What were the years?

Orlando Calixte - purchased by Mets and played in their system in 2021. Hit .197/.269/.279 with 1 home run and 3 RBI in 26 games for Chunichi in Japan in 2026. For their farm system, he hit .318/.387/.421 with 2 home runs and 12 RBI in 39 games. Pete Crow-Armstrong - traded for Javier Baez and Trevor Williams in 2021. Hit .280/.372/.570 with 45 home runs, 107 RBI, 41 steals and 119 runs in 162 games for the Cubs in 2026. Led the league in WAR (9.8), plate appearances (726), home runs, slugging, OPS (.943), OPS+ (156) and total bases (357). He was an All-Star. Robel Garcia - waiver claim was selected to play in the Mets system in 2021, but never did. Hit .325/.462/.711 with 8 home runs and 28 RBI in 23 games for Parma in the Italian Serie A. Deivy Grullon - waiver claim played in the Mets system in 2021. Hit .323/.360/.462 with 2 home runs and 15 RBI in 30 games between Mexico's Tabasco and Yucatan in 2026. Jesus Reyes - waiver claim played in the Mets system in 2021. Went 0-0 with a 15.88 ERA in 8 relief appearances for Union Laguna in Mexico in 2026 and 1-1 with a 7.11 ERA in 13 appearances for Saltillo, also in Mexico. Kumar Rocker - Mets 1st round pick in 2021; never signed. Went 6-11 with a 4.38 ERA in 30 games (27 starts) for the Rangers in 2026. Endy Rodriguez - former Mets prospect played in their system in 2018 and 2019. Later traded for Joey Lucchesi. In 2026, he hit .267/.373/.467 with 7 home runs, 20 RBI and 6 steals in 45 games for Pittsburgh; for their Triple-A team, he hit .217/.322/.300 with 1 home run and 17 RBI in 36 games. Ryder Ryan - traded to Mets for Jay Bruce in 2017. Later traded to Rangers for Todd Frazier. Played in Dodgers system in 2026, going 3-5 with a 5.19 ERA in 26 games (11 starts) for their Triple-A team. Mallex Smith - signed to played in the Mets system for 2021, but never did. Hit .272/.343/.374 with 2 home runs, 18 RBI and 40 steals in 50 games for the independent Cleburne Railroaders in 2026. Mike Vasil - Mets 8th round pick in 2021. Played in their system from 2021 to 2024. Was in the White Sox system in 2026, but was hurt all year and didn't play. Josh Winckowski - traded to Mets for Steven Matz, then traded to the Royals for Khalil Lee. Never played in the Mets system. In 2026, he went 1-0 with a 0.66 ERA in 6 games (4 starts) across two minor league stops in the Blue Jays system. Josh Wolf - Mets 2nd round pick in 2019. Played in their system only that year. Later traded for Francisco Lindor and Carlos Carrasco. Went 0-0 with a 9.00 ERA in 3 relief appearances for the York Revolution and 0-0 with a 27.00 ERA in 2 appearances for Mexico's Jalisco in 2026.

Hint: The year featured Frank Thomas, Charlie Neal and Jim Hickman. Hint for the player: Remembered for a 17-game losing streak, this player also earned respect as a dependable reliever on an early, struggling Mets team and remained admired by former teammates, players he coached, and fans for his humility, kindness, and class

Bud Zipfel died. https://www.riverbender.com/obits/details/marion-zipfel-belleville-obituary-33139.cfm Who was Bud Zipfel? Bud Zipfel (1938–2026) was an American first baseman and left fielder who played 118 major-league games over two seasons with the Washington Senators in 1961 and 1962. Originally signed by the New York Yankees, he showed power in the minor leagues but struggled to hit major-league pitching, finishing his MLB career with a .220 batting average, 10 home runs, and 31 RBIs. Zipfel is best remembered for hitting a 16th-inning, game-winning home run on September 12, 1962, giving Washington a 2–1 victory while teammate Tom Cheney set a major-league record with 21 strikeouts in a single game. After his major-league career ended, Zipfel played in the minor leagues for several more years before retiring following the 1966 season.

Chapter 25: The Boy from Wyoming Summary: After nine seasons in New York, Brandon Nimmo’s departure for Texas leaves Mets fans reflecting on the enthusiasm, resilience, and memorable moments that made him a beloved presence despite his imperfections. As the team turns toward a new generation of players and another uncertain future, his story reminds us that a player’s lasting value is measured not only in statistics or victories, but in the memories and affection he leaves behind. The trouble with saying goodbye to a baseball player is that the goodbye rarely arrives alone. It brings along a parade of old afternoons, forgotten box scores, radio calls, and the peculiar conviction that a man who has played for your team long enough has become, in some small but permanent way, your man. Brandon Nimmo was such a man. He came to the Mets from Wyoming, a state better known for its wide spaces than for producing major-league ballplayers. He was a first-round draft choice, but he was not burdened with the sort of expectations that can turn a young player into a public disappointment before he has learned to shave. Nobody announced him as the savior of the franchise. Nobody expected him to become the next Tom Seaver, the next Darryl Strawberry, or the next David Wright. He was simply a kid who could run, smile, draw a walk, and occasionally make a baseball do something unexpected. For a while, injuries seemed to be the principal story of his career. He spent his early years arriving, departing, returning, and trying to establish himself as a major-league regular. He played in fits and starts. He had a little power, a little speed, a little patience at the plate. He was a player whose talents seemed to come in modest installments, like a savings account to which somebody had forgotten to make the occasional deposit. Then came 2022, and Nimmo became a different sort of ballplayer. He began playing regularly. He stayed healthy. The power developed, the production grew, and the kid from Wyoming became a dependable presence in the Mets' lineup. Over the next four seasons, he played more than 150 games each year, a quiet accomplishment in a sport in which a pulled muscle can become a monthlong absence and a sore shoulder can make a man's career feel like a historical document. He was never the most graceful outfielder, and his throwing arm was not going to frighten many runners. His strikeouts could be exasperating. Those who played fantasy baseball learned to regard him with the wary affection one reserves for a relative who means well but has a habit of arriving late. In leagues where strikeouts carried a penalty, Nimmo could turn a promising fantasy afternoon into a private comedy of errors. But fantasy baseball is a poor instrument for measuring affection. It counts what a player does for your roster. It cannot count what he does for your experience of the game. Nimmo ran to first base on walks. He ran when his foot hurt. He smiled as though he had been given a remarkable gift, which, in a sense, he had. Here was a man earning millions of dollars to play a child's game, and he seemed aware of the absurd good fortune of it. He was a Christian who did not feel compelled to turn every interview into a sermon. His enthusiasm was visible without being theatrical. When he looked happy, he appeared to be happy. This may sound like a modest set of virtues. In professional sports, where a player can spend a career perfecting the art of saying nothing while looking annoyed, they were worth something. There are moments in a ballplayer's career that become fixed in the minds of those who watched. They are not always the moments the player would choose. The great home run, the impossible catch, the postseason hit with the season balanced on the bat: these become the public property of a fan base. They are played again on television and summoned whenever somebody asks what a man meant to the team. Nimmo had his share. In 2016, he hit his first major-league home run against the Chicago Cubs and received a curtain call from the crowd. It was a small ceremony, but baseball is a game of small ceremonies. A rookie hits a home run, the crowd asks him to come back, and for a few seconds the distance between the major leagues and the boyhood dream disappears. In 2018, he hit a three-run homer at Dodger Stadium that helped the Mets win a game they had been trailing. The Dodgers were the Dodgers, the setting was Los Angeles, and the home run carried the particular pleasure of taking something from an opponent in its own house. There were other big hits, clutch moments, and rallies in which Nimmo found himself at the center of events that no one had predicted. His career did not proceed as a straight line from prospect to star. It wandered. It stalled. It revived. It became better than its beginnings suggested. Perhaps his most memorable defensive play came in 2022, against the Dodgers, on a night when Jacob deGrom was back on the mound and Timmy Trumpet's music had become part of the Citi Field atmosphere. Nimmo made a remarkable catch, then celebrated with the sort of fist pump and flex that suggested he had just rescued something larger than a baseball. He had. He had rescued a moment. Baseball is generous in this respect. A season contains 162 games, each filled with pitches that are thrown, taken, fouled, missed, or hit into ordinary places. Most disappear almost as soon as they occur. But every so often, a ball is struck or thrown into the precise arrangement of circumstances that allows an ordinary afternoon to become permanent. A catch becomes a memory. A home run becomes a story. A player becomes part of the emotional geography of a city. Nimmo's great moments were not always accompanied by victories. In the 2024 game in Atlanta that mattered enormously to the Mets' postseason chances, his eighth-inning home run gave the team a three-run lead. The Mets did not hold it, and the final result was not the one the fans wanted. But the homer remained, a bright piece of work inside a game that refused to cooperate. That is another thing baseball teaches. A player can do his job and still lose. A man can make the right play and watch the wrong outcome follow. The box score records what happened, but it cannot always tell us what ought to be remembered. The same season offered another Nimmo moment, this one less about his bat than his standing with the fans. Before a late-season series against Philadelphia, he urged Mets supporters to fill Citi Field. He wanted the place rocking Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. He wanted everybody there. He reminded them that this was playoff baseball, the kind of baseball they had been waiting for. The appeal carried authority because it came from a man who had been around long enough to understand what the crowd wanted. It was not a public-relations employee asking people to buy tickets. It was one of their players asking them to show up for the team. The Mets won the finale of that home stretch in dramatic fashion, Nimmo contributing a home run against Zack Wheeler. The ball went into the New York night with a certain stubbornness, as though it had taken offense at the wind and decided to keep going anyway. The game became one of those occasions when a team and its supporters seem to understand one another without the need for explanation. Nimmo had earned the right to ask for that noise. He had played through the lean years, the disappointments, the managerial changes, and the winters when the Mets appeared to be rebuilding the same house with different materials. He knew what it meant to have a good team, and he knew what it meant to ask the fans to believe that a good team might be coming. Now he was leaving. The Mets had decided that it was time to move on. His contract was substantial, his defensive limitations were becoming harder to overlook, and the club had reasons to believe that the later years of the deal might become more burdensome than the earlier ones. The decision could be defended on baseball grounds. A team cannot preserve every familiar face indefinitely. The business of assembling a roster requires the removal of some pieces so that others may fit. The front office saw the contract, the aging curve, the defensive metrics, and the opportunity to reshape the roster. The fans saw those things, too. They were not ignorant of the game simply because they were sentimental about a player. But there is a difference between understanding a transaction and being pleased by it. Nimmo was not Pete Alonso, the homegrown slugger whose departure carried the particular sting of a family member moving away. He was not a franchise icon in the traditional sense. His career had not been marked by one unbroken succession of triumphs. He had endured too many injuries early on, struck out too often, and sometimes appeared to be a player whose many good qualities had not yet found a way to become one great one. And yet he had stayed. That is important. In baseball, continuity is often treated as a sentimental luxury. The club is forever looking for a better player, a cheaper player, a younger player, a player whose skills fit the latest theory of how games should be won. But the fans live through the transitions. They remember the players who remain while the cast around them changes. A longtime veteran becomes a bridge between one version of the team and the next, even when nobody has given him the official title. Nimmo had been that kind of bridge. If Jeff McNeil were also to leave, the Mets would lose another familiar presence, a player whose faults were well known and whose good days had become part of the team's texture. The roster might improve. The club might become younger, faster, more defensively sound. But the faces would change, and the fans would have to begin the process of getting acquainted again. There is nothing wrong with that process. It is one of the ways baseball stays alive. Every spring brings new names, new prospects, and new reasons to hope. The boy in the minor leagues becomes a major leaguer. The reserve becomes a regular. The player whose name was once unfamiliar becomes the one whose absence is noticed. The Mets had a young pitcher named Jonah Tong, who appeared at a holiday party dressed as an elf, alongside other young pitchers helping to entertain children. Tong was 22, and he said that being a Met was one of the coolest things he had ever done in his life. It was a simple statement, but it carried the kind of unguarded joy that Nimmo had offered for years. Tong was young enough to regard the uniform as a privilege rather than an obligation. Fans who had spent the winter arguing about contracts, trades, and the intentions of the front office found themselves smiling at the photograph. They wanted him to stay. They wanted him to succeed. They wanted him to become a beloved Met, perhaps in the way David Wright had become one. They knew the dangers. Prospects are not promises. A pitcher can dominate the minor leagues and still find that major-league hitters have an answer for his fastball. His secondary pitches might not develop. His control might fail him. A promising career can disappear before it has properly begun. But hope is not a forecast. It is an act of faith undertaken in the absence of sufficient evidence. That was why the young pitcher mattered. He reminded the fans that the next chapter was not merely a matter of filling holes in a lineup. It was also a matter of finding the next player who would make them care. The Mets would sign other players. They would acquire pitchers, arrange their infield, calculate their options, and search for a combination that could take them into October. The baseball department would make decisions that could be judged only after the games had been played. Some would work. Others would not. A signing that looked inspired in December might seem foolish in June; a minor move could become the transaction that saved a season. And somewhere in Texas, Brandon Nimmo would put on a different uniform. He would run to first base. He would smile. He would strike out, perhaps more often than his new fans would like. He would hit a home run at an unexpected moment, make a difficult catch, or drive in a run that mattered. There would be days when his new team would be glad to have him and days when its supporters would wonder whether the contract was wise. That is the ordinary life of a baseball player. He moves from one city to another, taking his skills and his habits with him. The old city retains the memories, and the new one begins making its own. Mets fans will remember Nimmo's catch against the Dodgers, the home run in Atlanta, the curtain call against the Cubs, and the three-run blast in Los Angeles. They will remember his running on walks and the smile that seemed to suggest he had wandered into a wonderful mistake and hoped nobody would discover it. They will remember the kid from Wyoming who became a regular in New York, a place that has never been especially patient with anyone. They will remember, too, that he was not perfect. That is part of the affection. Perfect players belong to the highlight reels and the Hall of Fame debates. Familiar players belong to the lives of the people who watched them. The best baseball memories are rarely clean. They contain missed opportunities, injuries, bad calls, and games that were lost despite a player's best efforts. They contain arguments about whether a man should have been traded, whether a manager should have made a different move, whether the front office has mistaken efficiency for wisdom. They contain the knowledge that baseball is a business and the stubborn wish that it might occasionally behave like a family. A player leaves. The team moves on. Spring comes, and the new center fielder takes his position beneath the sky. The first pitch is thrown, the crowd settles into its seats, and for a moment the old player is forgotten. Then a ball is hit into the gap, and someone runs hard after it. The memory returns. It always does.

Chapter 24: The Sound of a Closer Leaving Summary: Edwin Díaz’s departure for the Dodgers becomes a larger story about the Mets’ struggle to turn financial resources into a winning organization, and about the emotional bond between fans and the players who make baseball memorable. As supporters debate the front office’s decisions, the team’s new signings, the Dodgers’ dominance, and baseball’s financial inequalities, they confront a familiar Queens dilemma: how to keep believing in a club that has given them so many reasons to doubt. There are many ways to lose a baseball player. You can trade him for prospects who will be ready sometime after your children have graduated from college. You can let him go because he has reached the age when his knees begin to negotiate separate contracts with the rest of his body. You can even lose him to a richer offer, which is the natural order of a game that has always been both a sport and a business. But there is a special kind of loss when a team that has money, a wealthy owner, and a reasonable chance to keep a player nevertheless watches him walk away for another three-year contract. That was the trouble with Edwin Díaz and the Mets. The Dodgers had offered the great closer three years and $69 million. The Mets, according to the reports that followed, had offered three years and $66 million, with some money deferred and, apparently, a little room to maneuver. Three million dollars is a considerable sum to anyone who has ever had to replace an automobile transmission. In the economy of a major-league baseball club owned by a billionaire, it is less than the cost of a mistaken afternoon. And yet Díaz was going west. The first response in Queens was disbelief. Then came anger, the kind that makes a man reconsider not merely his team's management but the whole arrangement by which he has spent his life caring about the team. How could David Stearns, the Mets' baseball president, allow the best closer in the game to join the club the Mets most needed to beat? If the Dodgers had demanded five years and a hundred million dollars, the argument might have been different. But three years? Three years was not a mountain to climb. It was a hill, and the Mets had brought a checkbook. The numbers did not explain the feeling. Baseball seldom does. For three seasons, Díaz had been a magnificent source of theater. The lights, the music, the walk from the bullpen, the particular way a ball sounded when it met his fastball: these things had become part of the Mets' civic life. His entrance was not simply an introduction to a relief pitcher. It was a small public ceremony, an announcement that the Mets had reached the late innings with something precious to protect. The song mattered. Of course it mattered. Baseball is played by men who wear numbers on their backs, but it is watched by people who attach memories to sounds, gestures, and places. A certain song can bring back an entire summer. A certain player can remind a man of where he sat, who was beside him, and how old his father was when the Mets last made him happy. There were those who tried to reason the fans out of their distress. Díaz, they pointed out, was not Mariano Rivera. His career with the Mets had contained bad stretches as well as brilliance. His first few seasons had been uneven; his later seasons were much better. He had suffered the terrible injury during the 2023 World Baseball Classic, and in 2024 he had served a suspension for a foreign substance. His statistical profile, some argued, showed signs of decline. A reliever was a volatile investment, and Devin Williams, whom the Mets had acquired as another possible answer at the back of the bullpen, might prove the better pitcher over the next three years. These were not foolish arguments. The trouble was that they answered a question many Mets fans were not asking. The question was not whether Díaz would be worth $69 million. The question was whether the Mets should have done everything reasonably possible to keep a player who had proved he could dominate in New York, whose best performances had been electric, and whose presence had become a pleasure shared by thousands of people who otherwise had little in common. A fan does not calculate affection by the dollar. He may spend an afternoon explaining that the team ought to have offered a fourth year. He may argue that a three-million-dollar difference is an absurd reason to lose a closer. He may insist that an organization with enormous resources has no excuse for allowing a negotiation to turn into a defeat. But underneath all the arithmetic is something more difficult to quantify: the desire to win with the players you know. One fan remembered Darryl Strawberry leaving. Another was still not over Jacob deGrom's departure. The names were different, the circumstances different, but the ache was familiar. It is possible to understand why a baseball player leaves and still wish he had stayed. It is possible to want a championship more than anything and nevertheless care about the particular men who might win it for you. This is one of the paradoxes of fandom. The general manager is supposed to improve the team. The fan wants the team improved, too, but he also wants to recognize it when it takes the field. And the Mets were asking their supporters to recognize a new team before they had finished explaining the old one. There were other reasons Díaz might have preferred Los Angeles. The Dodgers had won, and continued to look like a club constructed to win again. They had the infrastructure, the pitching, the stars, and the recent October history that makes a player believe his next appearance in the postseason might be something more than a brief visit. Díaz had a family connection there, too: his brother Alexis had spent time with the Dodgers. There were reports of dissatisfaction over the Mets' dismissal of pitching coach Jeremy Hefner, though not every rumor deserved to be believed. In the end, Díaz supplied the simplest explanation himself. He chose the Dodgers because they were a winning organization, because he wanted to win, and because he believed they had everything necessary to do so. It was difficult to argue with that. The Mets' fans could argue about the contract, the fourth year, the deferred money, the negotiations, and whether Stearns had misread his leverage. They could blame ownership or the baseball department. But a player who says he wants to win has made an argument as old as the game, and the Dodgers had the recent evidence to support it. There was something especially galling about the destination. The Dodgers were not some faraway club in a different league, a team the Mets might encounter only if the season went well. They were the Dodgers: rich, talented, confident, and standing directly in the way of the Mets' ambitions. Every October, they seemed to possess another starter, another slugger, another answer. Now they had Díaz, too. The fans could hardly be blamed for looking at the transaction and seeing a larger problem. What was the point of having an owner willing to spend if the Mets could not persuade an elite player to remain? Money could buy talent, but it could not purchase the conviction that the team was headed somewhere worth going. The Dodgers had made the Mets look not poor, but uncertain. Then came the rest of the winter. The Mets signed Jorge Polanco to a two-year, $40 million contract. Polanco was a switch-hitter with a useful bat, a veteran capable of playing around the infield, and a player whose versatility appealed to the sort of front office that likes to preserve options. He was also a man who had never played an inning at first base in his major-league career, though the Mets expected him to spend time there, along with the designated-hitter role. The signing was met with the particular suspicion that follows a transaction whose purpose is not immediately obvious. If Polanco was a good hitter, that was welcome. If he was meant to help improve the defense, the plan required some explanation. If he was going to replace Brandon Nimmo's production, the comparison was uncomfortable. If he was insurance for other moves, the fans wanted to know what those moves might be. This is the curse of the winter roster. A player arrives carrying his own statistics, but also the burden of all the players who have departed and all the players who have not yet arrived. Polanco might hit 26 home runs. He might be a useful designated hitter. He might even become an ingenious solution to a problem that had not yet fully announced itself. But to the fan who had just watched Díaz leave, he was not Díaz. No signing could be judged entirely on its own merits because the winter had become a referendum on the people running the club. There was a similar uneasiness around Cristian Pache, a veteran outfielder with a weak major-league batting record, signed to compete for a roster spot. Such a player might prove useful in the proper role. Teams need reserves. They need defensive replacements, injury insurance, men who can fill a hole when the season begins to take things away. The Mets' front office had often shown an ability to find these useful pieces. But fans do not spend their winters dreaming about the twenty-fifth man on the roster. They dream about the great player, the indispensable player, the man whose name they can imagine being announced in October. They want to know why the club that can afford the great player has not secured him, and why the replacements seem to arrive with instructions attached. The answer, of course, may be that baseball is complicated. It may be that Stearns sees a longer arc than the fans do, that he believes the roster needs a different balance, that the club has to consider the cost of aging players and the uncertainty of pitchers. A front office cannot simply give every beloved player every dollar and every year he requests. That way lies a payroll full of regrets. Yet a front office can be right about the arithmetic and wrong about the experience. This is where the Mets' history becomes relevant. Their fans have lived through the lean years, the improbable years, the brief moments of grandeur and the long stretches in which a promising season collapsed beneath the weight of its own expectations. They know what it means to wait for a club to become serious. They know that a team can acquire expensive talent and still fail to become a winner. They also know that winning is not only the accumulation of good decisions. It is the ability to make the right decisions at the moments when the opportunity is available. The Dodgers have understood this better than most clubs. Their roster has not been perfect, and their players have not all been successful. Their young pitchers have struggled; their veterans have been injured; even their expensive acquisitions have occasionally looked mortal. But they have repeatedly assembled a team capable of surviving the long season and then becoming something more dangerous in October. The Mets have watched that process from the other side. During the postseason, the Dodgers' pitching offered a cruel demonstration of what the Mets lacked. Yoshinobu Yamamoto could take a game into the ninth inning with the sort of command that makes the final outs feel like formalities. Blake Snell could make a lineup look helpless. Shohei Ohtani could pitch effectively and hit home runs as if the two tasks were merely different forms of recreation. The Dodgers were so deep that a disappointing season from one acquisition could be absorbed by the arrival of another. Watching them, Mets fans could indulge in the familiar exercise of imagining the players who might have been theirs. The pitcher pursued but not signed. The star who chose another club. The player who might have made the difference in a close game. These are the shadows that follow every baseball winter, and no club has ever been able to banish them. But the Dodgers' success also sharpened another argument, one that went beyond the Mets. The Milwaukee Brewers had won 97 games, more than any other major-league team, and then struggled to score against Los Angeles in the postseason. They had built a good team, won their division, and reached October with the sort of season that ought to have inspired confidence. Yet a small-market club has a different relationship with time. Its window can narrow while a rival's seems permanently open. Players become expensive, prospects become trade pieces, and the next season is never quite guaranteed to contain the same team. The question of a salary cap arose, as it always does when the richest clubs appear to collect the best players. Some fans regarded the arrangement as unfair to the smaller markets. Others replied that a cap would protect owners more than supporters, limiting what teams could spend without guaranteeing that the savings would be invested in the roster. Both sides had a point, though neither could resolve the essential uneasiness. Baseball's money is not distributed evenly, but money alone does not make a championship. The Mets had money. They had an owner who had promised a different kind of future. What they needed to demonstrate was that their resources could produce not merely a large payroll, but a club that players wanted to join and fans could believe in. A salary cap would not have settled the Díaz dispute. The Mets had offered him a great deal of money. The Dodgers had offered a little more, and perhaps something beyond money: a more convincing picture of what winning might look like. If the Mets had lost him because they were unable to compete financially, the explanation would have been simple. Losing him while appearing to have the means to keep him made the question more painful. Baseball has always had its own hierarchy of memory. There are good players, very good players, stars, legends, and icons. The Mets' supporters, considering their history, could agree that Tom Seaver belonged at the top of the list. Beyond Seaver, the arguments began. Darryl Strawberry, Dwight Gooden, David Wright, Mike Piazza, Keith Hernandez, Pete Alonso: each carried a different claim, and each was measured against a different kind of affection. What makes a player an icon? Is it the number of years he spends with a team? The statistics he leaves behind? The championships he helps win? Or is it something less orderly, something that happens between the player and the people who watch him? The debate matters because baseball is a game of numbers that refuses to be explained by numbers. A man can have a fine career and never become beloved. Another can have a short stay and leave behind a memory that lasts a lifetime. A homegrown player may become part of a city's identity; a free agent may arrive from elsewhere and, through the force of his personality or performance, become part of the family. Díaz had not spent his entire career in New York. He was not a homegrown Met in the way Alonso was. But he had become one of those players whose presence made a game feel different. He had his entrance, his music, his particular power to make a ninth inning seem both urgent and safe. The fans did not need to believe he was Rivera to appreciate what he had given them. The business of baseball has little patience for such distinctions. Players move. Contracts end. A new pitcher takes the mound, and the old one puts on a different uniform. The game continues because it must. The Mets would find another closer, another way to arrange the bullpen, another answer to the question of who would pitch the ninth. But the fan's memory is less efficient than the front office. It does not erase a player when his contract expires. It keeps the old entrance music, the big strikeout, the familiar walk from the bullpen. It remembers the seasons when the team was good enough to make the game feel possible. There was even a domestic comedy running alongside the winter's baseball drama. One fan, distracted by the news of Díaz's departure, found himself taking apart an oven in an attempt to repair an ignition problem. A five-minute online demonstration became a half-day of labor. Screws vanished, a hinge jammed, and a household repair threatened to become a small catastrophe. The oven door remained out of commission while the Mets' roster seemed to be losing pieces of its own. The man had wanted to keep watch over the team's assets. Instead, he was wrestling with gas tubes and a recalcitrant hinge, explaining to his wife that he might have prevented a major baseball transaction if only he had not been occupied with the kitchen. It was an absurd story, and therefore a perfect baseball story. Fans live with the knowledge that the game is not the most important thing in the world, even as they arrange their days around it. The oven must work. The bills must be paid. The family must be fed. But when the Mets lose a player, a part of the mind remains at the ballpark, wondering whether anyone could have done something differently. Eventually the oven was repaired. The Mets' roster was another matter. The lesson of that winter was not that the Mets had to keep every player they loved. No team can do that. Nor was it that Díaz would certainly thrive in Los Angeles, or that Devin Williams would fail in New York. Baseball is too unpredictable to permit such certainty. Three years from now, the contract may look wise, foolish, or merely ordinary. The closer who leaves may age badly; the replacement may become indispensable. The front office may yet assemble a championship team. But on the day Díaz chose the Dodgers, the Mets lost something that could not be measured in saves or salary. They lost a player who had become part of the way their fans experienced the game. They lost him to a direct rival that seemed to understand better than they did how to turn money, talent, and ambition into a winning organization. And the fans were left with the familiar winter task of trying to believe. They would study the new signings. They would debate the infield, the bullpen, the batting order, and the wisdom of paying a middle infielder to learn first base. They would argue about the general manager's methods and the owner's priorities. They would insist that they were angry because they wanted to win, then discover that their anger had as much to do with affection as with the standings. In spring, the players would report. The grass would return. The ball would come off the bat with its old, clean sound. The Mets would play nine innings, and the ninth would arrive with its usual collection of possibilities. Someone would take the ball. The music would be different. The fans would listen anyway.

Chapter 23: When the Game Becomes Ours Summary: With the Mets eliminated, October baseball becomes an unexpected education in the difference between watching as a partisan and watching as a lover of the game, prompting reflections on postseason pitching, forgotten players like Cedric Mullins, the departure of longtime executive Tommy Tanous, and the tension between statistical value and emotional attachment in the Pete Alonso debate. Ultimately, the piece argues that winning may be why fans tell themselves they watch baseball, but memory is what keeps them watching—the home runs, mistakes, familiar faces, and fleeting moments that make the game their own even after their team’s season has ended. There is a point in October when a baseball fan becomes an unwilling neutral. It happens quietly. One afternoon you are watching a game because you care desperately about who wins. Then, sometime later, you are watching because you care about baseball. The distinction is not announced. There is no ceremony. Your team is simply gone, and the games continue without asking permission. This is when you begin to notice things. You notice that extra-inning baseball feels different when there is no runner placed on second base to begin the inning. You notice the strange pleasure of a game that reaches the eleventh inning honestly, with the runners having earned their way there. You notice pitchers you had scarcely thought about in August. You notice the way a manager uses a bullpen, the way a shortstop moves two steps before the pitch, the way a team that has been waiting all week can somehow look less prepared than the team that played yesterday. And, eventually, you notice your own team. The Mets were gone, and the October games became a kind of examination. Watching Detroit and Seattle play eleven innings, one Mets fan remarked on the absence of the automatic runner. Another agreed. Then came the more painful observation: watching these teams made it apparent that the Mets' pitching staff had not been close to good enough for October. Not close. There are things you can believe during a regular season because you want to believe them. October is less charitable. October puts you in a room with the best teams and closes the door. You see what real pitching looks like. You see what a lineup looks like when every at-bat has become expensive. You see a starter who has been resting for days and another club that has prepared for the moment since February. You see a game continue into the eleventh inning, and suddenly the Mets' pitching staff of the preceding summer seems not merely imperfect but several miles away. This is one of baseball's cruelties: sometimes you need to lose before you understand why you lost. The Mets fan, deprived of his own team, becomes an amateur scout. He studies Milwaukee. He studies Chicago. He studies Detroit. He studies Seattle. The Brewers and Cubs, in particular, offered the sort of October baseball that can sneak up on you. At one point the Brewers had one hit through four innings. At another, the Cubs were three outs from survival. Then Milwaukee was finished, 3–1, and somebody announced, with appropriate Midwestern solemnity, that it was time for brats and beer. It is possible to spend a lifetime watching baseball and still be surprised by how little it resembles a plan. The Brewers had won their division decisively. They had time to arrange their pitching. They had the advantage of preparation. And yet, in one game, they found themselves using a bullpen strategy that left a perfectly reasonable observer wondering how a division winner had arrived at such a moment. This is October. The best-laid rotation can become a bullpen game. The best pitcher can give up five runs. The great favorite can go home. The little mistake becomes the whole story. And somewhere in all of this, a Mets fan begins thinking about the Mets again. Not necessarily about the stars. Sometimes it is the lesser players who return. Cedric Mullins, for example. There was nothing heroic about his Mets tenure. That may be precisely why he became memorable. He arrived with expectations already lowered, then managed to fall beneath them. He struggled offensively. His defense, which was supposed to provide some consolation, did not. There was even a moment when a fan realized that he was advocating for Mullins to pinch-hit and then immediately regretting the advocacy because it meant Mullins would actually be in the game. That is a particular kind of baseball memory. It is not the home run. It is the sigh before the at-bat. Every team has such players. Every fan does. The great teams have them too, although history is kinder to them. We remember the stars. We remember the October heroes. We remember the photographs. We rarely remember the man who hit .218 while occupying a place somebody else might have used. Yet one observer offered a specific memory: a fly ball against Washington that Mullins turned into an inside-the-park home run in extra innings. Another called it the defining moment of the season. There it was. A bad player, a bad play, a bad season—and suddenly there was a memory. That is how baseball works. It does not ask whether an event deserves to be remembered. It simply places the event in your head and walks away. Years later you may remember the man who hit .218 more clearly than the man who hit .318. Because the man who hit .318 behaved according to expectations. The other man did not. The Mets' winter contained another kind of argument, one that baseball has been having since somebody first put a dollar value on a ballplayer. Kyle Schwarber was available. Pete Alonso was available. The question seemed simple until you looked at the numbers, the ages, the positions, the money and, most dangerously, the memories. Schwarber was older. He was essentially a designated hitter. He struck out a lot, walked a lot and hit the ball a very long way. Alonso was younger, could at least play first base, and had become something more complicated than a slugger. On paper, it was a comparison. In New York, it was something else. One observer eventually put his finger on the difficulty: if you were going to take the risk of giving five years to a player in his early thirties, perhaps the place to take that risk was with a franchise icon. This is the sentence the spreadsheet cannot write. A franchise icon is not merely a player with good statistics. He is a player who has accumulated your memories. He has been there long enough for you to have disliked him, forgiven him, admired him, criticized him, defended him and finally, without quite noticing, loved him. The problem with replacing such a man is that the replacement begins with a deficit. He is not simply asked to play well. He is asked to become familiar. That takes years. Perhaps this is why baseball fans are always more interested in continuity than executives are. Executives must think about what a player will become. Fans remember what he has already been. The difference is not stupidity. It is time. The executive is looking forward. The fan is looking backward and forward simultaneously. He remembers the player as a rookie. He remembers the player after a bad month. He remembers the September game when the player carried them. He remembers the afternoon he bought the jersey. He remembers who was sitting beside him. The player, meanwhile, has simply been doing his job. Then there are the men behind the men. In December, Tommy Tanous left the Mets organization after fifteen years and joined Colorado. He had been involved in scouting and player development for years, with fingerprints all over the organization. The departure was hardly as dramatic as losing a star player, but it carried its own meaning: another person who had been there for a long time was suddenly somewhere else. That is how an organization changes. Not always with trumpets. Sometimes a man who has been around since 2010 simply gets on a plane. The Mets fan notices. He may not know exactly what Tanous did on a Tuesday afternoon in 2016. He may not know which meeting mattered or which scouting report changed somebody's mind. But he knows that a familiar name has disappeared. And familiarity, in baseball, is its own form of history. The season after your season ends is full of such discoveries. You discover that Detroit and Seattle can play a wonderful baseball game without you. You discover that Milwaukee can lose a series after winning its division. You discover that the postseason can make you reconsider the quality of your own pitching. You discover that Cedric Mullins can become a memory despite barely having deserved one. You discover that a discussion about Kyle Schwarber is really a discussion about Pete Alonso. You discover that a longtime baseball executive can leave an organization and take a small piece of its accumulated memory with him. Most of all, you discover that being a baseball fan is not quite the same thing as being a fan of winning. Winning is the reason we tell ourselves we are watching. Memory is the reason we actually are. The Mets will play another season. There will be another Opening Day, another first pitch, another player whose name will initially sound unfamiliar and eventually sound as though it has always belonged there. Some of those players will succeed. Some will fail. Some will become stars. Some will become Cedric Mullins. And one of them, perhaps, will make a catch or hit a home run or stand on a mound in a game that has gone eleven innings, and somebody watching from somewhere will remember exactly where he was when it happened. That is the strange bargain baseball makes with us. It gives us six months of games and asks us to keep only a handful. We do not choose them very well. We remember the home run. We remember the error. We remember the player we thought would be good. We remember the player we were certain would be good and wasn't. We remember the one who stayed. We remember the one who left. And after our team is gone, when the television remains on and the postseason continues into the night, we discover that we are still watching. Not because we have to. Because somewhere between the first pitch and the last, the game became ours.

Chapter 22: The Season That Belongs to You Summary: With the Mets eliminated and familiar stars like Pete Alonso, Brandon Nimmo, and Edwin Díaz gone, the piece explores how baseball fandom persists through October rivalries, empathy for other teams’ players, and memories of the moments that made certain Mets feel irreplaceable. Ultimately, it argues that a player’s value cannot be measured by contracts or statistics alone, because the memories accumulated over years of watching him belong to the fans—and those attachments endure even after the season, and the player’s time in New York, have ended. There is a strange period in baseball when your own team is gone but baseball is not. The calendar says the season has ended. The players have gone home. The clubhouse has been emptied of its ordinary noises—the bats knocking together, the music, the trainers, the conversations that seemed so insignificant until they were no longer there. The uniforms have been packed away. Somewhere, somebody is already thinking about spring training. But you are not finished. You become a partisan for reasons that would seem ridiculous if baseball were only a game. You root for Toronto because Toronto beat New York. You root against Los Angeles because Los Angeles is still alive. You discover that you have strong feelings about Philadelphia pitchers, Milwaukee hitters, Seattle fans, the peculiarities of a Canadian national anthem. This is one of baseball's small gifts. It allows you to keep being sixteen years old long after you have stopped being sixteen. The Mets were gone, and yet the Mets were everywhere. They were there in the pleasure of watching the Yankees lose to Toronto. There was a particular satisfaction in watching the Yankees' season reach its final innings with the Blue Jays holding the lead, Judge coming to the plate, the tying run still somehow lingering in the distance. When the final out came, there was celebration in places where no Mets game was being played at all. One Mets fan admitted to staying up to watch the Yankees' season end and enjoying the tears afterward. Another said he would have an extra pep in his step the next morning. This is not entirely rational. It does not have to be. Baseball has always been full of people who can explain their feelings with statistics until the moment a particular player walks to the plate. Then statistics become something else. They become evidence in a trial whose verdict was decided years earlier. The Yankees lose and the Mets fan sleeps better. There are worse reasons to stay awake. But beneath the jokes and the old rivalry is something more serious. Watching other teams in October forces a fan to think about his own team. You watch Toronto and wonder what it would feel like to see the Mets there. You watch Philadelphia and Los Angeles and Milwaukee and think about the players who might have been wearing blue and orange. You watch a young pitcher make a mistake and understand, for a moment, that every postseason is built on somebody else's mistake. The Mets fan is an interested observer now. He is also a ghost at his own party. The Phillies provided one of those October moments that baseball produces so efficiently: a young pitcher, Orion Kerkering, fielding a comebacker in a decisive situation, bobbling it, panicking, throwing home when first base was there, and watching the Dodgers advance. The immediate reaction was predictable—anger, jokes, the knowledge that the mistake would be remembered all winter. But then something more generous entered the conversation. A Mets fan, while acknowledging that he would root against the player the following year, admitted that he felt badly for him. A sharply hit comebacker is a reaction play, he observed. Once the ball is bobbled, the mind and body are no longer operating from the comfortable world of diagrams. That is another thing baseball teaches us if we stay with it long enough. The man who makes the error is not the error. It is an easy distinction to make from a couch. It is much harder to make when your team has just been eliminated because of one. And yet the distinction matters. Players are young. Players are frightened. Players make decisions in half a second that will be discussed for twenty years by people who had considerably more time to think about them. A baseball game can make a man famous. It can also make him immortal for the wrong reason. And then there is Pete Alonso. Perhaps the reason Alonso's departure hurt as much as it did was that he had become more than his statistics, although his statistics were considerable. He arrived as a home-run hitter, and for a while that seemed to be the entire story. He was the large man who hit the ball a very long way. There was something almost comic about the enthusiasm: the shirts coming off, the rally pony, the strange hair, the celebrations that seemed occasionally to have wandered in from a different sport. Then time did what time always does. The joke became a person. The person became a Met. And the Met became part of the furniture of people's lives. One of the most telling memories of Alonso is not a number. It is the 2024 postseason home run in Milwaukee, the ball disappearing into the night at the moment when the Mets' season seemed ready to disappear with it. For one fan, that homer stood above everything else—not merely because of what it did to a playoff series, but because it changed the emotional temperature of the entire season. Other memories followed: Alonso helping revive the black uniforms, embracing the strange rituals and personalities around the club, participating in the peculiar culture that makes a baseball clubhouse more than a workplace. This is how a player becomes yours. Not by contract. Not by WAR. Not even by the number of home runs. He becomes yours by accumulating moments. A rookie season. A bad haircut. A stupid celebration. A September afternoon. A home run in Milwaukee. A wife writing goodbye to New York. The knowledge that, for years, this particular man was going to appear on your television almost every night. That last part is more important than we like to admit. We speak about baseball players as though they enter our lives only to perform. But the regular season is too long for that. A player becomes a recurring character. He appears when you are twenty minutes late getting home from work. He appears while dinner is cooking. He appears during the summer when your children are growing, when your parents are aging, when your own life is changing in ways you do not notice until afterward. The player does not know this. He cannot. But you do. That is why losing a player can feel different from losing a contract. The contract belongs to the organization. The memories belong to the fan. And so when Alonso left, there was a certain sadness that had little to do with whether five years was too many years, or whether an aging slugger would be worth the money in 2029. Those are reasonable questions. They are also questions asked from a considerable distance. A fan lives much closer. A fan remembers David Wright. He remembers the Mets going to Washington in 2015. He remembers the home run in the World Series. He remembers the final years when Wright could no longer do what his younger body had done. And there is something wonderfully irrational in the idea that the contract can be judged a failure while the memory of it remains a triumph. One fan put it plainly: he would make that Wright contract again one hundred times out of one hundred. The bad years at the end did not erase the years that came before. This is where baseball's accountants and baseball's historians part company. The accountant asks what the player will be worth. The historian asks what the player already was. Neither is foolish. They are simply keeping different books. The Mets were entering another version of the argument. With Alonso, Brandon Nimmo and Edwin Díaz gone, some fans spoke about the disappearance of continuity, about the fear that the next Mets team might become a collection of short-term players rather than a team that people could grow attached to. Someone remembered the 2015 club precisely because it contained young players who seemed as if they might belong to the Mets for years: deGrom, Harvey, Syndergaard, Matz, Conforto, d'Arnaud, Familia, Flores. That is what fans mean when they talk about identity. They don't necessarily mean a style of play. They mean recognition. They mean looking at the television and knowing who these people are. Baseball is the only sport in which a player can become part of your household without ever having been invited inside it. And perhaps this is why Mets fans can spend October rooting for Toronto, against New York, then against Los Angeles, then suddenly feeling sorry for a Philadelphia pitcher. The season has ended, but attachment has not. The Mets have ceased to provide new memories, so the fan begins examining the old ones. He becomes an archaeologist. He digs through October. He finds Alonso in Milwaukee. He finds Wright in Washington. He finds the Yankees losing. He finds a Philadelphia pitcher standing alone after making a mistake. He finds himself, too, sitting somewhere in New York—or Florida, or Tennessee, or wherever Mets fans happen to be when the games are played—watching baseball that no longer affects the standings of his own team. And still caring. This is the part that people who do not understand baseball sometimes miss. They think fandom is about wanting your team to win. It is. But it is also about wanting certain people to remain where you left them. You want the old player to stay young. You want the old ballpark to stay the same. You want the great October home run to remain capable of producing the same sensation when you remember it ten years later. You want the player who was yours to remain yours. Baseball does not permit any of this. The players leave. The uniforms change. The children become adults. The adults become old. The ballparks acquire new advertisements. The game itself changes its rules and rhythms. Even the people sitting beside you eventually stop being there. Still, in October, you watch. Perhaps your team is gone. Perhaps your favorite player has signed somewhere else. Perhaps a young pitcher on another team has just made the kind of mistake that will follow him into winter. You watch anyway. And for a few hours, the season is not over. Neither, really, is the part of it that belonged to you.

Guardians vs. Brewers would be cool.

Chapter 21: The Place No Front Office Can Renovate Summary: The Mets’ winter of departures, especially Pete Alonso’s, exposes the tension between baseball’s business decisions and the emotional attachments that make a team feel like family, even as Steve Cohen’s $8.1 billion Metropolitan Park project promises to transform the world around Citi Field. Ultimately, the piece argues that while players, stadiums, neighborhoods, and rosters can all be replaced, the years fans spend with a player cannot be rebuilt or bought back; the deepest home of a Met is the place in memory where, for a time, he was one of yours. There are two ways to change a baseball team. You can change the players. Or you can change the place. The first is easy to see. A player is here on Monday and gone on Wednesday. His locker is cleaned out. His name disappears from the lineup. Someone else stands at first base. The second takes longer. You notice it in the neighborhood. A building goes up where there used to be parking. A restaurant appears. A hotel. A casino. A concert hall. The traffic gets worse. The subway gets more important. And one day you look around and realize that the ballpark you knew has become part of something much larger than a ballpark. This is what is happening around the Mets now. Steve Cohen and Hard Rock have received approval for a gigantic project beside Citi Field, an $8.1 billion development called Metropolitan Park. There will be a hotel, casino, sportsbook, restaurants, bars, a 5,650-seat music venue, a food hall and public green space. It is supposed to be finished in 2030. Five years is a long time in baseball. But five years is also a short time. Five years ago, Pete Alonso was still young enough that the idea of him becoming an old Met seemed ridiculous. In five years, Metropolitan Park may be finished. There will be people walking through it who have no memory of the Citi Field parking lots before the construction. They will know the place as it is. That is how cities work. That is how baseball works, too. The strange thing is that while Cohen is building outward, making the physical world around the Mets larger, the baseball team has suddenly become smaller in one important sense. Pete Alonso is gone. Edwin Díaz is gone. Brandon Nimmo is gone. Three men who had become part of the modern Mets vocabulary disappeared in one winter. One fan, looking at the names of Mets who had left over the years, wrote them almost as a family tree: Seaver. Strawberry. deGrom. Wheeler. Reyes. Díaz. Alonso. And then came the comparison to 1977. This was not a comparison of baseball teams. It was a comparison of feeling. The Mets have always been unusually good at creating attachments to players who do not necessarily spend their entire careers in New York. Sometimes the attachment lasts because the player was great. Sometimes because he was there during a particular period of your life. Sometimes because he simply seemed to belong. Pete belonged. That is different from saying that Pete Alonso was worth every dollar of every possible contract. Baseball people can make a perfectly reasonable argument that five years and $155 million is too much for a 31-year-old first baseman/DH. One can look at aging curves and defensive value and positional scarcity and future production and conclude that the Orioles made the better financial decision. All of this may be true. It does not make the departure less sad. This is the part of baseball that statistics cannot solve. A man can be worth $20 million a year on one spreadsheet and worth more than that to the people who watched him hit home runs on another. One fan said he could not get angry about the Mets failing to sign Alonso because the contract was more than he would have wanted to give him. Then came the other sentence. Stearns had better have a plan. That may be the essential sentence of the winter. Not Was Pete worth it? Not Will Pete decline? Not Will Baltimore regret the fifth year? The question is: What comes next? Because letting somebody go is easy to explain when there is somebody coming. It is harder when there is only space. A first baseman's position can be filled. A lineup spot can be filled. Twenty-five home runs can perhaps be replaced. But a familiar face cannot simply be replaced by arithmetic. This is why the loss of three players in the same winter has seemed different from three ordinary transactions. One departure can be business. Three departures can begin to feel like an era. And baseball fans are sentimental about eras in ways they are not sentimental about contracts. The rational fan knows that teams must change. The irrational fan knows that the rational fan is correct. The irrational fan is still angry. Someone put it bluntly: Fandom is not rational. Of course it isn't. If fandom were rational, nobody would care whether a player retired with a particular team. Nobody would care where he signed next. Nobody would remember his first home run. Nobody would remember the walk-up music. Nobody would have a favorite player who was not necessarily the best player. Nobody would look at a uniform number and see a particular summer. Baseball is filled with such memories. That is why the Mets' winter has felt, to some people, less like roster construction than demolition. The front office sees contracts. The fans see departures. Both are looking at the same transaction. They are simply measuring different things. There was something almost perfect about the timing of the Pete Alonso news. A year earlier, the Mets had gone to the Winter Meetings and signed Juan Soto. The news came suddenly, while a fan was watching Sunday Night Football. He was sitting in the same place again this year, checking his phone, half-joking that perhaps it might happen again. Maybe the Mets would sign another Soto. Maybe there would be two Juan Sotos. Baseball fans make jokes like that because jokes are what we use to occupy the spaces between events. Then the winter came. And instead of adding another familiar name, the Mets lost one. This is how quickly baseball changes. One year you are sitting in the same chair waiting for good news. The next year you are sitting in the same chair wondering what happened to the team you thought you knew. There is a cruelty to this that has nothing to do with money. It is memory. Last year belongs to us. This year belongs to the front office. That is the bargain. The fans remember. The baseball people decide. And occasionally those two things agree. When they do, everyone is happy. When they don't, someone asks to see the plan. Show me the plan. It is a reasonable demand. But it is also an impossible one, because the plan is always hidden inside the future. The front office knows things the fan does not. The fan knows things the front office cannot. The front office knows the aging curves. The fan knows what Pete Alonso sounded like when he hit a home run. The front office knows the financial implications of a fifth year. The fan remembers where he was when the Mets finally beat the Braves. Neither kind of knowledge is fake. That is why baseball arguments never end. The casino, meanwhile, will eventually rise beside the ballpark. There will be lights. There will be people coming to gamble. There will be people coming to concerts. There will be people coming to restaurants. There will be people who have no particular interest in baseball at all. Someone wondered about the parking. Someone else had already developed a strategy: park under the Northern Boulevard overpass, get out quickly, take the subway or an Uber, avoid the garage. This, too, is baseball. Not the statistics. Not the contracts. Parking. Traffic. The subway. The walk to the stadium. The place where you ate afterward. The place where you stood before the game. The people you went with. The Mets have always been attached to these things because baseball teams are not really confined to their stadiums. They live in the city. They live in the memories of the people who go there. They live in the route you take to get there. They live in the seat you sit in. They live in the person who sits beside you. They live in the player you expect to see when you look toward first base. That is why the casino matters, even to someone who has no interest in gambling. It changes the world around the Mets. Perhaps that is not bad. Perhaps it will be magnificent. Perhaps the transportation will work. Perhaps the new park will become one of those places New Yorkers eventually insist has always been there. That is how cities absorb change. There was even a joke about McFadden's, the old sports bar, and the imagined tourist who had come all the way from Seoul or Glasgow or Topeka only to discover that the great New York pilgrimage ended at a chain sports bar. The joke was funny because it contained a truth. Every new place wants to become an old place. Every corporation wants to create tradition. But tradition cannot be manufactured. It has to accumulate. You cannot build nostalgia. You can only build the place where nostalgia might eventually happen. Perhaps that is what Cohen is really doing. Building the place. The rest will take time. The Mets will have different players. Pete Alonso will wear another uniform. Edwin Díaz will close games somewhere else. Brandon Nimmo will become a former Met in the way that former Mets always become: first painfully, then ordinarily, and finally nostalgically. New players will arrive. Some will become beloved. Some will become hated. Some will become beloved only after they leave. There will be prospects whose names are now spoken with the confidence reserved for future stars: MacLean, Sproat, Tong, Jett, Benge. There will be arguments about whether the Mets are rebuilding. There will be arguments about whether they are really rebuilding. Someone will say that every year is a rebuilding year to a baseball executive. Someone else will say that a team that spent extravagantly on Juan Soto cannot possibly be rebuilding. Both will be right, for a little while. That is the peculiar nature of baseball. You can be rebuilding and trying to win at the same time. You can be getting younger while paying an older player. You can lose a franchise icon and believe you are improving the team. You can be correct and still hurt someone. The Mets are entering that territory now. The territory between memory and mathematics. The territory where the old Mets are still alive in people's minds while the new Mets are being assembled on spreadsheets. It will take years before we know whether the baseball decisions were right. We will know sooner whether the feelings were real. They already are. Pete Alonso was not simply a first baseman. He was one of the faces of the Mets. For some people, that alone was worth something. Maybe it was worth $155 million. Maybe it was worth less. Maybe it was worth more. There is no formula for it. And that is probably why the departure hurts more than the contract number suggests it should. Baseball has always been a business. But it has never been only a business. The Mets can build a casino. They can build a hotel. They can build a concert hall. They can build a new parking garage. They can spend billions changing the neighborhood around Citi Field. But they cannot build a Pete Alonso. They cannot build the years a fan spent watching him. They cannot build the feeling of knowing, when he walked to the plate, that he was one of yours. That part has already been built. It took years. It took games. It took home runs. It took losses. It took October. It took spring training. It took ordinary nights that seemed unimportant at the time. That is how a player becomes part of a franchise. Not by contract. By accumulation. And perhaps that is the final irony of the Cohen era. The physical Mets are becoming larger. The business is becoming larger. The neighborhood is becoming larger. The ambitions are larger. But the fans are discovering that bigger does not necessarily mean more familiar. Sometimes you can build an $8 billion world around a ballpark and still look toward first base and feel that something is missing. Maybe that is inevitable. Maybe it is necessary. Maybe the next generation of Mets will make us forget the last one. But I doubt we will forget completely. We never do. That is the trouble with baseball. You can replace the player. You can replace the manager. You can replace the general manager. You can replace the stadium. You can even replace the neighborhood. But you cannot replace the years. They remain where they were. And for a while, at least, Pete Alonso will remain there too. Not in Baltimore. Not in the new lineup. Not in the new plan. But in that older, more stubborn place where the Mets are kept. The place no front office can renovate. The place where a player is still yours because, for a few years, he was.

Chapter 21: The Consolation and the Curse Summary: The 2025 Mets season is remembered as a frustrating contradiction: a team loaded with individual talent and statistical achievements that nevertheless won only 83 games, missed the postseason, and left its fans exhausted by a long, dispiriting collapse. Yet the piece argues that baseball’s enduring power lies in the way disappointment gives way almost immediately to hope, as fans preserve the memories of the season that was while beginning to believe, against their better judgment, that next year will be different. There are baseball seasons that end with a bang. There are seasons that end with a champagne bottle broken against a clubhouse wall, with men shouting, cameras flashing, somebody holding a trophy above his head. And then there are Mets seasons. Those can end rather quietly. The Mets finished 2025 with 83 victories and no postseason. This, by itself, was not remarkable. Eighty-three wins is not a catastrophe. It is not even particularly interesting. It is simply the number that remains after the arithmetic has been completed. But there was something strange about these 83 wins. Four Mets hit at least 25 home runs. Two scored more than 115 runs. Two drove in more than 100. Two stole at least 30 bases. The Mets had the league leader in walks, the league leader in doubles, the league leader in stolen bases and the league leader in on-base percentage. They had four All-Stars. And they had 83 wins. No playoffs. The numbers seemed almost to be mocking one another. Baseball occasionally does this. It puts a splendid collection of individual accomplishments inside a season that, taken as a whole, feels strangely empty. The 2025 Mets were not bad enough to be understood. That was the problem. Had they lost 95 games, the explanation would have been easy. Had they won 95, the explanation would have been easier still. Instead they became something more difficult: a team that appeared to contain nearly everything necessary for success and somehow could not make the parts operate as a whole. One observer put it in the simplest possible terms: They were loaded, yet underwhelming. That was the season. Loaded and underwhelming. The Mets had been something else before that. From May 30, 2024 through June 12, 2025, they had gone 112-64, a .636 winning percentage, the pace of a 103-win team. Then came June 13. From that day until the end of the season they went 38-55, a .408 percentage, the pace of a 66-96 team. There were different players during those stretches. Baseball rosters are never quite as fixed as memory makes them. But the core remained recognizable. That made the collapse more unsettling. It was not as though an entirely different team had wandered into the clubhouse. It was still the Mets. They simply stopped being the Mets people had come to expect. This is one of the crueler things about baseball. A team does not usually announce the precise moment when it changes. There is no bell. There is no meeting in which somebody says: We are now a .408 team. Instead, there is a game in June. Then another. Then a bullpen decision that doesn't work. Then a game in which the hitters leave runners on. Then another. Then somebody notices that it has been three weeks since the team looked like itself. By then, it has become a season. The Mets' final game was played in Miami, but geography seemed almost incidental. The real game was taking place elsewhere. The Reds and Brewers were playing too. The Mets needed help. They needed themselves to win, and they needed events in another ballpark to break correctly. This is one of the peculiarities of late-season baseball. A fan can become intimately acquainted with the score of a game he cannot see while simultaneously losing faith in the game he can. The scoreboard becomes another member of the roster. The Brewers were up. The Reds were down. The Mets were still alive. Then the Brewers were still up. Then they weren't. Every few minutes there was another piece of information. Somebody would type it. The Reds had taken the lead. The Brewers had answered. The Mets had runners on. The Mets had wasted them. The season was alive. The season was dying. Nobody could quite tell which. At one point the Mets had the bases loaded. It felt like the season was on the line. It wasn't, technically. But it felt like it. That distinction matters in baseball. There are hundreds of moments in a season that are not officially the season on the line but feel exactly like it. Fans understand this instinctively. A meaningless game in April can feel like October if you have waited all winter to see the team again. A September game can feel meaningless when the season has already slipped away, even if the mathematics insist otherwise. On this afternoon, everything felt like the season on the line. And then came the pitching. The Mets used pitcher after pitcher. There were five pitchers. Then another. Then another. A pitcher who was getting people out was removed. Another pitcher came in. The strategy began to resemble a search for the one man who would fail. Someone eventually put the thought into words: Keep pulling guys who are getting it done, and it becomes like you're searching for the guy who isn't going to. Someone else supplied the answer. Found him. That was Mets baseball by late September. The jokes became darker as the season became shorter. There is a particular kind of humor that belongs to fans who have watched the same thing happen too many times. It is not really laughter. It is recognition wearing a funny hat. The bullpen became a procession of names. Manaea. Brazoban. Raley. Stanek. Rogers. Díaz. Helsley. Peterson. Tong. Soto. Ross. A list like that looks different depending on whether you are reading it in March or September. In March it is a bullpen. In September it is a confession. Someone asked the most obvious question in baseball: What do you do after Díaz? Nobody had a good answer. That question had been sitting there all season, perhaps without anyone wanting to look directly at it. Edwin Díaz was still Edwin Díaz. But he was also becoming a question about the future. Baseball is cruel to closers because their failures are so visible. A starter can give up a run in the second inning and spend the afternoon recovering. A closer can be perfect for eight innings and have one bad pitch become the only thing anyone remembers. And then there was Pete Alonso. Pete was still there. That mattered. At the end, the Mets could say, in effect, that if there was going to be one last great moment, Alonso was somewhere nearby. Soto could be the tying run. Alonso could be the go-ahead run. Three outs to save the season. Then there was a walk. People held their breath. They crossed their fingers. Somewhere, an adult Mets fan undoubtedly clenched every muscle available to him. The game continued. And then it didn't. The Mets did not score. Not even a run against Miami. That was the end. There was no dramatic final swing. No ball disappearing into the night. No runner sliding beneath a tag. Just the slow disappearance of possibility. One observer called it a long descent of a season. That seemed right. A season can descend without ever becoming a disaster. It can descend through small things. A pitching change. A missed opportunity. A ball hit well but not far enough. A runner stranded. A lead surrendered. A decision that makes sense until it doesn't. A manager standing in front of a microphone afterward, looking less like a man who has answers than a man who has questions. And then the season ends. The strangest thing was what happened next. Relief. Not happiness. Relief. One person admitted he was not sure whether he was sad, relieved, disgusted or simply exhausted. Another said he was feeling a surprising amount of relief. He had wanted the season over so he could begin looking forward to the next one. This is something people who do not follow baseball closely may never understand. The end of a disappointing season can feel good. Not because you are glad your team lost. Because you are tired of hoping. Hope is work. Every day you calculate. Every night you watch. You check the standings. You look at the other scores. You calculate magic numbers and elimination numbers and games behind. You tell yourself that tomorrow could be different. Then tomorrow arrives. And it is not. After a while, the human mind begins to crave an ending. Not a victory. An ending. The Mets finally gave them one. And almost immediately, something else appeared. Hope. That is the great trick of baseball. The moment one season dies, another begins to form in the imagination. There it is. A blank page. A new rotation. A healthier player. A better bullpen. A more patient approach. A prospect who might become what everybody thinks he can become. A free agent who might sign. A trade that might work. A mistake that might be corrected. The future has one enormous advantage over the past: It has not disappointed you yet. That is why it is so easy to love. By the next morning, Pete Alonso's decision to opt out was already part of the new season. He had scarcely finished playing the old one. Someone was annoyed by the speed of it. Did he really have to announce it within an hour of the season ending? But perhaps that was fitting. Baseball does not wait for grief. The season ends. The agents call. The executives meet. The players go home. The contracts become questions. The Mets become a different team without having played another game. And the fans begin doing what they have always done. They begin putting the team back together. Perhaps this is what being a baseball fan really means. Not believing that your team will win. That would be too easy. It means believing that the next team might. The 2025 Mets had four 25-home-run hitters. They had four All-Stars. They had stolen bases and walks and doubles and runs and RBIs. They had enough individual achievement to fill a very good season. They had 83 victories. They had no postseason. And they had something else, too. They had people who cared enough to be furious. That matters. Anger is a form of attachment. So is exhaustion. So is the little laugh after another bullpen disaster. So is typing here we go while privately knowing exactly what is about to happen. So is thinking a ball is going to the wall. So is believing, for one second, that Pete Alonso has found the gap. So is holding your breath. So is watching another team on another television because its result might determine whether your own season survives. These are not statistics. They will not appear in the official record. Nobody will write them into the standings. But they are part of what a baseball season is. The official record will say that the 2025 Mets won 83 games and missed the playoffs. It will say that they had four players with 25 or more home runs. It will say that certain men led the league in certain categories. It will say who played and who didn't. It will say who was traded, who opted out, who was retained and who was dismissed. It will remember the numbers. It will not remember the exhaustion. It will not remember the sighs. It will not remember the moment when someone finally typed: Well, the season is over. It will not remember the answer: Which allows for hope to spring anew for 2026. But baseball people will. Because that is what baseball people do. They remember. They remember the team that was supposed to be. They remember the team that briefly was. They remember the team that disappeared. And then, because they cannot help themselves, they begin imagining the next one. There is always another season. That is the consolation and the curse. The Mets are already becoming history. The strange thing is that they are also becoming the future. Pete Alonso is part of both. Edwin Díaz is part of both. Lindor is part of both. The young pitchers are part of the future. The failures are part of the history. The statistics are permanent. The feelings are not. And yet the feelings are what we remember. Perhaps that is why the final number, 83, seems inadequate. A number can tell you what happened. It cannot tell you what it felt like. For that, you need the people who watched. You need somebody to say: It was disappointing. It was underachieving. It was loaded. It was exhausting. It was over. And then, almost before the sentence was finished: Now we can look forward to next year. That is baseball. The season ends. The hope begins. And somewhere, before the first pitch of the next spring, someone will say: Here we go. This time, maybe, it will be different. They will know better. They will believe anyway.

Fred Claire died. https://www.latimes.com/sports/dodgers/story/2026-10-06/fred-claire-former-dodgers-gm-1988-world-series-dies-91 Who was Fred Claire? Fred Claire was a longtime Los Angeles Dodgers executive who served as the team’s general manager from 1987 to 1998 after beginning his career as a sportswriter and joining the organization’s public relations department in 1969. He rebuilt the Dodgers into World Series champions in 1988, earning Sporting News Executive of the Year honors, but later personnel decisions—including trading future Hall of Fame pitcher Pedro Martínez for Delino DeShields—marred his tenure. Claire’s influence over baseball operations diminished following Rupert Murdoch’s takeover of the franchise, and he was dismissed in 1998 after the controversial trade of Mike Piazza was made without his knowledge. He died on his 91st birthday, October 5, 2026, leaving a legacy defined by both a championship triumph and the turbulent final years of his Dodgers career.

"Fall Ball" is what I said when I was trying to will my undescended testicle to drop.

And? My point hasn't been disproven.

I just imagined that's what all New Yorkers are like.

Great choice, Mr. President. Much like you, Clemens is an innocent victim of a corrupt system and much like you, when it all plays out, he'll finally and rightfully go down as one of the best in history.

In response to a previous post, I see nothing wrong with a light-hearted frivolity such as this in the slow time of year. Edwin Diaz is correct! #2 was former closer and #3 would himself be a great answer to a trivia question, the legendary Justin Wilson. Diaz averaged nearly TWO strikeouts per inning that year. Hints are my favorite part so here's a hint for another one: 1. The year featured Cleon Jones, Bud Harrelson and Jerry Buchek. And for the pitcher: This Canadian-born right-handed pitcher was a member of the 1969 Mets and had already won a World Series with another team.

That's correct! Good job, well done. Now, there's been only a handful of teams (2) whose appearances leader had EXACTLY 50 appearances. Can you name those seasons, and the team-leading pitchers? And we know the 2026 appearances leader didn't have even 50 appearances. But can anyone name the 2026 team leader in appearances? And finally, a bonus: Who led the team in appearances in the truncated 2020 campaign?

1981 is correct! And finally, all that stuff was mostly to get to this: When was the last (and only other) full season (162 games) in which a Mets team didn't have a single pitcher with 50 or more appearances? Hint: The team featured Roy McMillan, Ed Kranepool and Johnny Lewis. The pitcher who led the club in appearances was traded with Buddy Booker, Tommy Davis and Billy Wynne to the Chicago White Sox for Tommie Agee and Al Weis. He also led the league in losses that year.

1981 was not the strike year, however you are close.

Well, no one was answering before the hints :/ Neil Allen is correct! What was the year?