Cowtipper

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

Hint: It was another strike year. And the pitcher who led the club in appearances was traded with Rick Ownbey to the St. Louis Cardinals for Keith Hernandez. And since that should give the answer away, 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.

Jose Acuna - former prospect played in the Mets system in 2021 and 2022. Traded for Tyler Naquin in 2022. Went 5-10 with a 4.48 ERA in 26 games (25 starts) between Reds Double-A and Triple-A teams in 2026. Phillip Diehl - was received in trade for Jose Acuna and Hector Rodriguez in 2022. Played in Mets system that year. Went 7-2 with a 4.02 ERA in 56 relief appearances for the independent Lancaster Stormers in 2026. Had 87 Ks in 62 2/3 innings. JT Ginn - Mets 2nd round pick in 2020. Played in their system in 2021. Was traded for Chris Bassitt in 2022. Was 9-8 with a 3.71 ERA in 27 games (24 starts) for the Athletics in 2026. Jeremiah Jackson - was acquired for Dominic Leone in 2023. Played in their system in 2023 and 2024. In 2026, he hit .217/.247.365 with 10 home runs and 45 RBI in 102 games as a reserve infielder for the Orioles. For their Triple-A club, he hit .209/.232/.403 with 4 home runs and 15 RBI in 16 games. Justin Jarvis - Mets traded Mark Canha for him in 2023. Played in their system in 2023 and 2024. In 2026, he went 3-5 with a 5.91 ERA in 11 games (10 starts) for the independent High Point Rockers. Daniel Johnson - Purchased by Mets in 2022, played in their system that year. Hit .143/.294/.143 in 14 ABs for the Astros in 2026. Between the Astros and Marlins Triple-A clubs this year, he hit .164/.208/.254 with 1 home run and 3 RBI in 17 games. For Durango in Mexico, he hit .325/.380/.692 with 10 home runs and 31 RBI in 31 games. Tzu-Wei Lin - free agent signee played in the Mets system in 2022. Hit .249/.291/.329 with 3 home runs, 25 RBI and 20 steals in 94 games for Rakuten in the CPBL in 2026. Humberto Mejia - played in the Mets system in 2023. Went 0-4 with a 7.36 ERA in 22 games for Chunichi's (Japan) farm club in 2026. For the big club, he went 0-1 with a 3.18 ERA in 18 games. Adam Oller - taken in Rule V Draft in 2019. Only played in Mets system in 2021, however. Was traded with JT Ginn for Chris Bassitt in 2022. Went 11-9 with a 2.92 ERA in 28 starts for Kia in Korea in 2026. Felix Pena - free agent signee played in the Mets system in 2022. Went 0-4 in 12 starts for the CTBC Brothers in the CPBL. Wilkin Ramos - claimed off waivers in 2023 and played in the Mets system in 2023 and 2024. In 2 relief appearances with the Giants in 2026, he went 0-0 with a 22.50 ERA. Across two minor league stops, he went 6-3 with a 4.57 ERA in 40 relief appearances. Jesus Reyes - waiver claim in 2020; played in Mets system in 2021. Went 1-1 with a 9.82 ERA in 21 relief appearances between Union Laguna and Saltillo in Mexico in 2026. Hector Rodriguez - played in the Mets system in 2021 and 2022. Traded for Tyler Naquin. Hit .239/.270/.410 with 6 home runs and 17 RBI in 41 games for the Reds in 2026. For their Triple-A club, he hit .274/.347/.533 with 27 home runs and 69 RBI in 104 games. Carson Seymour - Mets 6th round pick in 2021. Played in their system in 2021 and 2022. Was traded to the Giants in 2022 for Darin Ruf. Went 0-2 with a 4.55 ERA in 25 games (1 start) for the Giants in 2026. For their Triple-A club, he went 5-2 with a 3.79 ERA in 22 games (9 starts). Allan Winans - Mets 17th round pick in 2018, played in their system from 2018 to 2021. In 2026, he went 2-4 with a 5.19 ERA in 8 games for Seibu in Japan. For their farm club, he went 4-0 with a 1.23 ERA in 11 games. In 102 innings between them, he had 112 Ks. Nick Zwack - Mets 17th round pick in 2021. Played in their system in 2021 and 2022. Traded for Darin Ruf in 2022. Went 3-3 with a 5.77 ERA in 42 relief appearances for the Giants Triple-A club in 2026. In 43 2/3 innings, he had 55 Ks.

Chapter 20: What Remains After They Leave Summary: The piece reflects on the departures of Edwin Díaz, Pete Alonso, and Gregory Soto, using their very different places in Mets history to explore how players become intertwined with a team and, more importantly, with the private memories of the people who watched them. Ultimately, it argues that while contracts, statistics, uniforms, and rosters are temporary, the meaning fans attach to players can survive long after they are gone: the game keeps the records, but people keep the meaning. There is a moment in every baseball career when a player stops belonging entirely to the team. It is not necessarily when he is traded. It may not even be when he signs somewhere else. Sometimes it happens quietly, in the mind of a fan. A player becomes attached to something that has nothing to do with his statistics. A summer. A postseason. A particular night in September. A radio call heard while driving home. A child watching television. A difficult year that became slightly less difficult because the man on the mound kept getting the last three outs. Then the player leaves. The uniform changes. The number belongs to somebody else. And yet the player does not entirely leave. Edwin Díaz had become that kind of Met. There had been years when he was merely Edwin Díaz, the hard-throwing closer the Mets had acquired in a trade that almost everybody seemed to hate. He had made a terrible first impression. That is putting it kindly. The trade had brought Robinson Canó and Díaz to New York, and for a while the deal seemed like an exhibit in how badly a baseball organization could misread the future. Díaz struggled. Canó struggled. The Mets struggled. Díaz, especially, became a symbol of something larger than himself. The Mets had paid a high price and received a pitcher who could not reliably protect a lead. Then came the years in which he became extraordinary. There were seasons when the fastball seemed to arrive before the hitter had finished deciding to swing. There was the entrance music. There was Timmy Trumpet. There was the spectacle of the whole thing, which became part of New York baseball's theater. And there were the other seasons. That was the trouble with remembering Díaz. He was not one pitcher. He was several. There was the pitcher who had been awful. The pitcher who had been magnificent. The pitcher who had been injured. The pitcher who had returned. The pitcher who could look untouchable for months and then suddenly make a game feel unsafe. One person remembered Díaz as inconsistent. Another remembered the entrance. Another remembered the years when he had been lights-out. This is how memory works. It does not average. It chooses. A statistic might say that Díaz had been very good over a particular period. A fan remembers one night. Or one pitch. Or one sound. Timmy Trumpet. A stadium rising. The ball disappearing into a glove. The inning ending. The Mets winning. That is enough. But there was another Díaz memory that had nothing to do with baseball statistics. A runner had been out in the woods on September 19, 2024. There had been a sudden fall. A foot struck something. There was a pop. The ground came up. The injury was frightening. And then, lying there, the runner thought about Edwin Díaz. Díaz had suffered a devastating patellar tendon injury and returned to a major-league mound less than a year later. He had done it in front of millions of people. He had done it while still learning to trust the repaired knee. He had done it imperfectly, because human beings do almost everything imperfectly when they are trying to return from something that has changed their lives. And for the injured runner, Díaz became something different. Not a closer. Not a contract. Not a trade. A model. Every save mattered differently. Every big out mattered differently. When Díaz came back into a game after something went wrong, it meant something to a person who was trying to come back, too. There is no statistic for that. There cannot be. Baseball has never been very good at measuring what it means to another person. That may be because the game is played in public but remembered privately. A player can have fifty thousand people watching him and still become part of one person's life in a way nobody else can understand. Díaz did that. The Mets let him leave. The reaction was sadness, but not merely sadness about losing a closer. It was the sadness of losing somebody who had become part of the story. That is different. The Mets had also lost Pete Alonso. That loss produced a different kind of argument. Alonso was not an obscure reliever or a player whose career had to be explained. Everybody knew what Pete Alonso was. He was home runs. He was durability. He was the polar bear. He was the middle of the lineup. He was the man who had been there long enough that people could imagine him as something permanent. Then permanence became a contract negotiation. And contracts are cold things. They reduce affection to years and dollars. Three years. Five years. Eight years. An option. A player opt-out. A no-trade clause. A market. An owner who can afford almost anything. And beneath all of it, something that cannot be put in a contract: You stayed with us. The Mets had established certain expectations during the Steve Cohen years. Brandon Nimmo received eight years. Díaz had received a long commitment. Soto received a spectacular one. Alonso had once been offered seven years. Then suddenly the Mets seemed less willing to go long. To the player, this could feel personal even if it was not intended to be. A man can understand the logic of baseball. He can understand aging curves. He can understand risk. He can understand that the owner is trying to win. But human beings are not spreadsheets. If the organization will give fifteen years to somebody else, why not five to me? The question does not have to be fair to be powerful. That is one of the oldest facts about baseball. Players are human beings. Fans are human beings. Owners are human beings. And human beings keep score in ways that do not appear on the scoreboard. The Mets now had to replace Alonso. But how? You could find a first baseman. That was the easy part. You could find someone who could stand at first and catch a ball and take his turn in the batting order. What you could not simply purchase was Pete Alonso's place. He had been a middle-of-the-order hitter. A right-handed presence. A source of power. A familiar face. A player whose mistakes were familiar, whose home runs were familiar, whose very presence in the lineup had become something people stopped noticing because it had been there for so long. This is another way a player becomes part of a team. You stop noticing him. You expect him to be there. Then one day you look at the lineup and he isn't. And the absence is larger than the name. There were jokes about James Loney and Michael Cuddyer, the sort of jokes Mets fans make when they begin to suspect that the present is becoming uncomfortable. Maybe 2026 would be a transitional season. Maybe it would be better than that. Maybe a young player would emerge. Maybe some veteran would surprise everybody. Maybe 84 wins would be enough. Baseball is full of maybes. The entire offseason is built upon them. Then there was Gregory Soto. Soto left, too. His departure did not inspire the same melancholy. Perhaps because he had not been in New York long enough to become anything other than a memory still under construction. One person remembered complaining about him when the Mets acquired him. Then remembered being proven right. Another person looked at Soto and saw the strange tattoo around his neck, which seemed on television to resemble a necklace of nails. There was something almost perfect about this as a baseball memory. Not his ERA. Not his WAR. Not his contract. Nails. A pitcher appears on television for a few minutes, and what remains years later is the irrational fear that the tattoo around his neck might somehow twist itself into his throat. That is baseball memory. It is completely unreasonable. It is also real. And then came the most revealing sentence of all: A place reserved for memories that may occur later. That was the joke about Soto. But it was also the truth about every baseball player. Every player is a future memory. We simply do not know yet what the memory will be. Pete Alonso may become the man who left and returned. Or the man who left and was replaced. Edwin Díaz may become the great Mets closer who spent his final seasons somewhere else. Or the player whose return to Citi Field produced the kind of ovation usually reserved for men who have been gone twenty years. Gregory Soto may become almost nothing in Mets history. A few appearances. A few complaints. A tattoo. A transaction. Gone. And that is fine. Not everybody gets to become Edwin Díaz. Not everybody gets to become Pete Alonso. Baseball does not have enough room for everybody to become a legend. Most players become something smaller. A memory. A joke. A face. A number. A particular night. A player whose name appears in an old box score and makes you stop for half a second. Oh, right. Him. That may be the most common form of baseball immortality. Not the plaque. Recognition. The little spark that occurs when an old name returns. There is something else about this particular Mets winter that makes the whole thing feel larger. The Mets had money. That was part of the argument. Steve Cohen could afford more. He was the richest owner in baseball. There was no salary cap. The Mets could spend. And so the question became not simply what the Mets could afford, but what their players believed the Mets should be willing to afford. This is the strange consequence of wealth. Once people know you can afford anything, they begin to wonder why you will not afford their thing. Money changes expectations. It changes the meaning of refusal. It can turn three years into an insult. It can turn four years into a statement. It can make a player wonder whether the team that says it loves him actually loves him enough. That is not necessarily rational. But baseball is not played by rational creatures. It is played by people. And people remember. They remember who got the contract. They remember who didn't. They remember who was welcomed. They remember who was allowed to leave. And fans remember, too. They remember Alonso's home runs. They remember Díaz's entrance. They remember the strange seasons. They remember the players who were supposed to be great. They remember the players who weren't. They remember the nights when the Mets seemed to be becoming something. And they remember when it all came apart. That is the strange bargain of being a Mets fan. The players move through the organization. The front office changes. The contracts expire. The owner spends. The owner stops spending. The closer arrives. The closer leaves. The first baseman becomes an ex-Met. A new man takes his place. And through all of it, the fan remains. That is why Díaz could mean so much to someone who was lying injured in the woods. The player did not know him. The player could not know him. But that is irrelevant. Baseball is full of one-sided relationships. A fan can spend twenty years following a man who has never heard his name. A player can become a part of someone's life without ever meeting him. That is not irrational. It is exactly what sports are for. We borrow other people's courage. We borrow their triumphs. We borrow their defeats. We see a man return from an injury and imagine ourselves returning from ours. We see a man hit a home run and remember being young. We see a player leave and discover that we had quietly come to depend upon his presence. And then, one day, the roster changes. The number changes. The music changes. The player is gone. What remains is the part that never belonged to the Mets in the first place. The memory. Pete Alonso will be remembered somewhere as a Baltimore Oriole. Edwin Díaz will pitch somewhere else. Gregory Soto will wear another uniform. There will be new Mets. Some will be good. Some will be terrible. Some will be forgotten before the season is over. And one of them, perhaps a player nobody is talking about now, will someday matter enormously to somebody. He will hit a home run at the right moment. He will return from an injury. He will smile at a child. He will pitch the ninth inning while a trumpet plays. He will simply be there on a night when somebody needs him to be. Years later, the statistics may say one thing. The person will remember another. That is baseball's secret. The game keeps the records. People keep the meaning. And sometimes, long after the player has gone, that is all that remains. It is also enough.

Sam McDowell died. https://www.thebiglead.com/sudden-sam-mcdowell-cause-of-death-cleveland-pittsburgh-pirates-yankees-indians-guardians-giants-mlb/ Who was Sam McDowell? Sam McDowell (1942-2026), nicknamed “Sudden Sam,” was one of the most overpowering—and most volatile—left-handed pitchers of his era. A Pittsburgh native who reached the majors with Cleveland as an 18-year-old in 1961, McDowell developed into a six-time All-Star and one of baseball’s premier strikeout artists, leading the American League in strikeouts five times between 1965 and 1970. At his peak, his blazing fastball made him virtually unhittable: he won the 1965 ERA title, twice struck out more than 300 batters in a season, and in 1970 went 20–12 while leading the league in innings, strikeouts, and complete games, earning Sporting News AL Pitcher of the Year honors. McDowell's greatest strength was also accompanied by his greatest weakness. His extraordinary velocity and strikeout ability were offset by chronic control problems, as he led the league in walks five times and wild pitches three times. Injuries, contract disputes, and increasingly severe alcoholism contributed to his decline after 1970. Traded to San Francisco after the 1971 season, he struggled with the Giants, Yankees, and finally the Pirates before retiring in 1975 at age 32 with 141 wins, a 3.17 ERA, and 2,453 strikeouts. His 8.86 strikeouts per nine innings were among the highest totals in baseball history, and he remains one of the most prolific strikeout pitchers in Cleveland history. McDowell's story ultimately became one of redemption as much as baseball. After retirement, alcoholism devastated his marriage and finances, eventually leaving him deeply in debt and living with his parents. He entered rehabilitation, overcame his addiction, earned degrees in sports psychology and addiction from the University of Pittsburgh, and returned to baseball as a counselor helping players struggling with substance abuse. He later worked with the Toronto Blue Jays and Texas Rangers and earned a World Series ring with Toronto in 1993. McDowell's career is therefore remembered not simply for his spectacular fastball and historic strikeout totals, but for the dramatic rise, fall, and recovery of one of baseball's most gifted and troubled pitchers. Bob Fontaine Jr. died. https://www.latimes.com/sports/story/2026-10-05/bob-fontaine-jr-obituary-angels-padres-scout Who was Bob Fontaine Jr.? Bob Fontaine Jr. (1952 or 1953–2026) was a longtime Major League Baseball scout and executive who spent more than five decades evaluating and developing players. The son of former San Diego Padres general manager Bob Fontaine Sr., he began his scouting career with the Padres in 1974 and later served as the Montreal Expos' West Coast scouting supervisor in 1982. He became scouting director of the California/Anaheim Angels from 1987 to 1999, Director of Player Development for the Chicago White Sox from 2001 to 2003, and scouting director of the Seattle Mariners from 2004 to 2008. By 2014, he was working in the Toronto Blue Jays' professional scouting department. Fontaine was particularly notable for his work with the Angels, where he helped oversee an unusual effort to establish a baseball presence in the newly opened Russian market. The Angels signed three Russian players— Ilya Bogatyrev, Yevgeny Puchkov, and Rudolf Razhigaev—in the early 1990s, although the experiment ultimately faded after the players spent only a few seasons in organized baseball. Fontaine also remained part of a baseball family: his son Matthew Thomas was selected by Seattle in the 41st round of the 2007 amateur draft. A veteran evaluator who worked for numerous organizations across several decades, Fontaine built his career largely out of the public spotlight that typically accompanies successful players and executives. He died on October 3, 2026, at approximately 73 years old.

Matt Beaty has retired.

Jorge Polanco: Underwent season-ending surgery on Aug. 26. Will be in "a baseball progression" at the start of Spring Training, according to interim manager Andy Green, meaning the Mets expect to take him along slowly. Expected return: 2027.

They have him for two seasons. He'd be an expensive bench piece, but maybe have him split time with Ronny Mauricio or something.* *Mauricio, by the way, has more career WAR (0.9) in 328 ABs than Mark Vientos has (0.4) in 1,365 ABs. Or trade him for a prospect. I like the idea of getting prospects. He wouldn't get much in return, and the Mets would probably have to eat most of his contract, but hey, one or two Low-A guys never hurt. Who knows what they'll become. It's better than just cutting him, at least they get something in return and save some face. If they cut him, then they basically traded a face of the franchise (Nimmo) for one year, 15 doubles, 15 home runs, a .215 average and a 74 OPS+. Not a good look. Looking back, why exactly did they make this trade?

Chapter 19: History Is What Happens in the Light Summary: The piece examines how baseball decisions change meaning with time, using Jeff Kent’s transformation from Mets prospect to Hall of Famer and Pete Alonso’s uncertain future to explore the limits of hindsight. It argues that trades, contracts, reputations, and Hall of Fame cases can only be judged properly by remembering that the people who made those decisions were living without the knowledge history would eventually provide. There is a peculiar cruelty in baseball history. It is that history is always right, eventually. Not necessarily morally right. Not necessarily fair. But right in the sense that time has a way of rearranging the furniture. A man who seemed important becomes a footnote. A man who seemed ordinary becomes important. A trade that looked sensible becomes absurd. A player who seemed finished becomes a star somewhere else. And a player whom nobody could quite decide what to do with becomes, years later, a name on a plaque. Jeff Kent is a good example. When Kent was with the Mets, nobody was looking at him as a future Hall of Famer. His New York numbers did not suggest one. He was not yet the player he would become. The Mets traded him to Cleveland for Carlos Baerga, and at the time there was nothing especially insane about the transaction. Baerga had been a good player. Kent had not yet become Jeff Kent. Then Kent became Jeff Kent. That is one of baseball's oldest tricks. The player you had is not always the player you traded. Years later, when Kent was finally elected to the Hall of Fame, somebody looked backward and had the natural reaction: The Mets traded a Hall of Famer for Carlos Baerga. It sounds ridiculous. It is also true, in the way that retrospective truths are true. But there is another truth hiding behind it. Kent's five seasons with the Mets were not Hall of Fame seasons. His WAR and OPS+ in New York were modest. The player who eventually accumulated the Hall of Fame résumé was still somewhere in the future, a future neither the Mets nor Kent could see. That matters. Baseball people are fond of judging trades by what happened afterward. We take the player who became a star and carry him backward through time, as if the man in 1996 already contained the man of 2000. He didn't. Nobody does. This is why the argument about trades never ends. It is not really about statistics. Statistics are merely the evidence. The argument is about whether the future was visible. It almost never is. A prospect is a promise. A veteran is a fact. But facts rot, too. There was a beautiful argument buried in all of this about whether a team should trade young, unproven players for the established player who can help immediately. One side saw the future in the prospect. Another side remembered Tom Seaver, and how ridiculous it would sound to say that the Mets should have kept Steve Henderson, Doug Flynn, Pat Zachry and Dan Norman because prospects were more valuable than veterans. Sometimes the veteran is Seaver. Sometimes the prospect is Jeff Kent. Sometimes the veteran is neither. That is the problem. There is no machine for knowing. Baseball executives have computers and scouts and medical reports and aging curves and projections. They have more information than any executives in history. Yet eventually somebody still has to sit in a room and say: We believe this man will be better than those men. And then everybody waits. The waiting is the worst part. Pete Alonso has lived inside that waiting for years. His case is different from Kent's because everybody knows what Alonso is. He is not a mystery. He is a home run hitter. He is durable. He has given the Mets years of power and personality. He became one of the faces of the franchise. And yet the argument surrounding him has never really been about what he has been. It has been about what he will be. That is a much harder question. There is always something unsettling about a player entering his thirties. Baseball fans know the aging curve. They have seen good players become less good. They have seen bodies slow down, bats lose a fraction of a second, defensive limitations become more apparent. They have watched long contracts become short histories of regret. So the numbers begin. Three years. Four years. Five. Six. Seven. The numbers look precise, but there is nothing precise about them. A six-year contract is a wager on six summers that have not happened. You are not paying Pete Alonso for what he did. Not entirely. You are paying for the possibility that some part of what he was will continue. That is what every baseball contract really is. A bet against time. The strange thing is that the people making these arguments are doing exactly what baseball history does. They are taking the present and trying to imagine the past. Only they are doing it in reverse. They are looking at Alonso at thirty and trying to imagine Alonso at thirty-five. The future Alonso does not exist yet. Neither did the future Kent when the Mets traded him. This is why hindsight can be so arrogant. It knows the ending. Imagine standing in New York in 1996, watching Jeff Kent play second base. Imagine being told that one day he would be elected to the Hall of Fame, and that people would look back at the trade and shake their heads. You might have laughed. You might have said, Jeff Kent? Then imagine standing in New York now, watching Pete Alonso, and being told that in ten years people will argue about the Mets' decision regarding him. You might say: Of course they will. That is what baseball does. It turns decisions into history. And history turns decisions into jokes. There is another kind of history in the Hall of Fame arguments, too. It concerns the things people remember after they have forgotten why they remembered them. Jeff Kent's personality was part of the story. He was not universally loved. Some of the feeling surrounding him was so strong that people wondered whether, someday, after everyone had forgotten how much they disliked him, they would simply look at his numbers and wonder why he had waited so long. This happens. Time removes the irritation. The ballplayer remains. That is one of the strange mercies of statistics. They do not remember arguments. They do not remember that a man was difficult. They do not remember the clubhouse. They remember the home runs. They remember the hits. They remember the years. The Hall of Fame is, among other things, a machine for separating a career from the circumstances in which people experienced it. Fernando Valenzuela became part of this argument for another reason: fame. There are careers that are statistical and careers that are cultural. Sometimes they overlap. Sometimes they don't. Valenzuela's significance extended beyond the numbers. He became a figure larger than a pitching line, especially for Mexican and Latin American baseball fans. The question then becomes whether the Hall is a museum of statistical achievement or a museum of baseball's most important figures. That question has no simple answer because baseball itself has never had a simple definition of greatness. Wins matter. So do strikeouts. So does longevity. So does dominance. So does fame. So does the feeling that a player meant something to the game that cannot be put neatly into a spreadsheet. The arguments over Bonds and Clemens introduce another problem: morality. Time does not merely change statistics. It changes judgments. The players of one era are judged by the standards of another. The people who watched the games remember what was known then. The people looking backward know more. There is always a temptation to believe that the people in the past should have known what we know now. But they were living then. That is an important distinction. Baseball history becomes distorted when we forget that. The same thing happens with trades. It is easy to say the Mets should have known Jeff Kent would become a Hall of Famer. They did not. It is easy to say they should have known Carlos Baerga's decline was coming. They did not. It is easy to say that a prospect should never be traded because he might become great. But a prospect might also become nothing. Every general manager knows this. Every fan knows this. And still, every time a prospect is traded, somebody imagines the future star wearing another uniform. That is because baseball fans are historians before they are historians. They remember. They remember the player they almost had. They remember the player they traded. They remember the player they let leave. They remember the player who came back. They remember the player who was supposed to become something and didn't. They remember the player who became something somewhere else. And then, years later, they bring the name back. This may be the most enduring quality of baseball. Nothing is ever entirely finished. A trade is not finished when the players change uniforms. A career is not finished when the player retires. A reputation is not finished when the man dies. Even a decision is not finished. Somebody will revisit it. Somebody will pull up the numbers. Somebody will say, Wait a minute. Somebody will discover something that everybody else missed. And suddenly the old baseball becomes new again. That is why the Mets' past can feel so strangely alive. Jeff Kent is not merely a second baseman from the 1990s anymore. He is a Hall of Famer who once wore a Mets uniform. Carlos Baerga is not merely the player the Mets acquired. He is part of the explanation for why a transaction that once seemed reasonable now looks so different. Pete Alonso is not yet a historical figure. That is precisely what makes his situation interesting. He is still playing. His future is still unwritten. Somebody will eventually be right about him. Somebody will eventually be wrong. The wonderful thing is that nobody knows which is which. Not yet. For now, Pete Alonso is simply a baseball player standing at the edge of the future, while thousands of people try to see around the corner. They cannot. Nobody can. That is why we keep talking. That is why we keep remembering. And that is why, years from now, when some other player is standing in the same place, somebody will look back at the Mets of this time and say: What were they thinking? Perhaps the answer will be obvious. Perhaps it will be foolish. Perhaps it will be neither. Most baseball decisions are made in the dark. History is what happens when someone turns on the light.

John Franco is correct. He had 47 appearances. #2 on the list is the real "who?" here: Roger Mason, with 41 appearances. I was intrigued to learn Franco averaged just 46 appearances per year from 1990 to 1996. Now, before 1994, when was the last time the Mets didn't have a single pitcher with 50 or more appearances? And the real fun part of the question: Who was the pitcher who led the team that year?

Hint for the 1994 pitching leader: The Mets traded Kip Gross and Randy Myers for him.

Benge and McLean are almost tied in my mind. Ewing is #3. McLean actually had what I'd consider an All-Star quality season, but Benge's 156 games, 20-20 season and all-around solid performance puts him over the edge, just barely. It's almost a tossup and I nearly went with McLean, but Benge being there nearly every single day is what got me to vote for him.

His head isn't four times larger than it used to be, so I'm pretty sure he's just bulked up a lot.

Keyshawn Askew - Was Mets 10th round pick in 2021. Was traded for Brooks Raley in 2022. Went 0-0 with a 8.53 ERA in 8 relief appearances for the independent York Revolution in 2026. Jon Duplantier - free agent signee played in the Mets system in 2024. In 2026, he went 0-2 with a 3.00 ERA in 2 games for Yokohama in Japan; for their farm club, he went 1-0 with a 0.00 ERA in 1 game. Duke Ellis - selected off waivers and played briefly in the Mets system in 2024. Hit .276/.341/.397 with 5 home runs, 26 RBI and 60 stolen bases for the Yankees Triple-A team in 2026. Shintaro Fujinami - free agent signee played in the Mets system in 2024. In 2026, he went 5-3 with a 3.11 ERA in 16 games for Yokohama's farm club in Japan; for the big club, he went 0-1 with a 6.30 ERA in 3 games. Paul Gervase - was Mets 12th round pick in 2022. Was traded for Tyler Zuber in 2024. Went 0-0 with a 2.35 ERA in 4 relief appearances for the Dodgers in 2026. For their Triple-A club, he went 3-1 with a 4.59 mark in 39 relief appearances. He had 68 Ks in 49 IP. Wilfredo Lara - prospect played in the Mets system from 2021 to 2024. Was traded for Huascar Brazoban. In 2026, he hit .238/.368/.379 with 6 home runs, 35 RBI and 14 steals in 78 games for the Marlins High-A club. Jeff Mangum - played in Mets system from 2019 to 2022. Was traded for Jeff Brigham an Elieser Hernandez in 2022. Hit .276/.331/.363 with 5 home runs, 33 RBI and 23 steals in 133 games for Pittsburgh in 2026. Kade Morris - was Mets 3rd round pick in 2023. Was traded for Paul Blackburn in 2024. Went 0-1 with a 10.90 ERA in 6 games (2 starts) for the Athletics in 2026. For their Triple-A club, he was 9-5 with a 4.08 ERA in 18 starts. Michel Otanez - former Mets prospect (2016-2021) went 5-1 with a 4.42 ERA in 50 games (1 start) for the Triple-A Round Rock Express in the Rangers chain in 2026. He had 74 Ks in 55 innings. Jose Rondon - free agent signed to play in the Mets system for 2024, but never did. He hit .322/.388/.557 with 15 home runs and 72 RBI in 89 games split between Puebla and Aguascalientes in Mexico in 2026. Franklin Sanchez - played in Mets system from 2021 to 2022. Was traded for Jeff Brigham and Elieser Hernandez in 2022. In the Marlins system in 2026, he went 0-1 with a 6.75 ERA in 13 relief appearances across three stops. Antonio Santos - free agent signee played in the Mets system in 2022. In 2026, he went 10-3 with a 4.15 ERA in 20 games for Puebla in Mexico. Taylor Saucedo - selected off waivers to play in Mets system for 2023, but never did. Went 1-1 with a 2.53 ERA in 28 relief appearances for the Angels in 2026, with a K/9 of 11.0. For their Triple-A club, he was 2-2 with a 6.10 ERA in 34 games (1 start). Tyler Stuart - was Mets 6th round pick in 2022. Was traded for Jesse Winker in 2024. Was in the Nationals organization for 2026, but was hurt all year and didn't get into a game. Rhylan Thomas - was Mets 11th round pick in 2022. Was traded for Ryne Stanek in 2024. Hit .288/.341/.347 with 2 home runs and 21 RBI in 60 games between four minor league stops split among three MLB organizations -- the Blue Jays, Astros and Mariners -- in 2026. Luke Voit - free agent signee played in the Mets system in 2023 and signed to play in 2024, but never did. In 2026, he hit .118/.189/.164 with no home runs and 3 RBI in 20 games for Rakuten in Japan; for their farm club, he hit .333/.424/.439 with 1 home run and 10 RBI in 16 games.

Chapter 18: The Place Where the Mets Were Kept Summary: The piece intertwines the Mets’ endless winter debates over pitchers, prospects, trades, and the unknowable future with a more intimate struggle to preserve the online community where Mets history has been discussed and remembered for years. Ultimately, it argues that the real value of a database or forum is not the website itself but the people who gather there to keep names, games, arguments, and memories alive—and that baseball survives because someone is always willing to remember. Baseball is supposed to be about what happens on the field. This is the official version. There are nine men in the field, nine men in the other dugout, a pitcher, a batter, a ball, a bat. There are standings and schedules and statistics. There are trades, injuries, contracts, arbitration hearings and free agents. There are winters in which the entire sport seems to exist for the purpose of discussing what might happen next spring. But baseball has always been about something else, too. It is about keeping. Keeping the names of players who have been gone for fifty years. Keeping the memory of a particular pitch. Keeping the box score of a game nobody else remembers. Keeping the argument over whether a player was really as good as you thought he was. And, eventually, keeping the place where all of those things were kept. That last part is harder. In December, there was a possibility that the old place might disappear. The man who had been running it was preparing to hand over the Ultimate Mets Database. The domain was changing hands. The future of the site was uncertain. The forum that had lived there might survive, or it might not. There was talk of hosting. PHP. Domains. Servers. Annual costs. There was talk of finding somebody with the technical knowledge to keep the machinery running. There was talk of contributions. One person offered a personal check. Another offered cash. Someone suggested a temporary server. Someone else offered a domain he already owned. It was all very unromantic. No one was standing at home plate. No pennant was involved. No television cameras were watching. Yet there was something strangely moving about it. People wanted to save the place. Not because it was large. It was not large. It was described as a small community, a passionate and loyal membership. That was enough. There are moments in baseball when size becomes irrelevant. A ballpark can hold fifty thousand people, but the memory of a game may belong to two people sitting beside one another. A team can have millions of fans, but a particular player may belong to one family, one neighborhood, one boy who once waited for an autograph. And a community can have a relatively small number of people and still become a part of someone's life. That is what the people were trying to preserve. The Mets, meanwhile, were doing what the Mets always do. They were trying to acquire pitchers. Sandy Alcantara had become an object of fascination. The question was what the Mets would have to surrender for him. Three prospects? Four? The conversation went backward through Mets history: Johan Santana, Carlos Delgado, Mike Piazza, Tom Seaver. Big players had always cost something. The price of a good pitcher is rarely the pitcher himself. It is the future. That is what makes these discussions so difficult. You are not trading three names. You are trading the three men those names might become. One might become a star. One might become a useful player. One might become nothing. You do not know. That is the business of baseball. You exchange something you can see for something you cannot. Sandy Alcantara was real. The prospects were hypothetical. But the prospects were also real in another sense. They were the future waiting somewhere in the minor leagues, wearing uniforms nobody had yet learned to recognize. Then there was Joe Ryan. Someone admitted he had never heard of him until he saw his name connected to the Mets. This was not an unusual confession. Baseball creates too many players for one person to know them all. Then came the statistics: 29 years old, approaching 30, two years from free agency, 3.42 ERA, 194 strikeouts, 39 walks, 171 innings. Suddenly Joe Ryan existed. There was a possible trade. Then there were comparisons. Was he Tom Seaver? No. Was he Johan Santana? No. Somebody remembered Frank Viola. Somebody remembered Dean Chance. Someone remembered that once upon a time Mark Bomback might have been considered the Mets' ace. This is one of the pleasures of baseball history: the past is never really past. Every new player is measured against an old one. Every trade proposal opens a door to another trade. Every prospect reminds somebody of another prospect who became something, or failed to become anything. David Wright. José Reyes. Generation K. Bull Pulsipher. Jason Isringhausen. Paul Wilson. Names come back. They rise from the ground like weeds. That is why the argument about Joe Ryan was never really just about Joe Ryan. It was about how much of the future you should surrender for the present. One person said he would take Jonah Tong over Ryan every time. Another pointed out that Tong offered six years of control where Ryan offered two. There it was. The whole argument in one sentence. Six years versus two. The future versus the present. Baseball is full of these bargains. And yet nobody knows what the future is. That is why people argue. If we knew, there would be no arguments. There would only be instructions. The Mets were also connected, at various times, to Sandy Alcantara and Michael King and other pitchers. There were discussions about whether relievers ought to be starters, whether pitchers were being used incorrectly, whether an injury would return, whether a contract was too expensive, whether a prospect was too valuable to surrender. The arguments continued. They always do. Winter baseball is built upon the word if. If Alcantara returns to his old form. If Joe Ryan keeps improving. If Jonah Tong becomes the pitcher people think he can become. If Byron Buxton stays healthy. If Michael King is healthy. If the Mets make the trade. If they do not. If the prospect becomes a star. If he doesn't. The whole winter is one long conditional sentence. And then, suddenly, someone says: What happens to this place? That is a different kind of if. Because this time the thing at risk is not a player. It is the place where the players are remembered. There was something almost perfect about the timing. The Mets were discussing whom they might acquire. The people who loved the Mets were discussing whether they could keep what they already had. The baseball team wanted to trade the future for the present. The community wanted to preserve the past for the future. Nobody quite knew whether either would work. People began making jokes. There were jokes about Medicare advertisements and AARP and Viagra and Colonial Penn. There were jokes about hosting companies. There were jokes about domains. There was even a suggestion that the forum could be moved to Reddit. Baseball people have always joked at funerals. It is one of the ways they avoid admitting that they are frightened. And perhaps they were frightened. Because a long-running baseball community is a strange thing. It becomes part of the calendar. You wake up. You check the Mets. You read what somebody thinks about a pitcher you had never heard of. You discover that another person remembers a player you had forgotten. Someone finds an obscure statistic. Someone makes a joke. Someone gets annoyed. Someone says something ridiculous. Someone else corrects him. Then somebody remembers a Mets player from 1968. Then someone else remembers the same player differently. This is how history is made. Not in monuments. In repetition. A name is said again. And again. And again. Eventually it becomes part of the furniture. That may be why one of the funniest lines in the discussion was also one of the saddest. Someone said that every day he clicked on the site hoping to see three headlines: Mets re-sign Pete Alonso. Mets re-sign Edwin Díaz. The forum has found a permanent home. The first two were baseball news. The third was not. But perhaps it was the most important one. Because what good is the news if there is nowhere to tell it? Someone else put it more simply. If Alonso and Díaz signed elsewhere but there was no place there to report and dissect it, did it actually happen? Another person answered: Not if it happened in the woods. It was a joke. But it contained something true. Baseball requires witnesses. A home run requires somebody to remember it. A trade requires somebody to argue about it. A bad contract requires somebody to complain about it. A player nobody remembers requires somebody, years later, to say: Wait. Who was that guy? Without the witnesses, baseball becomes numbers. With the witnesses, it becomes history. That is the difference. The men who played the game eventually disappear. The statistics remain, but statistics alone are not memory. Memory requires people. And people, unlike statistics, are temporary. That was the quiet irony of the whole thing. The Mets were preparing for another season. Another roster. Another rotation. Another collection of players who would arrive and eventually leave. Sandy Alcantara might be a Met someday. Joe Ryan might be a Met someday. Or neither might happen. Players come and go. They always have. The organization changes. The front office changes. The uniforms change. The ballpark changes. The names on the backs of the uniforms change. And somewhere, people sit and talk about all of it. Until one day the place where they talked about it needs saving. Then you discover something. You discover that the thing you thought was permanent was not permanent at all. You discover that the real continuity was never the website. It was the people. One offered money. Another offered technical help. Another offered a server. Another said he would follow wherever the community went. “I will go,” someone essentially said. That was the important promise. Not where. Just together. Baseball has always understood this better than almost anything else. A team leaves one city and goes to another, but people continue to call themselves fans. A player changes uniforms, but somebody continues to remember him as a Met. A stadium is demolished, but someone still knows where the seats used to be. The names change. The places change. The game changes. The people change. But somebody remembers. That is the fragile miracle. In the end, the great Mets database was not merely a database. The baseball team was not merely a baseball team. The players were not merely players. And the community was not merely a website. They were all versions of the same thing: a way of keeping time. A way of saying that this happened. This man played here. This pitcher was good. This pitcher wasn't. We should have traded for him. We should not have. That prospect became David Wright. That prospect became Bull Pulsipher. That pitcher was supposed to be the next great thing. That one was Mark Bomback. That one was Tom Seaver. That one was Johan Santana. That one was Joe Ryan. No, not Joe Ryan. He wasn't Seaver. He was just Joe Ryan. And that was fine. Because baseball does not require every player to be a legend. It only requires somebody to remember him. The future of the Mets would be decided in offices, ballparks and hotel rooms. The future of the little community that had spent years discussing the Mets would be decided by something much less glamorous: a domain, a server, a hosting account, a few dollars, somebody knowing how to install software. It was almost funny. Baseball history had come down to PHP. But perhaps that was appropriate. The game's grandest history has always depended upon ordinary things. A man keeping a scorebook. A newspaper clipping saved in a drawer. A photograph in an attic. A box score. A conversation. A website. A place where someone can say: Do you remember? And someone else can answer: Yes. I do. That is how baseball survives. Not forever. Nothing survives forever. But long enough for the next person to remember. And perhaps that is all anyone was really trying to save. Not the server. Not the domain. Not even the forum. The remembering. The little daily ritual of looking in and finding that the Mets were still there, somewhere between Sandy Alcantara and Joe Ryan, between Tom Seaver and Johan Santana, between the players who had already become history and the players who had not yet become anything at all. The Mets would keep changing. They always would. The question was whether the people who remembered the changes would still have a place to meet. For the moment, they did. There was a plan. That was all they had. But in baseball, and perhaps in life, a plan is sometimes the beginning of permanence. Not quite yet. But enough to keep going.

Chapter 17: The Ghosts in the House Summary: The piece reflects on the fleeting Mets careers that might otherwise disappear—relievers such as Ty Adcock and Danny Young, the singular memory of Tim Harkness’s 1963 grand slam, and the still-forming stories of players such as Tyler Rogers, Francisco Lindor and Juan Soto. Ultimately, it argues that a baseball team is built not only from its stars and statistics but from the accumulated traces of everyone who passed through it, with even the briefest Met becoming part of the club’s collective memory. There is a particular kind of baseball player who belongs to a team without ever quite belonging to it. He comes in quietly, usually in the middle of something else. A trade is made. A waiver claim is announced. A minor-league contract appears in the transactions. His name arrives in the morning and, by afternoon, has already begun to recede. He is a relief pitcher, most often. Relief pitchers are especially vulnerable to this sort of disappearance. They come into games with nobody expecting to remember them. They pitch the seventh inning on a Tuesday night in May, or the eighth inning when the Mets are behind by four, or the ninth when the game has already been decided. They throw twenty pitches. They give up a single. They strike out a man. They walk another. Then they sit down. Tomorrow there is somebody else. Tyler Rogers was different. Rogers had the peculiar appearance of a man who had wandered into baseball from another profession and somehow discovered that the oddity of his body was an advantage. He threw from a place most pitchers did not throw from, with a delivery that seemed to violate the conventions by which pitching was supposed to work. But the important thing was not that he was strange. The important thing was that he was good. And durable. He had led the National League in appearances in 2020, 2021 and 2024, and all of baseball in 2025, which is an extraordinary achievement in a sport where relief pitchers are used until they are no longer useful and then replaced by someone else. He kept coming back. He kept appearing. He became one of those men who seemed to be somewhere in every season, a little piece of connective tissue between April and October. The Mets wanted him, and others wanted him, too. That is another way baseball tells you a man matters. Not with a plaque. With competition. There was concern about his strikeout rate with the Mets. There was the larger question of whether the version of Rogers that had arrived in New York was the same pitcher who had been so effective elsewhere. Baseball is forever asking such questions. Was it real? Was it luck? Was it the ballpark? Was it the catcher? Was it the hitter? Was it the pitcher? The numbers are supposed to answer. Sometimes they do. Sometimes they merely give you another question. And then there were the men who had come and gone so quickly that the questions became almost comical. Ty Adcock was one of them. Three relief appearances in one season. Three in another. Six appearances. That is not much of a baseball career, at least not in the ordinary sense. You can attend six games as a fan without ever knowing who pitched. A player can make six appearances and leave behind nothing more substantial than a line in a transaction log. Yet someone remembered that Adcock looked like Daniel Murphy with a large, shrubby beard. Someone else remembered wondering whether he was related to Joe Adcock. Someone else remembered that he had gone away and then returned. Someone else, with the solemnity baseball reserves for statistics and jokes, wondered what he had been doing in the year between. This is how baseball memory works. It is not organized. It does not care what is important. It remembers faces. It remembers names. It remembers the peculiar shape of a man's beard. It remembers that there were two Youngs. Danny Young and Alex Young. For a while, there had been two of them in the Mets' world, and that alone was enough to make one of them difficult to remember clearly. Danny Young had been dependable before his season unraveled. Like so many Mets relievers, the season divided itself into a before and an after. His ERA had been 2.70 through early September, and then everything fell apart. Had he been hurt? By next May, Tommy John surgery came calling. By the end, the number was 4.54. The season had been transformed. That is another peculiar thing about relief pitchers. Their careers can be destroyed by the final three weeks of a season. A starter can survive a bad month because there are thirty starts to balance it. A reliever can be excellent for five months and then walk into September carrying a small suitcase of gasoline. The Mets have had many such men. They arrive. They are good. They are hurt. They are bad. They are gone. And somewhere down the road, somebody sees their name and says: Oh, yes. I remember him. Sometimes the memory is not even about baseball. Tim Harkness is different. Harkness played long ago, in a Mets universe so distant that the uniforms, the stadium and the city itself seem to belong to another country. Yet he had one afternoon that baseball refused to let disappear. The game came in 1963. The Mets were losing. Harkness came to the plate with the bases loaded, and the situation was large enough to make a man's entire career fit inside it. He hit a grand slam. The Mets won. That was the event. But the event grew in the remembering. Years passed. Decades passed. Harkness became an old man. Eventually he died at eighty-seven. And suddenly the game was there again. Not because anyone had watched it yesterday. Because someone remembered. Baseball people began calculating exactly how much the home run had changed the Mets' chances of winning. Sixteen percent became one hundred. Eighty-four percentage points disappeared into one swing of the bat. Then somebody compared it with Steve Henderson. Another game. Another Met. Another moment in which the whole history of the club seemed to balance on one pitch. Henderson's swing had been even more dramatic by that measure. Ninety-two percentage points. There was something almost absurdly beautiful about the argument. A man had been retired for years, but his home run was still being measured. His place in a game was being reconsidered by people who had not been born when he played. That is baseball's peculiar form of immortality. The men disappear. The play does not. And yet even the play is not enough. Someone remembered that Harkness had already been 3-for-6 that day. Someone remembered Jim Hickman getting thrown out at third. Someone remembered that Harkness had hit the ball to deep right-center. The grand slam was not just a grand slam anymore. It had acquired a neighborhood. A collection of small details. The way all memories do. There was also the question of whether Harkness had been a good fielder. Someone remembered that he had been supposed to be excellent with the glove. Someone else remembered that the Dodgers had used him late in games for “defensive purposes,” perhaps making him appear more valuable than he really was. This, too, is baseball. A man's reputation can be built from a mistake. A career can be remembered through a single swing. A single swing can be reduced to a number. And the number can eventually lead someone back to the man. Then there were Lindor, McNeil and Soto. Here the memory was not yet history. It was still being made. There had been an argument between Lindor and McNeil after a loss in Philadelphia. There were reports that Lindor and Soto had not particularly warmed to one another. There were questions about clubhouse leadership, about personalities, about who talked to whom and who did not. This is the part of baseball that people always think they understand. The clubhouse. The chemistry. The personalities. The invisible architecture of a team. But a clubhouse is a strange place to build a story because almost everything important happens behind a closed door. Someone says something. Someone else hears it. Someone remembers it differently. Months later a story appears. And suddenly a few sentences become a season. Maybe Lindor and McNeil were angry with one another. Maybe they were. Teammates are angry with one another all the time. Maybe Lindor and Soto were different kinds of men. One more outward, one more private. One inclined toward the obligations of being a captain, another toward the concentration required to hit a baseball very hard. That does not necessarily make a clubhouse dysfunctional. It makes it a clubhouse. There was a better story, too. Starling Marte, it was said, encouraged younger players to talk to Soto. He pulled him into the dugout after home runs. He joked with him. He told him to smile. On road trips, Soto, Marte and Mauricio played dominoes and video games. Soto said Marte helped him through the transition. That story has the advantage of being about something people actually did. A hand on the shoulder. A joke. A game. A man telling another man that he belonged. Those things rarely make the headlines. They ought to. Because the Mets are not really made of statistics, or anonymous sources, or clubhouse theories. They are made of men. And men are complicated. Some are loud. Some are quiet. Some smile. Some do not. Some become leaders because the organization gives them the title. Some become leaders because a younger player needs somebody to sit beside him on a long flight. Some pitchers throw from three-quarters. Some throw from somewhere near the floor. Some make six appearances. Some make hundreds. Some hit a grand slam in 1963 and are remembered sixty-two years later. And some leave the Mets and become the answer to a question nobody thought to ask. Danny Young went to Atlanta. Ty Adcock went to San Diego. There was no ceremony. There rarely is. The Mets did not stop the season to acknowledge the departure of a man who had pitched six times. The stadium did not darken. Nobody stood at home plate and spoke about the good old days. The transaction simply happened. Then baseball moved on. That is the cruelest thing about baseball and perhaps the reason we love it. It moves on. Every day. A new pitcher. A new lineup. A new injury. A new argument. A new player whose name nobody knows yet. And somewhere behind it all are the men who came before. Ty Adcock. Danny Young. Tyler Rogers. Tim Harkness. Steve Henderson. Men who occupied different corners of the Mets' history, some for years, some for minutes. The Mets have always been particularly good at producing such ghosts. Maybe every baseball team does. But in New York the ghosts seem to linger. Perhaps it is the city. Perhaps it is the enormous appetite for remembering. Perhaps it is because there have been so many Mets and so many seasons and so many strange afternoons that no one person can possibly remember them all. So the remembering becomes communal. One man remembers the beard. Another remembers the grand slam. Another remembers the two Youngs. Another remembers the game in Philadelphia. Another remembers a pitcher with an unusual delivery. Piece by piece, the past is reconstructed. Not accurately. Not completely. But lovingly. A baseball team is a little like an old house. You move into it and discover that other people have lived there. There are marks on the wall. Names written in closets. A nail where somebody once hung a picture. You do not know who made the mark. You do not know why the picture mattered. But it is there. And eventually it becomes part of the house. That is what these men become. Marks on the wall. Some are large. Some are almost invisible. Tim Harkness gets a grand slam. Steve Henderson gets a percentage. Tyler Rogers gets a strange delivery and a remarkable number of appearances. Danny Young gets a good stretch of baseball and then a terrible September. Ty Adcock gets six appearances and a beard. And somebody, years later, remembers. That is enough. More than enough. Because the final measure of a baseball life is not always how many games a man played. Sometimes it is simply whether, after all the games are over, somebody can still say his name and mean it. Tim Harkness. Ty Adcock. Danny Young. Tyler Rogers. They were Mets. For a season. For six games. For a moment. For as long as it takes a baseball to travel from home plate to deep right-center. And then they were gone. But not entirely.

The question was asking when was the last time a Mets team didn't have a single pitcher with 50 or more appearances. It was 1994, though the question as to who led the team in appearances that year remains unanswered. Now, we're also asking, when was the last time before 1994 that a Mets team didn't feature a single 50-appearance pitcher, and who led the team that year? And we'll extend it once more beyond that -- when was the last time before then that a Mets team didn't have a single 50-appearance pitcher, and who was the team leader then?

1994 is correct! Can anyone name the pitcher who led the 1994 Mets in appearances? And can anyone name the time before 1994 that the Mets' pitching appearances had less than 50 appearances? And who was it?

Today's hint: It was a strike year.

Chapter 16: The Names Remain Summary: The piece explores baseball’s peculiar form of immortality, in which greatness is not required for a player’s name to survive, as Mets from six-game footnotes to longtime stars remain woven into the club’s collective memory. Through the deaths of Bart Shirley and George Altman, the Mets Hall of Fame debate over Mazzilli, Valentine and Beltrán, and the enduring presence of figures like John Gibbons and John Stearns, it argues that baseball history is ultimately less about what the record books preserve than what people choose to remember. There is a peculiar thing about baseball and time. In most professions, a man leaves his job and, after a while, he is gone. His name disappears from the office directory. The new man takes his chair. The old man becomes a memory, then a story, then perhaps nothing at all. Baseball is different. Baseball keeps the names. A man can play six games for the Mets in 1967 and, nearly sixty years later, his name can still turn up in New York. He can play a few seasons, spend most of his career somewhere else, and nevertheless become part of the long, complicated family history of a ballclub. He can die at eighty-five in Corpus Christi and still be remembered by people who never saw him play, some of whom had barely heard of him before the day of his death. He can be a catcher who spent his life taking the blows that catchers take, or a manager whose most lasting contribution was perhaps not a championship but a particular expression, a particular way of standing in the dugout, a particular reputation for being exactly what he appeared to be. Baseball is generous with its immortality. It does not require greatness. John Gibbons, for instance, was still around. There was something pleasing about that fact. Gibbons had become the Angels' bench coach, which meant that a man who had spent so many years in baseball's sunlight and shade was still wearing the uniform, still going to work. Someone remarked, almost with surprise, that he was alive. It was not cruel. It was the sort of thing baseball people say when they realize that the men they watched when they were young have somehow become old men while they themselves were not looking. Gibbons had the sort of face that seemed permanently carved into a scowl, although photographs occasionally betrayed him with a smile. That, too, is baseball memory: the difference between the face a man wore and the face people remember him wearing. And then there was the Mets Hall of Fame. Three names were being discussed: Lee Mazzilli, Bobby Valentine and Carlos Beltrán. Three men. Three careers. Three entirely different kinds of Met. Beltrán had been a great player, the sort whose numbers could be put into columns and compared with other great players. Valentine belonged to another category, the baseball character, the man whose presence seemed larger than his statistical record. Mazzilli was something else again. He was a New York player in the old sense of the word: a homegrown face, a local boy, a man whose importance to the club could not be measured entirely by what appeared on the back of his baseball card. This is where the arguments about baseball history become interesting. What does a Hall of Fame actually remember? Numbers remember one thing. Fans remember another. A ballplayer can have a good season and become a statistic. He can have a mediocre season and become a memory. He can hit a home run that matters to one generation and mean almost nothing to another. He can be a very good player for ten years and leave behind less emotion than a man who was very good for five. Mazzilli's case seemed to rest partly on that mysterious substance baseball people sometimes call Metliness. It is not measurable. It does not appear in WAR or OPS. It has something to do with being of the place, of the uniform, of the city. It is the residue left when statistics have been put away. And there were those who thought that residue ought to count. Others were less convinced. One man suggested that John Stearns, the catcher from the Joe Torre years, might have been the better representative of that era. Stearns was dead now, but death, someone pointed out, ought not to be a disqualification. There had been Mets before, men who had died decades earlier and were eventually placed in the club's history. Casey Stengel. Joan Payson. Gil Hodges. George Weiss. Johnny Murphy. Tommie Agee. Baseball does not always hurry to remember its dead. Sometimes it waits. Sometimes it forgets. Sometimes it remembers only after somebody asks, years later, almost embarrassed: What happened to him? That question is one of the quiet engines of baseball history. It was asked again when Bart Shirley died. Shirley had been a Met for six games in 1967. Six. There are players who spend fifteen years with a franchise and become institutions. There are players who spend six games and become footnotes. Yet six games are still six games. He wore the uniform. He walked into the clubhouse. He stood on the field. He became, for a brief interval, a New York Met. That was enough to make his death news. He had played for the Dodgers and Mets during parts of four seasons. Later, he worked with the Players Association in an effort to obtain a lifetime pension after the rules changed in 1980, though the change did not become retroactive for former players. He eventually lived in Corpus Christi, where he became a longtime usher at Whataburger Field. There is something beautiful in that last fact. The ballplayer became the man who greeted people at the ballpark. Not the man on the field. The man at the gate. The distance between those two jobs is enormous, and yet somehow they belong together. Baseball had followed him through his life, from the clubhouse to the entrance of the minor-league park. He had gone from being watched to helping others watch. Then George Altman died. Altman had been the oldest living Met, and with his death another door closed. He had played in the Negro Leagues, beginning with the Kansas City Monarchs in 1955, eight years after Jackie Robinson broke baseball's color line. He played in the Three-I League, the Western League and the Panama Winter League. He spent eight years in Japan and hit more than 200 home runs there. He carried with him a baseball life that stretched across countries and leagues and eras, a life that belonged to more than one version of professional baseball. His Mets years, however, were remembered for something more painful. He arrived in New York after having success at what Bill James's terminology would call the age of 27 to 29. Then came the Mets, and the performance declined. The joke was that this constituted a disease. George Altman Syndrome. His father, somebody remembered, had diagnosed it more simply: “Traded to the Mets disease.” The joke works because baseball is full of such jokes, and because behind nearly every good baseball joke there is a little sadness. The sadness is that a player's career can be divided into before and after. Before New York, he was a ballplayer. After New York, he became a memory of the ballplayer he had been. But that is not the whole story. It cannot be. The Mets portion of George Altman's life was only a portion of George Altman's life. There were the Negro Leagues. There were the minor leagues. There was winter baseball. There was Japan. There were more than 200 home runs in a country half a world away. There were the old leagues whose names now sound like names from another country: Three-I, Western, Panama. And there was the shoulder injury that helped make his Mets years what they were. That is the trouble with baseball memory. It likes to simplify. It takes a man's life and turns it into a sentence. Good player. Bad Mets years. Hall of Famer. Six games. Dead. Alive. But no baseball life is a sentence. It is a long accumulation of places and uniforms and people, most of which nobody remembers. That is why the Mets Hall of Fame arguments matter, even when they seem trivial. They are not really arguments about plaques. They are arguments about what we choose to keep. A retired number is one kind of remembrance. A Hall of Fame induction is another. A photograph is another. A boyhood home preserved as a shrine is another. A person standing at a ballpark years later and saying, I remember him, may be the most intimate of all. Baseball has always had its official historians, but its true historians are the people who remember. They remember the player who was supposed to be something. They remember the player who became something. They remember the player who was almost something. They remember the player who was there for six games. And sometimes, years later, they remember the player whose face they had forgotten but whose name still sounded familiar. That is the great kindness of baseball. It permits a man to disappear without completely disappearing. A season ends. A career ends. A life ends. The uniforms are packed away. The photographs yellow. The ballpark changes its seats, its advertisements, its name. The people who watched the games grow older. And still, somewhere, somebody says the name. George Altman. Bart Shirley. John Stearns. Lee Mazzilli. Bobby Valentine. Carlos Beltrán. John Gibbons. The names remain. And for a moment, so do the men.

Cool seeing the now old former players so young in this one: New York Mets 25th Anniversary Documentary (1986) "Five Days in Flushing" (SNY documentary)

Who was the 2026 Mets Rookie of the Year? Some great options this year. Carson Benge: 156 G, 20 HR, 65 RBI, 22 SB, 86 R, .282/.346/.430, 4.3 WAR AJ Ewing: 120 G, 11 HR, 43 RBI, 25 SB, .252/.324/.376, 3.1 WAR Nate Lavender: 1-0 W-L, 1.66 ERA, 21 G, 0.738 WHIP, 0.9 WAR Nolan McLean: 12-10 W-L, 3.16 ERA, 31 G, 179 2/3 IP, 194 K, 128 ERA+, 1.169 WHIP, 3.0 WAR Zach Thornton: 5-6 W-L, 3.43 ERA, 15 G, 84 1/3 IP, 63 K, 119 ERA+, 1.138 WHIP, 1.7 WAR

Good to see Stanton back. Really wanted him to get close to 500 home runs this year. Maybe next year.

Every cloud has a silver lining. Stearns did take the flyer on Holmes that turned him into a great starter, and Holmes was their most effective starter in 2025. He did bring aboard Manaea and Severino, who combined did provide one of the most thoroughly effective and consistent top-three I've seen in a while. He did bring aboard Phil Maton, who transformed from a 4.50 ERA pitcher with the Rays to a 2.50 pitcher with the Mets, and without him the Mets run to the playoffs would've been that much more difficult. He did help turn a 75-87 team into a 89-73 team -- a team, recall, that wasn't even supposed to be good that year. He did re-sign Pete Alonso the first time. And though Soto isn't hitting .350 with 60 home runs yet, Stearns did bring aboard the Juan Soto for a lengthy duration. And there's the draftees -- the previously mentioned Benge, Jonathan Santucci (11.7 K/9 in 2026) and Pretty Boy Voit, among others, all look promising.

Chapter 15: The Names That Remain Summary: The piece explores the strange relationship between baseball history and memory, where obscure Mets players such as Tony Phillips, Dick Schofield, Nick Burdi, and Ryan Helsley can briefly disappear from view only to be resurrected by a question, a statistic, or a remembered game. Through Mets postseason history and the countless players who passed through New York, it argues that baseball does not preserve everything equally—it preserves whatever happens to stick, allowing even the most fleeting player to remain alive in memory for one more moment. There are two kinds of baseball memory. There is the memory that announces itself. You remember where you were when the ball went through Bill Buckner’s legs. You remember Kirk Gibson limping around the bases. You remember Endy Chávez reaching into the air and catching a ball that seemed destined to change the evening. You remember the Mets winning in 1969 because people have spent more than half a century reminding you that they did. Then there is the other kind. It comes quietly. Somebody says a name. You stop. You know the name, certainly. You may even see the man for a moment: the stance, the uniform, the shape of the body beneath the uniform. But you cannot quite remember when he was there, or how long he stayed, or what happened afterward. Baseball is filled with these men. Perhaps that is why there is such pleasure in the obscure corners of its history. The famous names are already preserved. The forgotten names require somebody to go looking for them. There was once a Mets player named Tony Phillips who played 2,003 games in the American League before ever appearing for New York. Two thousand and three games is a baseball lifetime. It is more than enough time to become familiar to generations of fans, to establish a reputation, to become part of somebody else's childhood. And then he became a Met. The strange thing is not that Phillips played 2,003 American League games. The strange thing is that somebody had to ask. The same question produces Yogi Berra, Robinson Canó, Marcus Semien, Jim Piersall, Jim Fregosi, Mike Bordick, Mo Vaughn, Robin Ventura, Curtis Granderson, Trot Nixon, John Valentin, John Olerud, Carlos Baerga and Tony Clark. The list keeps reaching backward through the history of baseball until the Mets become almost a receiving station for men who had spent their baseball lives somewhere else. The numbers are funny that way. A man can spend 1,629 games in the American League, as Marcus Semien had done before reaching the Mets, and that fact can suddenly become more interesting because he had not played a single National League game before arriving in New York. The Mets, in this sense, are a sort of geographical border crossing. A player arrives and, simply by putting on the uniform, becomes part of a different history. Sometimes it is a great history. Sometimes it is barely a footnote. Sometimes the man is remembered chiefly because he was there when something happened. And sometimes he is remembered because somebody happened to ask a question. That is how Tony Phillips comes back. That is how Dick Schofield comes back. That is how Alvaro Espinoza comes back. Schofield had played 1,061 American League games before becoming a Met. Espinoza had played 861. Neither was the first name that came readily to mind. The people trying to remember them reached for other names—José Bautista, Claudell Washington, Tim Teufel, Daryl Boston, Yoenis Céspedes. They remembered men who seemed more obvious, more Mets-like, more securely filed away in the mind. Then, eventually, the obscure names appeared. There was laughter. There was the admission that nobody could have guessed some of them “with a gun to my head.” And that, too, is baseball. A player's career can be enormous while his place in memory is tiny. We like to believe the two things are connected. They aren't. A man can play 2,003 games and disappear. Another can play one October game and become immortal. This is especially true with the Mets because October has always been such a concentrated form of their existence. The Mets have played 105 postseason games, and the attempt to rank every one of them becomes, eventually, less an exercise in statistics than an exercise in memory. There are 59 victories and 46 defeats, but the numbers do not explain why one game follows a person for fifty years while another disappears almost immediately. Every postseason game feels enormous while it is happening. That is the trick. The pitcher throws. The crowd rises. The ball is hit. The television camera finds somebody in the stands with both hands over his face. For a few hours, nothing in the world matters quite as much as this game. Then time begins. The next season comes. Then another. Players are traded. Managers are fired. Stadiums change. Children become adults. Adults become old. And the game remains, but its meaning changes. A sixteen-inning game against Houston in 1986 can remain alive in somebody's mind because, in the purest sense of baseball, it had everything. Another person can remember the championship-clinching games more vividly because winning the pennant was what mattered most. Still another person can look back at 2015 and remember Games 1 and 2 more vividly than the game that actually clinched the pennant. There is no tribunal that decides these things. Memory is democratic. Or perhaps it is tyrannical. It chooses what it wants. The 2022 postseason provides another example. One person can barely understand why a particular game was not placed at the bottom of the historical pile because, in his memory, it contained an awful performance by players, management and fans. Another game can rise in memory for something as strange as the Joe Musgrove controversy—the ear, the suspicion, the business surrounding it—until the controversy becomes more memorable than much of the baseball itself. That is the cruelty of memory. It does not necessarily preserve what was most important. It preserves what stuck. The same thing happens with players. Consider Nick Burdi. He was, by the standards of modern relief pitching, a useful pitcher when his body permitted him to be one. In 2025 he spent most of the season at Worcester, striking out 45 in 35 innings with a 2.83 ERA, and later made a handful of appearances for Boston without allowing a run in 5⅓ innings. He had also spent 2024 with the Yankees. Then came a minor-league deal with the Mets, accompanied by the familiar invitation to spring training in Florida. This is how baseball happens to thousands of men. They sign. They report. They pack. They unpack. They change uniforms. They board airplanes. They pitch three innings in Worcester or five outs in Boston or two innings in Port St. Lucie. Somebody writes down the numbers. Then the season ends. The strange thing about Burdi's story is that it sits beside all those other Mets stories without demanding anything from us. He is not a legend. He is not a monument. He is not a man whose name changes the architecture of the game. He is simply a pitcher who might be useful. Baseball is made of such men. The game needs them, even if history rarely thanks them. Then there was Ryan Helsley, whose time with the Mets was brief enough that even his entrance music could seem to belong to somebody else. He arrived in 2025 with a reputation that made the Mets hopeful and left with a reputation that had become something very different. One observer remembered seeing him enter to “Hell's Bells,” and the music seemed almost comically premature because he had accumulated so little Mets equity and his tenure had already become shaky. Later, the same memory acquired an unintended meaning: the bell was not announcing Helsley's greatness. It was tolling for the season. That is a wonderful baseball sentence because it contains the whole problem. A player arrives carrying one story. By the time he leaves, he has acquired another. Helsley had come to represent something that had not worked. The relief corps had been reinforced at the deadline. The Mets had imagined the possibility of late-inning certainty. Instead, the memories became of blown opportunities, uncertain command, and a pitcher whose Mets ERA had climbed sharply during his stay. The player had not necessarily changed into another human being. The story had changed. That happens all the time. A man arrives from another club with a reputation. Then he wears your uniform. Now his mistakes are yours. His victories are yours. His bad inning belongs to your memory. His good inning may belong to nobody. And eventually he leaves. The uniform goes into somebody else's trunk. The clubhouse forgets. The fans move on. But not completely. Because baseball fans are peculiar custodians of the past. They remember the names that statistics say they ought to remember. They remember the names that statistics say they ought not to remember. They remember the 105 postseason games. They remember the 2,003 American League games before Tony Phillips became a Met. They remember a relief pitcher in Worcester striking out 45 men. They remember a bell ringing at Citi Field for a pitcher who had hardly had time to become a Met. They remember Tom Veryzer, a name so far down the road of memory that one person admitted he was not sure he had ever heard it before. And perhaps that is the real beauty of the whole exercise. Baseball does not disappear when the season ends. It becomes archaeology. You dig. You find a name. You find a number. You find an old uniform. You find a game that somebody remembers differently from everybody else. You discover that the man you thought you knew was only one version of him. Marcus Semien was an American League player for 1,629 games before becoming a National League player in New York. Tommie Agee had only 359 American League games before becoming a Met, despite the fact that his Mets identity feels so complete. Mickey Lolich had 508. Frank Tanana had 606. Yogi Berra had 2,116. These are numbers, but they are also little biographies. And somewhere in all of this is the peculiar bargain between baseball and time. The game gives us too much to remember. So we forget. Then, every once in a while, somebody remembers for us. A name appears. Tony Phillips. John Valentin. Dick Schofield. Alvaro Espinoza. Nick Burdi. Ryan Helsley. A game appears. Houston, 1986. Boston, 1986. The strange games of 2022. The bruising games of 2024. And for a moment the years collapse. The ballpark is back. The crowd is back. The pitcher is walking in from the bullpen. The uniform fits. The name is spoken. And the man who had almost disappeared is there again. Not forever. Baseball never gives us forever. But for a moment. And sometimes a moment is all a baseball player needs to remain.