Cowtipper

These were mentioned in the Mets Roster Central thread, but as it is the offseason and news is sparse this time of year, I thought it might be worth mentioning here, too. Pitcher Kevin Herget and infielder Zack Short, who both played briefly for the Mets in 2026, have declared free agency. Herget, 35, first joined the club in 2025, going 0-0 with a 3.00 ERA in 6 relief appearances; in the minors, he'd gone 2-0 with a 2.81 mark in 23 games (3 starts) for Syracuse. He followed that up with another solid line on the farm in 2026, going 1-1 with a 2.97 ERA in 19 games (8 starts) across four stops. That culminated in a single scoreless relief appearance with the big club on August 1. The 31-year-old Short first played in the Mets system in 2024. His major league contribution was minimal, as he had a single hit in 9 at-bats; he was gone from the organization by early May. He returned to the Mets in 2026, hitting .071 in 14 at-bats, including 7 strikeouts. Notably, he made a relief appearance on the mound in a blowout game in June, pitching a perfect inning. At Syracuse, he hit .233/.359/.383 in 42 games.

I previously had a thread about this, but it was closed and locked following the migration. Anyway, I'm going to resuscitate it. I've been watching these lately. I love the stuff from before I was born and also the stuff I remember...really brings back memories! If I post it and don't say otherwise, that means I liked it or found it worthwhile. The Good Doctor (2015) Mets 2015 MLB Documentary Mets 1986 - A Year to Remember Meet the Wilpons: How the Mets Became a Professional Mess Meet the Mets: A History of the NY Mets 1986 Mets: Simply Amazin' (2006) The 2015 Mets Had 3 Aces. What Happened? 2006 Mets - The Team. The Time. — This was a good one. Replacing Wright David Wright: A Captain's Story of Tragedy and Triumph 1968 NEW YORK METS "The Year of the Pitcher" Highlight Reel — a fun watch. 1975 Mets - This was enjoyable. The New York Mets have only Won two World Series...but they were Magical The INSANE Prime of Darryl Strawberry Kid - A Gary Carter Story (2018)

Good guess, but it was further back than Billy Wagner. Hint: Dallas Green was the manager.

Dave Rosello died. https://sports.yahoo.com/articles/longtime-cubs-infielder-finished-career-110000779.html Who was Dave Rosello? Dave Rosello (1950–2026) was a Puerto Rican infielder who spent nine seasons in Major League Baseball, playing for the Chicago Cubs from 1972–77 and the Cleveland Indians from 1979–81. Intended as the Cubs’ successor to longtime shortstop Don Kessinger, Rosello struggled offensively and defensively, finishing his career with a .236 batting average, 10 home runs, and 76 RBI, and later became associated with the Cubs’ struggles of the mid-1970s; he also played winter baseball in Puerto Rico. Rosello died in Kissimmee, Florida, on September 30, 2026, at age 76.

Reed Garrett: Expected to be ready for spring. Mets president of baseball operations David Stearns said Monday that he expects Garrett (elbow) to be a full participant in spring training, Michael Mayer of MetsmerizedOnline.com reports. Garrett underwent UCL reconstruction surgery last October. It's unclear how far along the veteran reliever is in his throwing program, but the expectation is that he'll be ready to roll for spring training. Assuming health, Garrett will likely be a high-leverage reliever for the Mets in 2027. He's logged a 4.10 ERA with 163 strikeouts over 129.2 innings during his time with New York. Injury: Elbow. Est. Return 2/1/2027. Tylor Megill: Will be full-go for spring training. Mets president of baseball operations David Stearns said Monday that he expects Megill (elbow) to be 100 percent for the start of spring training, Michael Mayer of MetsmerizedOnline.com reports. Megill is just over one year removed from Tommy John surgery on his right elbow. It's unclear where he's currently at in the rehab process, but it sounds like Megill won't be facing any real restrictions once spring training rolls around. The 31-year-old Megill could compete for a spot in the Mets' rotation next season. Injury: Elbow. Est. Return 2/1/2027. Jared Young: Recovering well. Young (concussion) is expected to have a relatively normal offseason and be ready for the start of spring training, Anthony DiComo of MLB.com reports. Young suffered a concussion and had to be stretchered off the field as a result of a Sept. 17 collision with teammate Nolan McLean. He's still experiencing concussion symptoms and hasn't regained all of his hearing yet, but Young has been progressing steadily and doesn't expect any long-term effects. The 31-year-old Young should be in the mix for playing time between first base and designated hitter with the Mets in 2027. Injury: Concussion. Est. Return 2/1/2027.

Chapter 14: The Future Belongs to Nobody Summary: The piece examines the Mets’ winter through the tension between certainty and possibility: whether to trade prospects for an established ace like Tarik Skubal, how to value players such as Jeff McNeil and Keith Hernandez beyond statistics, and how to manage the increasingly complicated demands placed on pitchers. Beneath the arguments over trades, prospects, defense, and bullpens is a larger meditation on baseball’s refusal to reveal what comes next, and the faith required to build a team around a future that nobody can actually see. There is a particular kind of winter baseball argument that begins with a player and ends somewhere far away, usually in a discussion about time. The player in this case was Tarik Skubal. He was good enough to make people forget, for a while, that baseball players are human beings and therefore temporary. He had won a second Cy Young Award, was approaching free agency, and had become the sort of pitcher who makes general managers dream in complicated arithmetic. Detroit had him. Everybody else wanted him. The number being attached to the negotiations was enormous, and the number separating the two sides was even more enormous—$250 million, a figure so large that it almost ceased to mean money and became instead a symbol of distance. And then came the question: Should the Mets trade for him? This is the sort of question that makes baseball people young again. Not young in the sense of being foolish. Young in the sense that the future suddenly becomes visible. You can see the pitcher on the mound at Citi Field. You can see October. You can see a cold night in the National League Championship Series, Skubal throwing the kind of game that causes people to say afterward that it was worth everything. Then, if you are sufficiently patient, you can see the other picture. Brandon Sproat is throwing somewhere. Jonah Tong is throwing somewhere. Jett Williams is playing shortstop or center field or wherever the baseball gods have decided to put him. Brett Baty is twenty-nine years old and finally healthy and has become exactly the player somebody thought he might become when he was twenty-one. Ronny Mauricio has figured out how to stop chasing pitches. Carson Benge has become a star. Or perhaps none of those things happens. That is the difficulty. The future is always made of players who have not yet become what they are supposed to become. The present is made of players who already have. So you have Skubal, a known quantity, and the young Mets, a collection of possibilities. The proposed packages began to grow: Sproat, Tong, Jett Williams, Mauricio, Baty. Then the argument became not whether Skubal was good enough, but whether he was worth all the things the Mets would no longer have if they acquired him. One proposed deal had four young players going to Detroit. Another person wanted an extension before surrendering that much. Another said the price was simply too high. Another said an ace was precisely what the Mets needed. There is no correct answer to this kind of argument because nobody knows the future. That is what makes baseball so wonderfully unfair. A prospect is a promise. An established star is an answer. But sometimes the promise is better than the answer. Sometimes the answer is better than everything. And sometimes the answer gets hurt in May. The old baseball men used to talk about trading youth for experience as though experience were a substance that could be poured from one player into another. They knew that young players were uncertain, but they also knew something else: that a good young player was cheap, and a good old player was expensive, and the years between those two conditions were where championships were often built. Now there is another wrinkle. The young player has a value before he ever reaches the major leagues. He has become a name on a list. A prospect ranking. A future asset. He is no longer merely a kid playing baseball. He is a piece. That word—piece—is one of the stranger words baseball has acquired. A player becomes a piece. A pitcher becomes an asset. A prospect becomes capital. A shortstop becomes organizational depth. A human being becomes a thing you can put on one side of a hypothetical trade. And yet, when the trade is finally made, everybody waits to see which human being turns out to have been worth more. This is why the Mets' winter was so interesting even when nothing had happened. The infield was crowded. Semien had arrived. Baty had played well enough to merit consideration. Vientos was still there. Mauricio was still there. Luisangel Acuña was still there. McNeil was still there. Jett Williams and Carson Benge were coming. Something had to give—or perhaps nothing had to give yet. That distinction matters. One person looked at the group and saw a logjam. Another looked at it and saw flexibility. One wanted the Mets to trade somebody before the situation became unbearable. Another saw no reason to trade anybody until somebody forced his way into the lineup. That is another way of saying that baseball has two clocks. The first is the clock of the front office. The second is the clock of the player. The front office wants to know what the roster will look like in April. The player wants to know whether he will still be here in April. The prospect wants to know whether there is a place for him in June. The fan wants to know whether all of it will lead to October. And October, of course, does not care. There was something almost tender in the discussion of Jeff McNeil because McNeil represented a different sort of baseball value. He was not Tarik Skubal. Nobody was going to empty the farm system for Jeff McNeil. He was something less glamorous and, in some ways, more useful: a baseball player. He could play several positions. He could have a good season. He could have a bad month. He could be inserted somewhere when somebody got hurt. He could accumulate at-bats without requiring that the manager build the entire team around him. And there was affection for him, too. Not statistical affection. Human affection. The kind that develops when a player has been around long enough that the uniform begins to seem incomplete without him. One person put it in terms of character. McNeil, with his temper and his red face and his oddness, had helped define the Mets even when the larger identity of the team seemed elusive. That is something statistics cannot quite measure. They can tell you what a first baseman is worth. They have a harder time telling you what a player feels like. This became obvious in the discussion about first basemen. The numbers said strange things. Keith Hernandez, one of the greatest defensive first basemen many Mets fans had ever seen, was one of the few first basemen with positive career defensive WAR in the group being examined. Pete Alonso was negative. Gil Hodges was negative. Steve Garvey was negative. Rafael Palmeiro was negative. Prince Fielder was deeply negative. The numbers provoked the inevitable question: Can this possibly be right? Perhaps. Perhaps not. Defensive statistics are difficult things because defense is partly movement and partly anticipation and partly hands and partly the ability to make something difficult look routine. A first baseman may spend most of a game standing close to first base, but then there is the ball in the dirt that must be picked, the throw that must be stretched for, the runner who comes late, the double play that requires a foot to remain on the bag for one instant longer than instinct says it should. A statistic sees an outcome. A player sees the ball. A fan sees the player. And sometimes those three things disagree. There is an old pleasure in watching a great first baseman because first base is supposed to be easy. That is the deception. The great ones make it look easy. Keith did. Other men did not. Some had bad hands. Some were awkward. Some seemed to be waiting for the ball to make up its mind. Some could hit so well that everybody forgave them. Baseball has always forgiven hitters. It is less forgiving of defenders because the errors are visible. The ball comes to you. You either catch it or you don't. The bullpen is different. There, the ball comes to you too often. The discussion of Adam Ottavino and Carlos Mendoza turned into a larger argument about what happens to pitchers in the modern game. Ottavino accused Mendoza of lacking feel and communication with relievers and questioned the way the bullpen had been handled. Others pointed out that injuries have causes more complicated than one manager's decisions, and that the pitching coach, bullpen coach, front office and organizational philosophy all have roles. Then came the numbers. A.J. Minter had pitched eleven innings in thirteen appearances before his season ended. Danny Young had made ten appearances and thrown only 8⅓ innings. Other relievers had similar stories, some involving repeated short outings and the strange physical burden of warming up again and again. There was an argument that perhaps two or three innings twice a week could be less taxing than one inning four times a week. That sounds almost too simple. Which is probably why it is worth thinking about. The modern game has become very good at protecting pitchers from one kind of danger while perhaps creating another. Nobody wants the starter to throw 120 pitches. Nobody wants the reliever to throw 40. Nobody wants the young pitcher to work too hard. Nobody wants the old pitcher to work too hard. And yet somebody has to pitch the innings. There are nine innings. The mathematics of the game has not changed. Only the people performing the mathematics have. So the bullpen becomes another version of the Skubal question. How much of the future are you willing to spend on the present? Only now the currency is not prospects. It is arms. And arms are the strangest currency in baseball because you cannot see when you have spent too much until after you have spent it. This is what made the winter feel less like a series of transactions and more like a conversation about faith. Faith in Skubal. Faith in Sproat. Faith in Tong. Faith in Baty. Faith in Vientos. Faith in Mauricio. Faith in McNeil. Faith in the pitching staff. Faith in the manager. Faith in the numbers. Faith in the scouts who watched the kid in Double-A. Faith in the executive who decided that the kid should not be traded. And, finally, faith in the future. The Mets had just come through a season in which the future was supposed to be bright and the present had not always behaved accordingly. That is the trouble with futures. They are always bright when they are far enough away. A young player is perfect before he fails. A trade is brilliant before somebody gets hurt. A contract is reasonable before the player ages. A pitching prospect is an ace until he throws his first bad major-league inning. A manager is a genius until September. Then September arrives. The game does this to everyone. It humbles certainty. That is perhaps why the most revealing sentence in all the winter discussion was not about Skubal or McNeil or first basemen or bullpens. It was the simple admission that nobody knows what the future will bring. You can approach it. You can study it. You can measure it. You can build models. You can rank prospects. You can calculate WAR. You can construct payroll projections and trade packages and depth charts. You can sit at a desk in November and create the 2026 Mets down to the last bench player. Then March comes. Then April. Then somebody pulls up lame chasing a fly ball. Somebody else hits .310. The kid you thought needed another year hits three home runs in a week. The veteran you thought would anchor the lineup begins looking old. The pitcher you thought was finished throws seven shutout innings. The pitcher you thought would save you needs Tommy John surgery. And the beautiful, terrible thing is that none of it is a surprise. Because baseball has always been like this. We spend the winter trying to know tomorrow. The game spends the summer reminding us that tomorrow belongs to nobody. And somewhere in Detroit, somewhere in New York, somewhere in a minor-league clubhouse where a young pitcher is still learning how to throw a breaking ball when he is tired, the future is already happening. Nobody knows its name yet. But it is coming.

Hint: The team featured Jose Vizcaino, Jim Lindeman and Joe Orsulak.

Michael Wacha - 35-year-old former Mets pitcher (2020) was 9-10 with a 3.32 ERA and league-leading 200 2/3 innings in 32 starts for the Royals. He was an All-Star. Josh Walker - 31-year-old former Mets pitcher (2023-2024) was 1-0 with a 2.08 ERA in 31 relief appearances for the Orioles. For their Triple-A club, he was 4-3 with a 3.73 ERA in 24 relief appearances. Taijuan Walker - 34-year-old former Mets pitcher (2021-2022) was 1-4 with a 9.13 ERA in 5 games (4 starts) for the Phillies. He was released in late April and later signed with the Angels. Between two stops in the Angels chain, he was 0-1 with a 3.86 ERA in 5 starts. Luke Weaver - 33-year-old former Mets pitcher (2026) went 2-0 with a 4.96 ERA in 18 relief appearances for the Pirates after departing the Mets at the trade deadline. Between both clubs, he was 4-1 with a 2.60 ERA in 60 games. Zack Wheeler - 36-year-old former Mets pitcher (2013-2014, 2017-2019) went 14-5 with a 3.00 ERA in 28 starts for the Phillies. In 162 innings, he had 193 Ks. In the minors, he went 0-1 with a 5.85 ERA in 5 starts across two stops. Trevor Williams - 34-year-old former Mets pitcher (2021-2022) went 2-0 with a 3.14 ERA in 15 games (1 start), with a K/9 of 10.7, between the Nationals and Rangers. In the minors, he went 0-1 with a 6.46 ERA in 6 starts across five stops. Jimmy Yacabonis - 34-year-old former Mets pitcher (2023) was 3-1 with a 3.89 ERA in 46 relief appearances for the Diablos Rojos del Mexico. Gabriel Ynoa - 33-year-old former Mets pitcher (2016) was 4-4 with a 6.25 ERA in 18 games (11 starts) between Chihuahua and Veracruz in Mexico. Alex Young - 33-year-old former Mets pitcher (2024) was 4-0 with a 4.86 ERA in 18 games (3 starts) across four minor league stops in the Nationals chain. Danny Young - 32-year-old former Mets pitcher (2024-2025) was 0-1 with a 8.03 ERA in 16 games (1 start) for Atlanta. Across three stops in their minor league system, he was 1-0 with a 0.00 ERA in 13 games (1 start). Rob Zastryzny - 34-year-old former Mets pitcher Rob Zastryzny (2022) was 2-1 with a 2.45 ERA in 26 games (1 start) for the Brewers. He was 0-1 with a 3.27 ERA in 13 games (3 starts) between two stops in their minor league system. Tyler Zuber - 31-year-old former Mets pitcher (2025) was 2-1 with a 5.67 ERA in 44 relief appearances for the Marlins. For their Triple-A team, he was 2-0 with a 5.20 ERA in 20 games (1 start). More figures who were in the Mets system but never played for the big club: Austin Adams - signed to play in the Mets system for 2024, but never did. Went 0-1 with a 2.63 ERA in 16 relief appearances for Dos Laredos in Mexico in 2026. Coleman Crow - traded to the Brewers for Adrian Houser and Tyrone Taylor in late 2023. Originally acquired for Eduardo Escobar. Went 0-2 with a 5.30 ERA in 5 games (4 starts) for Milwaukee in 2026. For their Triple-A club, he was 9-2 with a 3.59 ERA in 20 games (19 starts). Tyler Heineman - selected off waivers by the Mets for 2024, but never played in their system. Hit .175/.223/.220 with 1 home run and 10 RBI in 75 games between the Angels and Blue Jays in 2026. Elieser Hernandez - played in the Mets system in 2023; originally traded to the Mets for Jake Mangum and Franklin Sanchez. Went 2-0 with a 2.25 ERA in 5 relief appearances for the Braves and 2-5 with a 4.64 mark in 25 games (12 starts) for their Triple-A club in 2026. Cooper Hummel - selected off waivers by the Mets for 2024, but never played in their system. Was in Japan for 2026, hitting .209/.304/.364 with 5 home runs and 18 RBI in 59 games for Yokohama and .277/.413/.455 with 2 home runs and 14 RBI for their farm club. Justin Slaten - taken by the Mets in the 2023 Rule V Draft, then traded for Ryan Ammons. Never played in their system. Was 2-4 with a 4.60 ERA in 36 relief appearances for Boston in 2026, and was 0-0 with a 0.00 ERA in 2 starts across 2 minor league stops. Trayce Thompson - free agent played in the Mets system in 2024. Hit .238/.429/.595 with 4 home runs and 9 RBI in 12 games for the independent Lexington Legends and .182/.357/.273 with no home runs and 1 RBI in 6 games for Dos Laredos in Mexico in 2026.

Mark my words (but not in permanent ink): He'll be a 20-50 guy one day.

You know, I spend a lot of time ragging on David Stearns. But he deserves an appreciation thread. I don't personally have anything to add, but I'm sure someone here does. Go ahead, y'all! I'm actually interested to see what others have to say.

Chapter 13: Tomorrow's Game, Yesterday's Memory Summary: The piece reflects on the peculiar life of baseball in November, when the games have ended but rumors, roster moves, career lists, and memories keep the Mets—and their players—alive in the minds of fans. Through Kodai Senga, Frankie Montas, Tom Seaver, David Wright, Jacob deGrom, and the many forgotten names who once wore the uniform, it considers how baseball continually transforms players from living participants into fragments of history that can still be resurrected by a name, a statistic, or a memory. There is a strange time in baseball when the games are over but baseball is not. The stadium goes quiet. The uniforms are put away. The players scatter to places where there are no batting cages and no clubhouse clocks and nobody asking whether the pitcher is available tomorrow. Yet baseball continues, as it always does, because baseball has never been entirely about the games. It is also about what happened before them, what might happen next, and what we remember about what happened long ago. For the Mets, November has always been a particularly good month for this sort of remembering. Kodai Senga was, at the moment, apparently “extremely available.” That was the phrase making its way around baseball, a phrase that sounded almost comic until you thought about what it meant. A pitcher who had once seemed like a centerpiece could suddenly become an item on somebody else's roster construction. His first season in New York had been splendid: twenty-nine starts, a 2.98 ERA, an All-Star appearance, a second-place finish for Rookie of the Year and seventh in the Cy Young voting. Then came the injuries, the missing seasons, the strange starts and stops. By the end, three seasons had yielded only 52 starts and 285 innings. There is something cruel about that arithmetic. A pitcher can spend a lifetime preparing to throw a baseball, and then the thing that matters most about him can become the number of innings he did not throw. One hundred thirteen innings. That's what he pitched in 2025. Once upon a time that was barely more than half a season for a starting pitcher. Now it can become the statistical outline of three years of a man's life. And yet there was another number: fiftteen million dollars a year. The Mets were not being asked to discard some ancient, ruined pitcher at an impossible price. They were being asked to decide whether the pitcher they thought they had bought was still somewhere inside the pitcher they had actually received. That is one of baseball's oldest questions. Not: What is he? But: What will he be? Every winter contains thousands of versions of that question. The answer is never known. Frankie Montas offered another version. His Mets career ended almost before it had properly begun. He had been signed for two years, but injuries reduced his time in New York to nine games, seven starts. Tommy John surgery in September meant that the 2026 season was already gone, and the transaction that removed him from the 40-man roster was less a baseball decision than an act of housekeeping. That is how some baseball careers end. Not with a final at-bat. Not with a manager walking onto the field. Not with the crowd rising to its feet. Sometimes a man's last contribution to a team is the opening of a roster spot for a twenty-two-year-old kid who might, if things go properly, still have the future ahead of him. There is a sadness in that, although baseball rarely permits itself to acknowledge it. The Mets move on. They always move on. A new coaching staff appears. One coach retires, another is dismissed, another is replaced, another changes titles. A new hitting instructor arrives. A new bench coach arrives. A new pitching coach arrives. Men who have spent months sitting beside ballplayers, watching swings and studying grips and trying to find the little thing that makes a baseball career work, suddenly become yesterday's men. Baseball is full of men whose names disappear faster than their work. The player is remembered. The coach is forgotten. The trainer is forgotten. The clubhouse man is forgotten. The person who stayed late to watch a hitter take twenty swings against a machine is forgotten. But somebody remembers. That is why the old names have such power. Consider the strange little exercise of asking which accomplished players began their major-league careers with the Mets. The list begins with Tom Seaver and Nolan Ryan, which seems almost too obvious. Then it starts getting strange. Jerry Koosman. Dwight Gooden. David Wright. Jacob deGrom. Amos Otis. Lenny Dykstra. Darryl Strawberry. Ken Singleton. Zack Wheeler. Jon Matlack. Jose Reyes. Ron Hunt. And then the names begin to wander deeper into memory: Kevin Mitchell, Kevin Tapani, Melvin Mora, Pete Alonso, Jesse Orosco, Mike Scott, Mookie Wilson, Marco Scutaro, Rick Aguilera, Tug McGraw, Dave Magadan, Daniel Murphy, Buddy Harrelson. The beauty of such a list is not really the statistic. It is the surprise. You discover that the Mets were present at the beginning of somebody's story even when you had forgotten it. You discover that a player you remember from another uniform once stood in a Mets uniform as a young man, perhaps before you were paying attention, perhaps before you were born. You discover that memory has been editing baseball all along. And then there is Tom Seaver. Seaver is always there. That is the trouble with history. Certain men become so large that they cease to seem like men and become landmarks. Seaver becomes the mountain at the beginning of the list. Ryan becomes another mountain. Then you look farther down and discover somebody like Kevin Tapani, and you realize that baseball history is not made only of mountains. It is made of hills, valleys, roads, wrong turns and forgotten intersections. The exercise also reminds us that a player's Mets career and his baseball career are not the same thing. A man can be a Met for a year and remain a Met forever. Another can be a Met for ten years and somehow become difficult to picture in the uniform. A third can spend his entire life becoming famous somewhere else, yet the first photograph in the mind's album may still show him wearing blue and orange. That is the peculiar thing about beginnings. They linger. Endings do, too. Perhaps that is why the offseason feels so much like a cemetery and a nursery at the same time. The old players are leaving. The young players are arriving. Coaches are replaced. Rosters are rearranged. Contracts are examined. Names appear in rumors. Someone is “available.” Someone is “not available.” Someone is “a fit.” Someone else is “a possibility.” Nobody knows. And because nobody knows, everybody talks. This is one of the great pleasures of November baseball. In the absence of games, baseball becomes pure possibility. A rumor can live for three days without having thrown a single pitch. A player can be traded in the morning, re-signed in the afternoon and restored to the roster by dinner, all without moving an inch. The baseball world becomes a place where information is less important than the feeling that information might exist. There was a joke about this, naturally. Someone could report that the Mets were going to sign John Rocker, provided the source was sufficiently “sourcey.” That joke was funny because it was true. Offseason baseball is partly the manufacture of weather out of air. But underneath the jokes is something more serious. People care. They care enough to argue about a pitcher who threw 285 innings in three years. They care enough to remember a bad contract signed the year before. They care enough to wonder what happened to a coach. They care enough to reconstruct a career from WAR and argue over whether Willie Randolph really belonged above Yogi Berra. They care enough to remember that one player started exactly one major-league game somewhere else before spending the rest of his career with the Mets. They care enough to remember players who had been forgotten until a list brought them back. This is what baseball gives us after the games disappear. Memory. The television people understand this, too. The game itself keeps changing hands and screens. ESPN, NBC, Netflix. Different nights, different packages, different ways of finding the game. The audience, according to the material surrounding the new rights agreements, had just produced one of baseball's strongest postseason viewing performances in years. The game moves forward technologically while the people who love it continue looking backward. That is not a contradiction. It may be the whole point. Baseball is always tomorrow's game and yesterday's memory. The young prospect hitting two home runs in his first two Triple-A games is tomorrow. Kodai Senga wondering where his career goes from here is tomorrow and yesterday at once. Frankie Montas being removed from a roster is yesterday. Tom Seaver is yesterday. David Wright is yesterday. And yet none of them are entirely yesterday because baseball has a peculiar way of refusing to let its people disappear completely. A name remains. A statistic remains. A photograph remains. Someone remembers the swing. Someone remembers the fastball. Someone remembers the way a player walked into the clubhouse. Someone remembers that he was better than the numbers say. Someone remembers that he was worse. Someone remembers the afternoon when he became something. Someone else remembers the afternoon when he stopped being it. And somewhere, in the middle of November, with the stadium dark and the field empty, somebody makes a list. The list begins with Seaver. It goes through Ryan, Koosman, Gooden, Wright, deGrom and all the others. It eventually reaches names that make you stop. Then it reaches names that make you laugh. Then names you had not heard in years. And for a moment they are all alive again. That may be one of the nicest things baseball does. It does not actually preserve the past. Nothing can do that. The men grow older. The bodies fail. The uniforms change. The stadiums are demolished. The contracts expire. The coaches leave. The pitchers lose their velocity. The young players become old players, and eventually the old players become names. But the game leaves us enough fragments to reconstruct them. A hundred years from now, someone may not know exactly what it felt like to watch a certain Mets pitcher on a certain September afternoon. But someone may find the name. And someone may say: Oh, yes. I remember him. That is enough. For baseball, sometimes, it is everything.

Anyone wanna give this a shot?

Jeff Scott was a prolific baseball writer and television producer whose career spanned more than four decades, including more than 1,100 television programs, 450 consecutive episodes of This Week in Baseball, and nearly every Official World Series Film from 1988–2014. His work across MLB Productions, ESPN, YES Network, MLB Network, and other outlets earned him numerous Emmy nominations and awards before his death at 72 in September 2026.

I've never seen a guy look more dead on the field than Jared Young. He was out cold.

I've been a Mets fan since I was 9 years old or so and cannot say I've ever had a favorite. Picking a favorite kind of implies some level of idolization, and though I enjoy baseball and clearly have a strong affinity for the Mets, it all at its core is a frivolity. So I'm not going to idolize a baseball player. It seems silly. I've been to enough baseball games, major and minor, to see they're just people in real life. In fact, I was kind of taken aback at how human they are, when I developed the capacity to see things in such a way. They're not just folks you see on TV, they're actual people. The one that really registered when I saw Curtis Granderson for the first time. It's like, "oh, they're just guys."

"It's not even hard." That happens as you age.

Chapter 12: The Last Uniform Summary: The piece explores the peculiar way Mets history can claim a player who spent only a brief portion of his career in New York, turning a final season or late-career stop into a lasting part of his identity. Through names ranging from Willie Mays and Adrian Gonzalez to Francisco Lindor and Pete Alonso, it reflects on the difference between statistical history and personal memory—and how a player’s career can continue to live on whenever someone remembers the uniform he wore and asks where he finished. There is a curious kind of immortality available to a baseball player in New York. You do not have to stay. In fact, sometimes you hardly have to arrive. A player can spend two seasons in Queens, or one, or perhaps a summer and a September, and years later his name will still surface when somebody asks a question nobody had thought to ask before: Which men finished their careers as Mets? Which players, having worn the uniform near the end, left the game from New York? Or, at least, which had called New York their most recent home? It is a strange way of measuring a baseball life. The list begins with Willie Mays, which makes the question seem almost unfair. Mays stands at the top of it with 156.2 career WAR, followed by Willie Randolph, Richie Ashburn, David Cone, Gary Sheffield and Bobby Abreu. Yogi Berra and Joe Torre are there, too. Then come Francisco Lindor, Johan Santana, David Wright, Rusty Staub, Carlos Delgado and Gil Hodges. The names have an odd effect when placed together. Some belonged to the Mets in their prime. Some came to New York already famous. Some came for one last chance. Some were young enough to imagine that the Mets might be the beginning of something. Others were old enough to know that it was probably the end. And that is what makes the list interesting. It is not really a list of Mets. It is a list of endings. There is Willie Mays, of course. The Say Hey Kid had already been Willie Mays for most of baseball's lifetime when he became a Met. He had been young once, and astonishing, and fast, and graceful. He had played in the Polo Grounds and in San Francisco. By the time he reached Shea Stadium, the greatness had become history and the man had become something else: an old ballplayer trying to remain a ballplayer. The Mets gave him a uniform. He gave them a memory. Years later, that is enough. Then there are men whose Mets careers feel like footnotes until you place them beside the rest of their lives. Richie Ashburn. Yogi Berra. Joe Torre. Bob Friend. Gene Woodling. These names carry histories larger than the time they spent in Queens. Yet for a strange little period, near the end or somewhere along the road, they belonged to the Mets. Baseball does this constantly. It takes a man's long life and compresses it into a season. A man's career may have begun in one city, flourished in another and become famous somewhere else, but if he happens to wear the Mets uniform at the right—or wrong—moment, New York claims a small piece of him. It does not claim all of him. Just enough. The modern names make the phenomenon stranger. Juan Soto is already on the list, with a career still very much in progress. Francisco Lindor is there. Starling Marte is there. J.D. Martinez is there. The list has stopped being merely historical and begun reaching into the present. And then there are the players who make you stop. Jay Bell. John Valentin. Jose Valentin. Kevin McReynolds. The men you remember, but perhaps not quite as you remember them. That was the beauty of the quiz: it forced the mind to separate the Mets player from the baseball player. Kevin McReynolds is easy to remember as a Met. The Mets years are the center of his baseball memory for many people. But what does it mean to say that he was among the men whose careers ended in New York? It means that the Mets were not merely a chapter. They were the last chapter. John Valentin is harder. Jay Bell is harder. The years blur. Uniforms change. The mind puts a player in the place where it most clearly remembers him. One person, seeing the names, admitted that Jay Bell and John Valentin had somehow begun to fuse into the same person in his memory. Another confessed that he had not remembered either man having such a good career. This is what happens when time gets involved. Statistics remember better than we do. The numbers sit there without sentiment. Thirty-seven WAR. Thirty-two. Thirty. Nineteen. The number says: This man did things. Memory says: I remember him. The two are not always the same. That is why Adrian Gonzalez becomes a particularly nice answer. Gonzalez spent a great career moving through baseball, accumulating 43.6 WAR, playing for several clubs, and eventually appearing with the Mets. He had become the sort of veteran who arrived at spring training carrying the faint possibility of one more useful season. There is a type of player who comes to camp late in his career with a body that still resembles the body of the player he used to be. The shoulders are still broad. The forearms are still enormous. The uniform still fits. The swing still looks beautiful during batting practice. For a little while, everyone can pretend. These men are baseball's ghosts before they are ghosts. They show up in Florida in February with non-roster invitations and old reputations. They stand in the sunshine. They take batting practice. They make a few people believe that perhaps the old player is still inside there somewhere. Sometimes he is. Usually he isn't. But occasionally the illusion holds long enough to get him north. Gonzalez did. And then his career ended. That is a baseball story in miniature: the old player appearing briefly in the new world, trying to persuade everyone—including himself—that there is another season left. Sometimes there is. Sometimes the season is merely the goodbye. The same uncertainty exists in the opposite direction, with players who have not yet become old but whose Mets tenure already feels like something remembered. Pete Alonso appeared as a guess in the quiz, but he was not yet eligible by the numbers being used. His career WAR remained in the twenties. That led to the inevitable realization that the man many Mets fans think of as belonging to the deepest layer of their recent history was, statistically, still early in his career. That is another trick of baseball. Time spent with a team and time spent in baseball are different clocks. Alonso feels old because the Mets have had him for so long. Yet baseball's larger calendar says: Not yet. He is still becoming whatever he is going to become. Francisco Lindor is different. By the end of 2025, he had accumulated 55.7 career WAR and stood among the more substantial players in the history of the club's broader statistical universe. He had also acquired something more peculiar. Five-and-ten rights. Ten years in the majors, five with the same club, and suddenly the player has a little piece of power that most players never receive. He can veto a trade. He has stayed somewhere long enough that the contract cannot simply be picked up and carried elsewhere without his permission. In Mets history, the names attached to that status form their own little procession: Carlos Beltrán, Johan Santana, Steve Trachsel, Mike Piazza, John Franco. Now Lindor. Edwin Díaz was approaching it, too, though his future remained uncertain. There is something moving about the phrase five-and-ten. It is baseball's bureaucratic language for belonging. A man has been here long enough that he has earned the right to say no. For a sport that moves players around with extraordinary regularity, this is a small form of sovereignty. And perhaps that is what all of these names have in common. They belonged somewhere, however briefly. Mays belonged to the Mets at the end. Piazza belonged to them in the middle of his life. Wright belonged to them for almost all of the life we knew as baseball fans. Lindor belongs to them now. Alonso may or may not become one of the old men someday, depending on what baseball does with him and what he does with baseball. And somewhere far in the future, another fan will look at another list and be surprised to find that some player he remembers as belonging entirely to another team actually finished his career in Queens. That is how baseball keeps changing its own history. A player arrives. A player leaves. A player becomes a memory. Then somebody asks a question. And the name comes back. Maybe it is Kevin McReynolds. Maybe it is Adrian Gonzalez. Maybe it is John Valentin, hiding there among the numbers. Maybe it is Willie Mays, still standing impossibly at the top. The game is full of such returns. Not the player himself. Just the name. And sometimes the name is enough. Because a baseball career is never quite over when the uniform comes off. There are always people who remember the uniform. There are always people who remember the swing. There are always people who remember the year. And there are always, somewhere, people willing to sit down and ask: Who was he? Where did he finish? And why do I remember him here?

Liam Hendriks has retired.

And so they slowly drift away ... Kevin Herget has elected free agency. Those 2025 Mets teased us by giving a lot of potentially solid relievers just a few appearances here and there. Herget was one. Brandon Waddell, let go earlier this year, was another. Hagenman, Rico Garcia, etc.

Ziggles went 0-1 with a 7.43 ERA in 17 games (3 starts) across 4 minor league stops in 2026. In 13 1/3 innings, he allowed 12 hits and 24 walks for a 2.700 WHIP. On the bright side, he had 17 strikeouts.

Wyatt didn't find another home after being let go. He finished 2026 with a .212/.305/.255 line, 1 home run, 20 RBI and 16 steals in 88 games for Binghamton.

Williams hit .233/.340/.384 with 9 home runs, 41 RBI and 21 steals in 81 games for the Sounds in 2026.

Chapter 11: The Last Headline Summary: The piece reflects on the strange afterlife of a baseball season, when games become headlines, awards, photographs, obscure stories, and the rituals by which fans keep the past alive. At its heart is the disappearance of the Mets tabloid-cover contest, which becomes a meditation on how baseball communities preserve not only facts and memories, but the people and shared experiences that give those memories meaning. There is a season in baseball that does not appear in the standings. It begins sometime after the last out, when the players go home and the stadium becomes a building again. The bases are put away. The grass is cut for the last time. The crowds disappear. A man who spent six months arguing with strangers about the batting order discovers that he has no batting order to argue about. Yet baseball does not really end. It merely becomes something else. In New York, it becomes memory first. Then argument. Then rumor. Then history. It becomes old photographs and old box scores, names remembered for reasons nobody can quite explain. It becomes the newspaper covers that once seemed so important and now look almost tender in their exaggeration. HOW'S THAT? MANY TO COME. HI & MIGHTY. SHORT-STAFFED. A LEFT TO THE MIDSECTION. SOTO'S SECRET. STAIRWAY TO HEAVEN. SPRING PAINING. CAN'T CATCH A BREAK. CRUELLA DE BOONE. BUDDY BALL! The words were made to last one morning. They lasted longer than that. There is something peculiar about a New York sports headline. It has the life expectancy of a mayfly and the memory of a gravestone. It is intended to be read with coffee, perhaps carried onto a train, perhaps folded under an arm. By tomorrow it is wrapping paper. Ten years later, somebody looks at it and suddenly remembers exactly where he was. That is one of baseball's secret gifts: it allows the past to remain contemporary. A photograph of a player does this. So does an old ticket. So does a scorecard with a man's handwriting on it. So does a newspaper headline that once announced the arrival of a new Mets season as though the arrival itself were an event of national importance. The headlines were never merely headlines. They were declarations of hope. They told New York that spring was coming. They told New York that somebody new had arrived. They told New York that Pete Alonso was still Pete Alonso, that Juan Soto was now a Met, that some pitcher might save the rotation, that some hitter might save the middle of the order, that the coming season would be different from the last one because the coming season always has that advantage over the last. The future has never lost a game. That is why April is so beautiful. There was an old series of covers from late March and early April: HIGHEST HOPES, ENCORE! ENCORE!, OPENING ACTS, SOTO MUCH BETTER, THAT'S 1 FOR JUAN!, PAYBACK, TOR-PETE-O!, REPLAY IT AGAIN! and IT'S PETE'S PLACE AGAIN. Look at them now and you know too much. That is the problem with history. The people in those photographs did not know what you know. They were standing at the beginning. You are standing at the end. And so the optimism becomes almost painful. One person looking back at the old covers remarked that the optimism would be depressing. Another answered, simply, that it was fun to reminisce. Both were right. The sadness and the pleasure are the same thing. Baseball is perhaps the only sport that can make a man nostalgic for something he himself once laughed at. There were awards during that season, too. Pete Alonso was the National League Player of the Month in April. Luisangel Acuña was the Rookie of the Month. Edwin Díaz was a Reliever of the Month. Alonso won another weekly award. Juan Soto won one. Francisco Lindor won one. Later there were Silver Sluggers for Alonso and Soto, a Reliever of the Year award for Díaz, and All-MLB recognition for Soto and Díaz. Jonah Tong and Nolan McLean appeared in the minor-league honors as well. These things have a funny place in baseball memory. Awards are supposed to settle arguments. They rarely do. A fan hears that his favorite player has won an award and is pleased for approximately twelve seconds. Then comes the inevitable question: Yes, but did they win? A month is not a pennant. A Silver Slugger is not a parade. A good season is not necessarily a championship season. Baseball has always been cruel about this distinction. It allows you to accumulate individual accomplishments while denying you the collective one you really wanted. And yet those smaller accomplishments become the pieces from which the memory is eventually constructed. That is how a baseball season survives. Not as one thing, but as hundreds of small things. A home run. A pitching performance. A newspaper cover. A player of the month. A prospect's name. An obscure story from 1964. A photograph nobody else remembers. A joke that makes sense only to people who have been around for years. Then, suddenly, you have a history. There was an especially strange kind of history being preserved in the winter: an annual contest devoted to choosing the best Mets tabloid covers. It had been running for eleven years. There were hundreds of covers. Newsday. The Daily News. The Post. Each headline represented a tiny piece of the Mets' life, and together they formed something like an unofficial scrapbook of New York baseball. The numbers themselves were absurd and therefore beautiful. In 2025 there were 266 covers in the competition: 100 from Newsday, 81 from the Daily News and 85 from the Post, with more expected as the offseason continued. There would be at least twenty-seven first-round polls. The previous year had produced 256 covers. Two hundred and sixty-six. Think about that. Two hundred and sixty-six mornings in which somebody in New York had looked at the Mets and decided that what happened yesterday could be compressed into four words and printed in enormous type. That is a lot of baseball. It is also a lot of remembering. Someone described the contest as the saving grace of many a bad season. Someone else called it the most wonderful time of the year. Another compared its slow beginning to spring training: the countdown, the anticipation, the first underwhelming efforts, the feeling that something better was coming. This is what baseball people do. They create seasons inside seasons. They need rituals. If there is no game, they will discuss a photograph. If there is no photograph, they will discuss a trade. If there is no trade, they will find an old player nobody has thought about in forty years and ask where he came from. And if there is nothing else, they will count down to something. Baseball is a sport uniquely suited to this kind of devotion because it has always been more than what happens between the foul lines. Its history is so enormous that almost any road leads somewhere. A man can begin with a Mets headline from March and end up reading about a player who appeared in one game in 1963. That is not getting distracted. That is baseball. There was another story in these days, about a man named Wilbur Huckle, and a mystery more than sixty years old. Somebody had gone looking for an answer and found people who had been involved in the original campaign to make Huckle's name known. A reader called it an amazing story. Another called it a fun read. This, too, is baseball. The game keeps producing questions long after the people who created them have disappeared. Who was that man? Why did they do that? What happened? Where did he go? Who remembers? Sometimes the answer matters less than the search. Because searching is another way of saying that the past still belongs to us. Then, in November, something happened that had nothing to do with the Mets' batting average, their rotation or their bullpen. The cover contest was canceled. There had not been enough participation. The person who had spent eleven years putting it together decided it was no longer worth the time. It would not return the following year. And suddenly the disappearance of a little baseball ritual seemed much larger than a little baseball ritual. One person wrote that he feared the whole community was dying. Another said he had voted every day. Someone else wrote that it was sad. And then came the sentence that perhaps said the most: “The saddest headline of all.” That was the headline. Not about a pitcher. Not about a trade. Not about a Mets loss. About something disappearing. There is a particular sadness in watching an old baseball institution vanish. It is not the dramatic sadness of a player dying or a stadium being demolished. It is quieter. One day something is there. Then one day fewer people come. Then fewer still. Eventually the person who has been carrying it decides to put it down. Nobody writes a newspaper story about it. There is no ceremony. There is no moment of silence. The season simply gets a little smaller. One of the readers said that when another long-running Mets community disappeared, he would have no internet home. That sentence has the melancholy of an old ballpark. Because people think they are following baseball. Often they are following each other. They are following the people who remember the same games. The people who understand why a particular photograph is funny. The people who know why one obscure player matters. The people who can look at an old headline and remember the afternoon it represented. That is what a baseball community really is. It is a collection of witnesses. And when one witness leaves, something goes with him. Not the facts. The facts remain. The Mets won this game. That player hit that home run. This pitcher won that award. That headline appeared on that morning. But facts are not memory. Memory requires somebody to remember. This is why the old tabloid covers matter. This is why the awards matter. This is why the obscure mystery matters. This is why somebody still bothers to care about the name Wilbur Huckle. It is why a man can look at an old picture of Pete Alonso and remember not merely Alonso, but the version of himself who believed that the coming season might be the season. That man is gone, too. We all are. Baseball is partly the story of players aging. It is also the story of fans aging. The newspapers disappear. The players retire. The websites change. The jokes become incomprehensible to younger people. The names on the roster change. The people who used to argue until midnight stop arguing. And still, somewhere, somebody opens an old Mets newspaper. He sees a headline. He remembers. For a moment, the season comes back. The ballpark fills. The grass is green. The pitcher is young. The season has not gone wrong yet. There is no final score. There is only the beginning. And perhaps that is why we save these things. Not because they were important at the time. Because, years later, they remind us that once, for a little while, they were. And sometimes that is enough to keep baseball alive.

The Mets activated first baseman Jared Young from the seven-day injured list. The Mets activated right-hander Robert Stock from the 15-day injured list. The Mets activated right-hander Christian Scott from the 15-day injured list. The Mets activated left-hander Philip Abner. The Mets activated right-hander Daniel Duarte from the 15-day injured list. The Mets activated right-hander Jonathan Pintaro from the 15-day injured list. The Mets recalled shortstop Christian Cairo from Syracuse. The Mets recalled right-hander Cameron Weston from Syracuse. The Mets recalled catcher Hayden Senger from Syracuse. The Mets recalled right-hander Jack Weisenburger from the FCL Mets. The Mets recalled right-hander Dylan Ross from Syracuse. The Mets recalled first baseman Eric Wagaman from Syracuse. Shortstop Zack Short elected free agency.

Thornton and Lavender were both prospects from whom some productivity was expected, so I don't really think they qualify as dark horses in the strictest sense. Jared Young, a career minor leaguer/Quadruple-A guy who had his 'breakout' season at 30? Now that's the definition of a dark horse. So he gets my vote. Daniel Duarte is more of a dark horse than Lavender was. He was a scrap heap find, nearly 30, hadn't done much, then he went 2-0 with a 2.12 mark and 0.809 WHIP in 24 games.