Cowtipper

Chapter 10: The Price of Hope Summary: The piece reflects on Steve Cohen’s first five years as Mets owner, tracing how his spending, organizational investment, and ambition transformed the franchise’s expectations even as the results repeatedly fell short of the championships New York demanded. Ultimately, it argues that Cohen’s most lasting impact may not yet be measured in wins or payrolls, but in changing Mets fans from people accustomed to lowering their expectations into people who once again believe something great should be possible. There are owners who arrive at a baseball club quietly, almost apologetically, as if they have inherited a house and are not quite sure which rooms they are permitted to enter. Steve Cohen did not arrive that way. He arrived in New York with the force of weather. For five years the Mets had been his, and five years is a useful span of time in baseball. It is long enough to forget the precise sound of the old machinery and short enough to remember why you wanted it replaced. It is long enough for a prospect to become a regular, for a free agent to become a memory, for a manager to become an ex-manager, for a championship window to be opened and then, almost imperceptibly, to begin closing. Cohen brought money, and he brought it in quantities that changed the vocabulary of Mets baseball. There had been owners before him who talked about winning and owners who said they wanted to win and owners who seemed to believe that winning was a pleasant by-product of responsible bookkeeping. Cohen's Mets were different. Money would not be the excuse. If a player was wanted, there was money to pursue him. If the stadium needed something fixed, there was money for that, too. If the organization needed more scouts, more development people, more analytics, more machinery behind the machinery, there was money. The scoreboard at Citi Field was repaired. It sounds like a small thing, and perhaps in the ledger it was. But baseball is played in places, and people remember places. A scoreboard that works properly is not a championship. It is not even a good bullpen. Yet there was something symbolic in it. The house was being tended to. The Mets were being tended to. The club's reputation changed, too. Players wanted to come to New York. The organization acquired an aura of ambition. The old sense that being a Met meant occasionally wandering into a dysfunctional room was diminished. The farm system, scouting operation, player development and analytics departments were expanded and rebuilt, although those are the sorts of changes whose true results cannot be seen immediately. Baseball is full of investments whose dividends belong to somebody three years from now. This was the paradox of Cohen's first five years. The Mets became more serious before they became more successful. They became richer before they became wiser. There were moments when Cohen seemed to believe that if you wanted to win badly enough, you could simply buy your way through the waiting. Max Scherzer. Justin Verlander. Francisco Lindor. The pursuit of Carlos Correa. The great contracts arrived with the great expectations that accompany them. New York had seen this movie before, but never quite at this scale. And then there was the curious lesson that baseball keeps teaching men with money: you cannot buy tomorrow. The Scherzer and Verlander years carried the unmistakable excitement of a club refusing to wait. Yet baseball is not an auction in which the highest bidder receives the pennant. Players age. Arms break. Chemistry changes. Prospects fail. Prospects surprise. A contract signed in December can become an immovable object by July. A brilliant plan can meet a torn ligament. Cohen eventually changed direction. The early impulse toward the spectacular gave way to something more deliberate, with David Stearns brought in to run baseball operations. The organization began talking more about process and development and less about simply acquiring the biggest available name. That did not make the Mets easy to understand. They could win and still leave you wondering. They could be competitive and still finish without the thing that competitive teams ultimately want. There was an improvement in the atmosphere, an improvement in the roster, an improvement in the building, an improvement in the sense that something was happening. Yet the final standings remained stubbornly indifferent to all of this. This is where ownership grades become strange things. A man can spend without limit and still not control the outcome. He can hire people he believes are brilliant and discover that brilliance does not necessarily arrive on schedule. He can make the Mets more attractive, more modern, more ambitious and more financially powerful and still find himself standing outside the final door. The fans know this, although they sometimes pretend otherwise. They also know that the alternative is not attractive. There is a particular kind of baseball memory that comes from having suffered through an owner you did not trust. Once you have lived through years in which the organization appears to be thinking primarily about itself, the mere sight of an owner willing to spend can feel like sunlight. The Mets' attendance improved. Winning returned. The building became livelier. The possibility of something better became ordinary again. But New York is a difficult place to stop at ordinary. New York wants the parade. The newspapers understood this before anyone else. They always do. They reduced the seasons to enormous type and a few words, because that is what newspapers do when they are trying to capture the emotional temperature of a city. In December there was DAY JUAN, followed by KING OF QUEENS, A BRAND NEW START OF IT!, JACKPOT! and NEW KING OF QUEENS. Later came MAN OF STEAL and IT'S A WONDERFUL DEAL. The headlines were ridiculous, magnificent, disposable. They were also honest. This is how New York experiences baseball. A player arrives and for a few days he is not merely a player. He is an idea. A signing becomes a promise. A home run becomes evidence that the future has already arrived. A losing streak becomes a referendum. A bad bullpen becomes a crisis in civilization. In April, the newspapers could print HIGHEST HOPES, ENCORE! ENCORE!, OPENING ACTS, SOTO MUCH BETTER and IT'S PETE'S PLACE AGAIN. There is something touching about those covers now. The people looking at them later know what the people looking at them then did not: that optimism is always temporary, and that this is precisely why it is valuable. One observer looking back at the April covers said simply, “The optimism we had. This is going to be depressing.” Another answered: “Yeah but it's fun to reminisce.” That may be the truest description of baseball ever written. It is fun to reminisce because baseball gives us the peculiar privilege of remembering what we believed before we knew what happened. The old optimism is not embarrassing. It is evidence of having cared. And so the five years of Cohen become less a story about money than about belief. Money changed the Mets. It changed what was possible. It changed the expectations of the players and the expectations of the fans. It changed the stadium and the organization behind the stadium. It changed the conversation from Can they afford him? to Should they sign him? That is a considerable transformation. But money could not change the fundamental cruelty of baseball. There are nine players in the field. There are 162 games. The season does not care what you paid for the shortstop. A pitcher does not throw harder because his contract is enormous. A prospect does not mature because an owner is impatient. A baseball does not know the size of the payroll when it leaves the bat. And this is why the five-year question is more complicated than a grade. Cohen gave the Mets resources. He gave them relevance. He gave them a sense that the organization belonged among the ambitious clubs rather than among those apologizing for themselves. He made the Mets important again. But importance and accomplishment are not synonyms. The Mets still needed a center fielder who could actually play center field. They still needed a bullpen. They still needed to determine what the rotation ought to be. They still had questions around the middle infield and third base. They still had to decide what to do with Pete Alonso and Edwin Díaz. The list was long enough that even unlimited money could not make it short. And perhaps that is where Cohen's first five years should be remembered. Not as a failure. Not as a triumph. As a beginning that had gone on long enough to acquire a history. Five years earlier, the Mets had acquired a new owner and with him a new set of expectations. Five years later, the expectations were still there, perhaps larger than ever. The Mets had become a club that people expected to matter. They had become a club that could no longer hide behind poverty, neglect or indifference. Now came the harder part. To win. There is an old cruelty in baseball that the scoreboard remembers only what happened and nothing about what was intended. It does not remember the good press conference, the beautiful free-agent introduction, the repaired scoreboard, the improved scouting department, the optimistic April, the photograph of the new star holding his jersey. It remembers the score. Yet perhaps the score is not the whole history. Perhaps five years of Steve Cohen had already altered something more durable than a win total. He had altered what a Mets fan was permitted to expect when he walked through the gates at Citi Field. For years, the Mets fan had learned to lower his expectations before the season could hurt him. Now he could expect more. That expectation, too, has a price. It is the price of hope. And in New York, hope has always been expensive.

Tyler Wade has retired.

Austin Slater - 33-year-old former Mets outfielder (2026) hit .273/.360/.364 in 22 at-bats for the Rays after leaving the Mets in April. For their Triple-A team, he hit .283/.387/.398 with 3 home runs and 15 RBI in 45 games. At all major league levels, he hit .231 with no home runs and 3 RBI in 65 ABs. Stephen Tarpley - 33-year-old former Mets pitcher (2021) went 3-6 with a 6.01 ERA in 16 starts for Monterrey in Mexico. He was traded to the Leones de Yucatan in August, but didn't play for them. Tyrone Taylor - 32-year-old former Mets outfielder (2024-2026) hit .351/.390/.500 with 1 home run and 10 RBI in 74 ABs over 30 games for the Cubs after being traded at the deadline. He hit .279/.325/.502 with 11 home runs and 38 RBI on the year as a whole. Blade Tidwell -25-year-old former Mets pitcher (2025) was 1-2 with a 4.45 ERA in 17 games (9 starts) for the Giants. For their Triple-A team, he was 2-3 with a 4.38 ERA in 16 games (15 starts). Wilfredo Tovar - 35-year-old former Mets infielder (2013-2014, 2021) hit .263/.294/.351 with 1 home run and 9 RBI in 30 games for Yucatan in Mexico. Justin Turner - 41-year-old former Mets infielder (2010-2013) hit .295/.395/.469 with 6 home runs and 28 RBI in 65 games for the Toros de Tijuana in Mexico. Edwin Uceta - 28-year-old former Mets pitcher (2023) went 0-1 with a 6.23 ERA in 4 relief appearances across two stops in the Rays system. He averaged 14.5 K/9 IP. Jose Urena - 35-year-old former Mets pitcher (2025) went 3-4 with a 4.01 ERA in 16 games for the Tohoku Rakuten Golden Eagles in Japan. For their farm club, he went 1-2 with a 4.35 ERA in 6 games. Justin Verlander - 43-year-old former Mets pitcher (2023) was 0-1 with a 7.00 ERA in 2 starts for the Tigers. For their Triple-A club, he was 1-1 with a 3.38 ERA in 2 starts. Jonathan Villar - 35-year-old former Mets infielder (2021) hit .300/.377/.458 with 5 home runs, 32 RBI and 15 steals in 60 games for Durango in Mexico. More figures who were in the Mets system but never played for the big club: Jesus Baez - played in the Mets system from 2022 to 2025. Traded for Ryan Helsley. Hit .283/.328/.587 with 39 home runs and 109 RBI in 113 games across two stops in the Cardinals system in 2026. Nate Dohm - Mets 3rd round pick in 2024. Played in their system from 2024-2025. Traded for Ryan Helsley. Went 2-7 with a 7.19 ERA in 25 games (13 starts) across two stops in the Cardinals system in 2026. Averaged 9.8 K/9. Frank Elissalt - Mets 19th round pick in 2024. Played in their system from 2024 to 2025. Traded for Ryan Helsley. Went 4-7 with a 3.41 ERA in 24 games (10 starts) across three stops in the Cardinals system in 2026. Averaged 9.7 K/9. Drew Gilbert - played in Mets system in 2024 and 2025, originally acquired in deal for Justin Verlander. Traded for Tyler Rogers. Hit .238/.330/.394 with 11 home runs and 43 RBI in 134 games for the Giants. For their Triple-A club, he hit .289/.389/.400 in 11 games. Raimon Gomez - played in Mets system from 2021 to 2023 and in 2025. Traded for Cedric Mullins. Went 0-0 with a 19.29 ERA in 13 relief appearances across two stops in the Orioles chain in 2026. Chandler Marsh - played in the Mets system from 2024 to 2025. Traded for Cedric Mullins. Went 5-3 with a 4.44 ERA in 40 relief appearances in the Orioles system in 2026. Had 71 Ks in 48 2/3 innings. Anthony Nunez - played in the Mets system from 2024 to 2025. Traded for Cedric Mullins. Went 3-2 with a 4.07 ERA in 52 relief appearances for the Orioles in 2026, averaging 10.0 K/9. Went 0-2, 4.85 in 11 appearances for their Triple-A club. He had 21 Ks in 13 IP there. Wander Suero - free agent signee played in the Mets system in 2025. Went 5-4 with a 7.04 ERA in 51 relief appearances for the A's Triple-A club in 2026. David Villar - free agent signee played in the Mets system in 2025. Hit .267/.362/.505 with 5 home runs and 19 RBI in 30 games for Durango in 2026.

Chapter 9: The Arithmetic of November Summary: The piece explores the Mets’ offseason as one of speculation, when payrolls, free agents, injuries, roster holes, and newspaper headlines replace the certainty of games and turn the empty ballpark into a canvas for possibility. It also widens its lens to baseball’s larger battles over money and power, ultimately contrasting the winter’s endless theories and projections with the approaching spring, when contracts and expectations must once again become players, games, and results. There is a particular kind of silence that comes to a baseball city in November. It is not really silence. The telephones are ringing in offices. Agents are talking. General managers are making lists. Players are taking airplanes home, or staying somewhere warm, or beginning the strange winter work of keeping their bodies ready for a season that is still four months away. The newspapers are full of rumors. The television people have discovered free agency. Somewhere, somebody is saying that this is the year the Mets finally get it right. But the ballpark is empty. That changes everything. In New York, the empty ballpark has always been an invitation to imagination. A season has ended and the next one has not yet begun, which means that for a little while the Mets are not what they were. They are what they might become. The arithmetic begins. Three hundred forty-one million dollars had been spent on the 2025 tax payroll. The Mets had missed the postseason. The projected payroll for 2026 was somewhere around $265 million, although another accounting put the actual figure closer to $247 million. There was money, certainly, but money in baseball is never simply money. It is commitments. It is arbitration. It is injured players. It is the contracts you already signed and the contracts you wish you had not signed and the contracts you have not yet signed but already know you probably need. And then there was Pete Alonso. And Edwin Díaz. Keep both, and suddenly the winter became a problem in addition. Add a starting pitcher, perhaps an ace. Add another starter. Find a right-handed designated hitter. Find a center fielder. Find an eighth-inning reliever. Find another reliever. Do all of this without wandering into a payroll of four hundred million dollars. The arithmetic did not seem impossible until you began adding it. Thirty million here. Fifteen million there. Twenty million for another bat. Ten million for a center fielder. Ten for the bullpen. Seven for another arm. Soon enough the Mets were spending money that had not yet been invented. This is one of the peculiarities of modern baseball. In the old days, winter meant wondering whether a player could hit .300. Now it means wondering whether an accounting department can make a roster fit beneath an invisible line drawn by lawyers and economists. Yet baseball itself remains stubbornly physical. The Mets could spend $400 million and still need somebody who can catch a fly ball in center field. That was the problem. The center-field problem was discussed with the seriousness usually reserved for matters of national security. One possibility was to keep a player whose bat did not inspire confidence because his glove was valuable. Another was to find someone who could actually play the position every day. Another was to hope the young players would arrive before the problem became fatal. There was always another possibility. Baseball is an industry built upon possibilities. That was why José Castillo could return to the Mets after having left them, been claimed by Seattle, exposed by Seattle, claimed by Baltimore, and then exposed again. He had pitched well for the Mets, with a 2.35 ERA in fifteen and a third innings, but good pitching is not always the same thing as secure employment. A pitcher can be useful and still become available. Castillo was six feet six inches tall, a large left-hander who had acquired the sort of nickname that baseball gives large men because baseball is incapable of allowing a large man to remain merely large. He was Big Dude. Then there was Ji Hwan Bae, a fast man who could play center, second and short, who had never quite turned his minor-league hitting into major-league hitting, but who could run. There are players who make a roster because they can do one thing better than most people. Speed is one of those things. The Mets, as usual, were collecting possibilities. Maybe. That was the word of November. Maybe the pitcher gets healthy. Maybe the young player is ready. Maybe the cheap outfielder becomes useful. Maybe the veteran has one more good season. Maybe the expensive player earns the contract. Maybe the money is there. Maybe it isn't. The newspapers had been less cautious a year earlier. They had screamed in the old New York way. WINTER WONDER LAND. MEET THE $765M MET. JUAN IS A MET. THE AMAZIN' JUAN. THE HOUSE THAT JUAN BUILT. The headlines had turned Juan Soto into an event before he had played a game for New York. That is what New York does. It takes a transaction and makes it mythology. A contract becomes architecture. A player becomes a neighborhood. A baseball team becomes a referendum on the future. The next morning, the newspapers are still there. The player is still there. But the future has moved on. That is why the old covers are so interesting. They preserve the instant before history had the chance to correct them. One cover says, in effect, this is going to be wonderful. Another asks what will happen next. Another finds a joke. Another finds a pun. Another tries to explain the whole thing in six words. They are all attempts to stop time. Baseball refuses. The Mets had spent years learning this. They had also learned that money cannot protect a team from baseball's oldest enemy: uncertainty. A player can be expensive and hurt. A pitcher can be talented and ineffective. A carefully constructed roster can develop holes in places nobody imagined. The Mets could spend more than almost anyone and still find themselves watching October from home. Someone looking at the payroll said the real problem was not having too little money. It was having too much money tied up in hurt or bad players. That sentence contained more baseball wisdom than most of the winter projections. Because the history of the game is filled with men who looked like answers when they signed their contracts. Then they got hurt. Or they got old. Or they stopped hitting. Or the league adjusted. Or the manager stopped trusting them. Or the player stopped trusting himself. And so the winter continues. The Mets search for another pitcher. Another bat. Another center fielder. Another reliever. The general manager searches for value. The owner searches for the right amount of money to spend. The fans search for a reason to believe. And somewhere, far from all the arithmetic, a man throws a baseball. That is still how the whole thing begins. A ball leaves a hand. A hitter swings. A runner breaks for second. A fielder goes back on a fly ball. All the payroll tables and luxury-tax thresholds and projections disappear for nine innings. Then the game ends. And the winter comes back. There was another argument happening in baseball, too, larger than the Mets, although Mets fans naturally found a way to make it personal. Bryce Harper had confronted Rob Manfred over the possibility of a salary cap. The words were blunt, angry words, the sort that once would have seemed almost unimaginable coming from a star player speaking to the commissioner of baseball. But perhaps baseball had reached a strange place where such anger was no longer unimaginable. The argument was about money, but not only money. It was about who gets to decide what baseball is. Owners. Players. Commissioners. Fans. The men who play the game and the men who own the buildings in which it is played. There was talk of a salary cap. There was talk of a salary floor. There was talk of competitive balance. There was talk of revenue. There was talk of whether teams that claimed to be small-market teams were actually small-market teams, and whether the system intended to help them was helping them for the reasons it was supposed to. Everybody had a number. Everybody had a theory. Everybody had a reason. That is how baseball arguments work when the season is over. During the season, the argument is settled by the scoreboard. In November, nobody has that luxury. So the argument grows. And somewhere in the middle of it, a Mets fan found himself uncomfortable because he liked Bryce Harper. This, too, is baseball. You can dislike the uniform and admire the player. You can dislike the Phillies and agree with their first baseman. You can spend years watching a man beat your team and still find yourself nodding when he says something that sounds right to you. Rivalry is simple only when the games are being played. Away from the field, baseball becomes more complicated. Perhaps that is why November baseball can be so fascinating. It strips away the certainty of the games and leaves only people. Players looking for contracts. Players trying to stay healthy. Managers looking for jobs. Executives trying to build teams. Owners deciding how much they are willing to spend. Fans staring at payroll projections late at night. And the newspapers, always the newspapers, turning all of it into six words in giant type. A baseball season is a long argument that ends with a score. The winter is the argument after the score. Nobody wins it. Not really. There is only another season waiting somewhere beyond the cold, another spring training clubhouse, another row of lockers, another pitcher rubbing a baseball between his fingers. The Mets will arrive there with a different roster. They will arrive with the same problems. They will arrive with new hopes. And some of the old ones. The headlines will come again. They always do. Someone will be called the future. Someone will be called a steal. Someone will be called a disaster. Someone will be called a bargain. Someone will be called the next great Met. Then April will come, and the names will become men again. The money will become games. The projections will become statistics. And the winter, which seemed so full of possibilities, will finally have to give way to the only thing baseball has ever really trusted: What happens next.

Marcus Semien Sucks It seems you're not wrong. Marcus Semien, 2021-2023: 162 G, 33 HR, 95 RBI, 36 2B, .263/.329/.482, 121 OPS+ on average Marcus Semien, 2024-2026: 142 G, 18 HR, 62 RBI, 19 2B, .228/.299/.367, 91 OPS+ on average At least he had positive WAR in 2026!

I enjoy putting them into a text to speech AI and having them read aloud.

Al Herring (1936-2026) was a Los Angeles-born outfielder who spent six seasons in the minor leagues from 1958 to 1963, compiling a .268 batting average with 610 hits in 657 games and briefly reaching Triple-A. A productive hitter early in his career, he hit .332 in his first professional season and .300/.365/.417 in 1960 before being traded by the St. Louis Cardinals to the Chicago Cubs for Bobby Locke in April 1962.

Chapter 8: The Autumn of Questions Summary: The piece examines the Mets' uncertain 2025-2026 offseason through Sean Manaea's disappointing season, the revolving door of managers, the fragility of players' bodies, and the small transactions that can quietly reshape a roster. Beneath the statistics, headlines, injuries, and speculation is a meditation on baseball's perpetual uncertainty: when one season ends, nobody knows what the next will bring, yet the unknowable future is precisely what makes people begin hoping again. There is an autumn that belongs to baseball and an autumn that belongs to everyone else. The second one is marked by leaves. The first is marked by names. A pitcher who was supposed to be a No. 1 becomes a question. A manager who seemed securely employed becomes a former manager. A player who had been somewhere in the middle of the roster becomes a transaction. A man who had been a star becomes somebody else's possibility. The standings disappear, the games stop, and yet baseball does not become quiet. It becomes speculative. The Mets had entered that autumn with Sean Manaea as one of those questions. He was supposed to be part of the answer. Instead he became part of the riddle. The previous year, he had been good enough to make people believe in him again. His 2024 ERA of 3.47 had seemed like evidence that the pitcher he had been could still be the pitcher he might become. Then came 2025, when everything seemed to go wrong at once. There were the loose bodies in his arm, the question of surgery, the diminished effectiveness, the short starts. He struck out 75 men in 60 innings, which sounds impressive until you realize that those 60 innings had been spread over fifteen appearances, twelve starts. He could overpower a hitter and then, somehow, overpower himself. Four innings became a kind of horizon he could see but rarely reach. This is the peculiar cruelty of pitching. A hitter may decline by degrees. His bat slows a little. His legs lose something. The ball that once went into the seats becomes a ball caught at the warning track. A pitcher can seem perfectly ordinary one season and then, suddenly, the machinery does not work. There is no graceful way to lose a fastball. And so people began asking what had happened to Manaea, and whether the Mets could fix him, and whether somebody else might be willing to believe that he could be fixed. One voice said, essentially, sell him while another man still thinks his pitching coach can solve the problem. Another looked at the underlying numbers and saw something less frightening: a superb strikeout-to-walk ratio, an unusually high BABIP, an abnormally high home-run rate. Perhaps the pitcher was not as bad as the season said he was. Perhaps the season was lying. That is another thing baseball teaches you. Numbers do not always tell the truth, but neither do your eyes. And somewhere in the middle of this argument came the thought that perhaps the Mets had not had one problem but several. Manaea. David Peterson. Kodai Senga. Other pitchers whose seasons had gone sideways. A rotation that, on paper, had seemed capable of carrying a club instead became another piece of the autumn mystery. Baseball people like answers because baseball gives them numbers. But the numbers are not always answers. Sometimes they are merely more questions, written with decimal points. The same thing was happening elsewhere in the game. Managers were being fired, resigning, retiring, moving upstairs, moving sideways. Rocco Baldelli was gone from Minnesota. Bob Melvin was gone from San Francisco. Brian Snitker was leaving Atlanta. Mike Shildt walked away from San Diego, saying that the stress had taken a severe toll and that he needed to take care of himself. There was something haunting about that particular departure because a manager usually leaves baseball on baseball's terms. He is dismissed. The door opens. Someone else walks in. Shildt chose his own door. There was dignity in that. The managerial carousel turned, and men who had spent their lives learning baseball suddenly found themselves being measured by strangers who had never managed anything more difficult than their own fantasy roster. Someone observed that nobody really understands what makes a good manager. Another suggested that perhaps the great managers are simply men who happened to arrive at the right time with the right players. That thought is uncomfortable because it removes some of the romance. We like to believe that Bruce Bochy wins because Bruce Bochy knows how to win. We like to believe that Terry Francona, Dusty Baker, Bobby Cox, and the others possessed some secret instrument unavailable to ordinary men. But baseball is cruel to simple explanations. A manager can make the right move and lose. He can make the wrong move and win. A player can hit .220 and drive in the winning run. A pitcher can have a beautiful game and lose 1-0. Still, the managers keep coming. A 33-year-old man can suddenly become the youngest manager in decades. A former catcher can become a manager long after his playing career has faded from ordinary memory. A reliever can retire, work in a front office, and then be handed a major-league dugout without ever having managed a game. Baseball is forever replacing itself with people who were once standing somewhere else. That is why the old photographs can be so startling. There is Don Mattingly, remembered now mostly for the bad back that helped shorten his career, even though the story of his back is more complicated than the casual memory. There is David Wright, whose own body eventually became part of his biography. There is Max Scherzer, who suffered a herniated disc and kept pitching. Miguel Cabrera, too. The body in baseball is always both an instrument and a liability. And then there is Joey Gerber, acquired by the Mets in November, one of those small transactions that arrive without trumpets. A pitcher who has done well in limited major-league duty. A pitcher with a history of a back injury. A pitcher who had surgery, missed time, returned, and continued his career. Somebody looks at the gap in his appearances and wonders whether he had been hurt. Somebody else knows that he had. Somebody else remembers a different player with a different back. Somebody makes a joke. Somebody takes offense. Somebody explains what he meant. Somebody explains the explanation. And then, finally, somebody says: I hope you're right and he is healthy. That sentence is more important than all the argument that preceded it. Because underneath the statistics and the transactions and the jokes and the theories, baseball is about bodies. Human bodies. A shoulder. An elbow. A back. A knee. A hand. A pair of legs trying to turn on a curveball. A spine carrying a man through another season because the calendar says he must report in February. We sometimes forget this when we turn players into numbers. We say a pitcher is a 3.90 ERA. We say a hitter is a .250 hitter. We say a manager is 2,252–2,266. We say a contract is four years. We say a player has one option remaining. But nobody has ever had an option remaining. Not really. There is only today. The Mets have always been especially good at reminding their followers of this. They have produced heroes, disappointments, miracles, disasters, comebacks and collapses, sometimes in the same week. Their history is filled with men who seemed finished and men who seemed destined, and the distance between those two conditions is often no greater than one bad pitch or one healthy winter. The newspapers once understood this. In the winter of 2025, old Mets newspaper covers were being gathered and remembered. There were the bright declarations: THE YEAR OF JUAN! THE FUTURE IS HERE! There were the demands: PLEASE SIGN PETE. There were the jokes, the puns, the desperate optimism that newspapers used to print in enormous type because New York baseball had always understood that hope sells papers. The headlines had once seemed enormous. Now they were artifacts. A phrase that had shouted from a newsstand became something a man could look at decades later and smile. THE YEAR OF JUAN! THE WRIGHT THING. PETE WHO? PLEASE SIGN PETE. They were little pieces of time, frozen before anyone knew what would happen next. That may be the real reason baseball people save such things. Not because the headlines were correct. Often they were not. We save them because they captured the moment before the future arrived. That is the beautiful thing about the baseball offseason. Nobody knows. The roster is a possibility. The pitcher is a possibility. The manager is a possibility. The injured player is a possibility. The young player in Syracuse is a possibility. The acquisition who seems insignificant in November may become important in June. The veteran who looks finished may find one more good season. The pitcher with the bad year may come back. The pitcher with the good year may not. And somewhere, perhaps in a clubhouse that has gone quiet for the winter, a player is lifting weights or throwing a baseball into a net or doing some monotonous exercise prescribed by a trainer who believes the body can be coaxed into cooperation. Outside, the season is over. Inside, it is beginning again. That is why baseball never really ends when the games end. The names keep moving. The men keep moving. The questions keep moving. And the rest of us, having watched one season disappear, begin doing what baseball people have always done when faced with the unknowable: We look at the numbers. We look at the headlines. We remember what happened. And then, despite everything we know, we begin to hope that next year will be different.

Chapter 7: The Past Standing Beside You Summary: The piece begins with Sandy Koufax and the Tropicana motel as a meeting place between baseball, music, youth, and the uncertain future, contrasting Koufax’s already-established legend with the musicians and dreamers who were still becoming themselves. It expands into a meditation on the way baseball careers, buildings, photographs, and former players gradually slip into the past, only to return unexpectedly through a name, an image, or a memory that briefly makes yesterday feel present again. There are places that seem to collect the past. Not preserve it, exactly. Preservation suggests order: photographs in albums, names on plaques, dates printed neatly beneath them. The past is rarely that orderly. It drifts. It gets lost. It leaves cigarette burns on tables and names in guest registers and photographs of people whose faces were famous for five minutes and mysterious for fifty years afterward. The Tropicana was one of those places. It stood on Santa Monica Boulevard, which is one of the great streets in the world for making people believe that something is about to happen. The Tropicana had rooms and a pool and the ordinary physical properties of a motel, but it also had a peculiar talent for attracting people who were not ordinary and who were, more often than not, trying to become something else. Sandy Koufax owned the place. This is the first fact that seems wrong. Sandy Koufax—the left arm, the perfect delivery, the quiet man who became something close to a myth while still young enough to have been somebody's kid brother—owned a motel in Los Angeles. A motel that became, in time, a crossroads for musicians, actors, misfits, dreamers and various other people who lived in the uncertain territory between obscurity and fame. You can imagine Koufax looking out at them. Or perhaps you cannot. That is part of the fascination. The baseball life and the life of the Tropicana seem, at first, to belong to separate civilizations. Koufax was precision. The Tropicana was accident. Koufax represented discipline, repetition, the same motion performed until it became beautiful. The people passing through his motel were often engaged in the opposite enterprise: experimentation, improvisation, noise, excess, trying something once simply because nobody had tried it that way before. Yet the motel filled with musicians. Tom Waits lived there. So did Rickie Lee Jones and Chuck E. Weiss. They shared rent and worked on music and somehow, amid the grime and uncertainty of young lives in Los Angeles, one of them disappeared for several days. He had fallen in love. When Weiss finally called, Waits listened to the explanation, said very little, hung up, shrugged and told Jones, simply, that Chuck E. was in love. There are stories that explain an entire era without intending to. That may be one of them. The Tropicana became a place where people arrived before they became the people we remember. The New York Dolls were there. The Ramones were there. Joan Jett had a childhood connection to the place. Blondie passed through. Clem Burke was photographed by the pool. Richard Hell came by, and apparently a party at the Tropicana was not quite a party until he did. The names pile up until the motel begins to sound less like a building than a fever dream. And somewhere in the middle of all this was Sandy Koufax. One can wonder what he thought. Perhaps that is the best question because it has no answer. We know the baseball player. We know the numbers. We know that he was not yet thirty when the end came. In his final season he made forty-one starts, threw 323 innings and struck out 317 men. His ERA was 1.73. He led the league in batters faced in both 1965 and 1966. The numbers tell us why he was great. They also tell us why he could not continue. But numbers do not tell us what it felt like to be twenty-nine years old and already approaching the end of something that other men would have given their lives to possess. The old baseball world was different in ways that are difficult now to explain. A pitcher might not know he was starting until the day of the game. Sometimes there was no meeting, no announcement, no carefully constructed five-day rotation. A glove on a stool with a new baseball inside might be the message. Your game. Get ready. Don Larsen learned this way, or something close to it, before his perfect game in the World Series. The idea that a player might want to know in advance when he would play was itself once regarded as a novelty. Players did not possess the elaborate advance knowledge and carefully negotiated control over their working lives that would later become ordinary. Baseball was harder on the body partly because baseball was harder on the body. Koufax was still only twenty-nine when he pitched his last season. There is something almost indecent about that now. We live in an age that expects athletes to extend themselves, to reinvent themselves, to find the next surgery, the next mechanical adjustment, the next trainer, the next pitch, the next opportunity. The career is assumed to continue until somebody finally takes it away. Koufax took himself away. Or perhaps his arm did. The distinction is not so large. Years passed. The Tropicana passed, too. Buildings do not know they are historic while history is happening inside them. The people in the rooms are too busy being young, or broke, or famous, or almost famous, or trying desperately not to be forgotten. Nobody stands in the hallway and whispers, Remember this. Someday people will wish they could see this place as it is tonight. They simply live there. A musician writes a song. A band photographs itself beside a pool. Somebody falls in love. Somebody gets married. The marriage does not last. A man wears an astonishing pair of trousers. Another man wears a cast. Somebody's mother appears in a photograph. Someone else has sunglasses. And decades later these details become evidence. Evidence that they were there. Evidence that the time existed. The strangest thing about baseball, perhaps, is that it understands this better than almost anything else. A baseball player leaves. Then he is somewhere else. J.D. Davis signs with another club. José Iglesias becomes a possibility with the Yankees, which is enough to make a Mets fan feel both tenderness and physical distress. Carlos Carrasco appears in pinstripes and then disappears. Tommy Pham goes to Pittsburgh. Seth Lugo leaves and discovers another version of himself in Kansas City. Noah Syndergaard winds up trying to make his way back from the ruins of the pitcher he once was. And Jacob deGrom keeps pitching. There he is again, years after leaving New York, wearing another uniform, striking out another generation of hitters. That is the cruel magic of former players. You think you have finished with them. You haven't. They turn up in Kansas City, Detroit, Mexico, Japan, Triple-A, an independent league, somebody else's bullpen. They are coaches. They are minor leaguers. They are released. They are traded for cash. They are remembered because somebody happens to see their name in a box score on a Tuesday afternoon. Robinson Canó is forty-two and hitting .366 in Mexico. Wilmer Flores is still playing. Chris Bassitt is still starting. Michael Conforto is still trying to find the old stroke. Dennis Santana has become, improbably or perhaps not improbably, a useful reliever in Pittsburgh. Noah Syndergaard is no longer the thunderbolt he once appeared to be, but the nickname survives because baseball is sentimental about its former selves. This is how baseball ages. Not gracefully. It scatters. The Mets you knew become Mets you used to know, and then former Mets, and then names you have to place. A player who once occupied an entire summer of your life becomes a transaction buried between two other transactions. He signs with an organization you barely follow. He gets released. He resurfaces in Mexico. He becomes a coach. He retires. The career does not end all at once. It leaks away. That is why the Tropicana photographs feel so strange. The young people in them do not know they are young. They are simply there. They have not yet become the people we know them to be. They have no idea which songs will survive, which marriages will fail, which bands will become legends, which ones will become trivia questions. They do not know that some stranger decades later will look at a photograph and recognize the location before recognizing the people. And Sandy Koufax, somewhere in the background of this strange California universe, had already lived the opposite experience. He knew what it was to become a legend. He knew what it was to have strangers remember the shape of your arm. He knew what it was to have the past catch up with you while you were still young. Maybe that is why the image of him at the Tropicana has such force. The motel was full of people becoming. Koufax was a man who had already become. But baseball and music have always shared one essential fact: neither lasts. The song ends. The inning ends. The career ends. The building comes down, or gets remodeled, or acquires a new name on its sign. The pool is drained. The photographs remain. Somebody finds one and asks who these people were. Somebody else knows. And for a little while the dead, the famous, the forgotten and the merely young all come back together. Sandy is there. Tom is there. Rickie is there. The Dolls are there. The Ramones are there. Blondie is there. Richard Hell is there. And somewhere, almost invisibly, is the future. It is waiting for all of them. That may be the most moving thing about old photographs. We look at them knowing what happened afterward. The people in them do not. They are standing beside the pool. They are laughing. They are waiting for the next song, the next game, the next night. They have no idea that someday we will call this the past. Baseball knows the feeling. Every spring it gives us the same promise: another season, another beginning, another chance to believe that the thing we are watching might last. Then October comes. Then winter. Then another spring. And the players change. The uniforms change. The buildings change. But if you are lucky, something remains—the memory of a pitcher who once seemed capable of stopping time, or a motel where musicians found one another, or a former Met whose name suddenly appears in a box score and takes you back twenty years. You look at the name. You remember the face. And for a moment the past is not past at all. It is standing beside you.

Fernando Salas - 41-year-old former Mets pitcher (2016-2017) was 1-1 with a 4.05 ERA in 22 relief appearances for Tabasco in Mexico. Ali Sanchez - 29-year-old former Mets catcher (2020) hit .244/.275/.302 with 1 home run and 8 RBI in 51 games (86 ABs) for the Yankees. He hit .227/.327/.375 with 6 home runs and 11 RBI for their Triple-A club. Gary Sanchez - 33-year-old former Mets catcher (2023) hit .209/.349/.422 with 12 home runs and 38 RBI in 86 games for the Brewers. Yolmer Sanchez -34-year-old former Mets infielder (2022) hit.274/.375/.407 with 8 home runs, 78 RBI and 20 steals in 125 games for the Angels Triple-A club in Salt Lake City. Dennis Santana - 30-year-old former Mets pitcher (2023) went 2-5 with a 5.56 ERA in 57 relief appearances between the Pirates and Diamondbacks. Max Scherzer - 42-year-old former Mets pitcher (2022-2023) went 4-9 with a 5.74 ERA in 18 starts for the Blue Jays. He was 1-2 with a 4.34 ERA in 5 minor league starts across two stops. Luis Severino - 32-year-old former Mets pitcher (2024) went 2-6 with a 4.16 ERA in 12 starts for the Athletics. Paul Sewald - 36-year-old former Mets pitcher (2017-2020) went 2-5 with 24 saves and a 4.73 ERA in 62 relief appearances between the Diamondbacks and Blue Jays. Jose Siri - 31-year-old former Mets outfielder (2025) hit .241/.296/.417 with 10 home runs and 33 RBI in 108 games for the Angels. For their Triple-A team, he hit .288/.353/.504 with 5 home runs and 27 RBI in 32 games. Chance Sisco - 31-year-old former Mets catcher (2021) hit .315/.430/.546 with 13 home runs and 49 RBI in 65 games for the independent Chicago Dogs. Dominic Smith - 31-year-old former Mets infielder (2017-2022) hit .253/.311/.383 with 9 home runs and 46 RBI in 269 at-bats across 108 games for the Braves. Drew Smith - 33-year-old former Mets pitcher (2018, 2020-2024) was 1-1 with a 4.74 ERA in 27 relief appearances for the Twins Triple-A club in St. Paul. Gregory Soto - 31-year-old former Mets pitcher (2025) went 6-5 with 16 saves and a 3.63 ERA in 69 relief appearances for the Pirates. In 67 innings, he had 79 Ks. Brandon Sproat - 26-year-old former Mets pitcher (2025) went 3-7 with a 5.57 ERA in 22 games (19 starts) for the Brewers. For their Triple-A club, he went 0-2 with a 5.64 ERA in 8 games (4 starts). Ryne Stanek - 35-year-old former Mets pitcher (2024-2025) went 2-3 with a 4.02 ERA in 70 relief appearances for the Cardinals. Hunter Strickland - 38-year-old former Mets pitcher (2020) went 0-2 with a 13.14 ERA in 10 games (1 start) for the Angels Triple-A club. Cole Sulser - 36-year-old former Mets pitcher (2024) went 1-0 with a 4.31 ERA in 51 games (2 starts) for the Rays. For their Triple-A club, he went 1-0 with a 2.57 ERA in 6 relief appearances. More figures who were in the Mets system but never played for the big club: Wellington Aracena - played in the Mets system from 2022 to 2024. Traded for Gregory Soto. In the Diamondbacks system in 2026, he went 3-5 with a 5.38 ERA in 25 games (22 starts) between two stops. Alexander Canario - purchased by the Mets system for 2025, but never played in their system. Hit .251/.307/.410 with 16 home runs, 53 RBI and 12 steals in 129 games for Seibu in Japan in 2026. Diego Castillo - Minor league free agent signee played in the Mets system in 2025. Had also been signed for 2024, but never played in their system. Hit .528/.575/.806 with 2 home runs and 14 RBI in 36 at-bats for Union Laguna in Mexico and .304/.374/.422 with 5 home runs and 57 RBI in 95 games for Triple-A Round Rock in the Rangers system in 2026. Junior Fernandez - Minor league free agent signee played in the Mets system in 2025. Went 0-0 with a 0.00 ERA in one relief appearance for Monterrey in Mexico and 2-2 with a 4.65 ERA in 26 relief appearances for the Triple-A Nashville Sounds in 2026. Cameron Foster - Mets 14th round pick in 2022. Played in their system from 2023 to 2025. Traded for Gregory Soto. In 6 relief appearances for the Orioles in 2026, he went 0-0 with a 9.00 ERA. In the minor leagues, he went 0-3 with a 9.53 ERA in 16 relief appearances across two stops. Sean Harney - acquired to play in the Mets system (for international bonus-pool money) for the 2025 season, but never did. Spent 2026 in the Diamondbacks system, but never played in a game. Michael Hobbs - taken by the Mets in the 2024 Rule V draft, but never played in their system. Went 2-0 with a 2.45 ERA in 12 relief appearances across four stops in the Mariners system in 2026. Julian Merryweather - minor league free agent signee played in the Mets system in 2025. In 25 games (2 starts) across three stops in the Twins minor league system in 2026, he went 0-3 with a 4.05 ERA. In 26 2/3 innings, he had 35 Ks. Troy Schreffler - acquired in minor league trade; played in the Mets system in 2025. In 2026, he hit .280 with 4 home runs and 36 RBI in 64 games across two Atlantic League stops. Jon Singleton - minor league free agent signee played in the Mets system in 2025. Hit .267/.407/.579 with 26 home runs and 73 RBI in 86 games for Mexico City of the LMB in 2026.

Chapter 6: When September Takes Tomorrow Away Summary: The piece explores the peculiar intensity of September baseball, when standings become arithmetic, every game acquires consequences, and Mets fans find themselves depending on the fortunes of teams they otherwise scarcely notice. Beneath the playoff scenarios, historical memories, Hall of Fame arguments, and changing rules lies a meditation on baseball's essential uncertainty: no amount of calculation can replace the single pitch, swing, or bounce that ultimately determines what happens next. September is the month when baseball begins to lose its innocence. For five months the game can pretend to be eternal. There is always tomorrow. A bad Tuesday in May is followed by Wednesday, and a bad Wednesday by Thursday, and by the time the dog days arrive the bad Tuesdays have become indistinguishable from the good ones. The standings move, then move back. A player who is hitting .198 can be hitting .271 six weeks later. A pitcher can lose four games and then win five. The season is long enough to forgive almost everything. Then comes September. Suddenly there are five games left, or three, or one, and every result acquires a second meaning. A win is not merely a win. It is also a loss suffered by somebody else. A loss is not merely a loss. It is ground surrendered to two teams you may not have thought about since spring. The scoreboard ceases to be a scoreboard and becomes an adding machine. The Mets were living in that country. They were trying to remain ahead of Cincinnati and Arizona for one place, and the peculiar cruelty of this arrangement was that there were two pursuers and only one escape hatch. In another year, perhaps, you could chase one club and leave the other to worry about itself. Here the Mets had to keep both behind them. Every night became a little three-cornered race, and every baseball game seemed to have two shadows. There was arithmetic everywhere. Someone calculated that with five games remaining there were 32 possible win-loss combinations for any one club. Someone else enlarged the universe to all fifteen remaining games and arrived at 32,768 possibilities. Another man objected to the logic. A third explained the logic. A fourth consulted a computer. The argument became less about baseball than about what it means for one thing to be independent of another thing, which is perhaps the most baseball argument imaginable because baseball is the sport that has always encouraged men to believe that numbers, if stared at long enough, will reveal the truth. They do not always reveal the truth. They reveal possibilities. The truth arrives later. There was an old Mets season buried underneath all this, too. Twenty-six years earlier, in 1999, the Mets had come down the stretch in a similarly desperate condition, although the mathematics were different then. They had lost seven of eight, mostly to Atlanta and Philadelphia, and found themselves two games out with three to play. But they had only one team to catch. Houston and Cincinnati were fighting for the division; the loser would fall into the wild card race, and the Mets needed to catch that loser. It was simpler then. Not easier. Simpler. Cincinnati lost. Houston won. The Mets swept Pittsburgh. And in the final regular-season game, with the bases loaded and one out, a pitch to Mike Piazza went to the backstop and allowed Melvin Mora to score. The Mets had their victory and, with it, their trip to Cincinnati for the one-game playoff. Al Leiter pitched that game. Baseball has always been generous with these memories. A man remembers a pitch, a face, a scoreboard, a particular October afternoon, and suddenly twenty-six years disappear. The memory is not a statistic. It is a room you can walk into. That was why the present race felt familiar. And while the Mets were trying to get into the postseason, the rest of baseball was making its own arguments. There was the matter of Seattle, a franchise that had existed for nearly half a century without appearing in a World Series. There was Milwaukee, and Toronto, and Los Angeles. Four division winners had reached the League Championship Series without a wild card among them, each having won at least ninety games. The shape of the postseason seemed, for a moment, almost old-fashioned. People chose sides for reasons that had little to do with baseball. One man rooted for Milwaukee and Seattle. Another preferred the American League. Another chose Seattle despite disliking its colors. Another could not bring himself to root for Toronto because he knew too many nice Canadians and because one particularly unpleasant Seattle acquaintance happened to be a Mets enemy. This, too, is baseball. The reasons are never quite the reasons. Then there was the matter of time itself. Max Scherzer and Clayton Kershaw were moving toward another World Series, perhaps their last. Justin Verlander remained part of the same great constellation. Zack Greinke was in the conversation. For nearly a decade, it seemed, at least one of these pitchers had been somewhere near the final stage of the sport. And suddenly someone noticed that there were only a handful of World Series in the modern era that appeared destined to pass without a likely Hall of Famer standing on either side. That sent the conversation backward. Jeff Kent appeared. So did Chase Utley. Lou Whitaker. Bobby Grich. Don Mattingly. The Hall of Fame became what it always becomes when baseball people start talking about it seriously: a collection of ghosts who have not yet been properly classified. Whitaker's one-and-done appearance on the writers' ballot was particularly difficult for some to comprehend. He and Alan Trammell had seemed, in memory, like two halves of the same player, two men joined by geography and double plays and the strange mathematics of middle infielders. Trammell eventually went into the Hall. Whitaker did not. Someone checked the numbers and discovered that Trammell did not even have the higher WAR. There was a pause, figuratively speaking, in which everyone stared at the floor. Baseball can do that to you. It can take an argument that began with World Series history and end with the uncomfortable realization that the people who were deciding who belonged in Cooperstown were themselves men with prejudices, blind spots, favorites, moods, eras, and imperfect memories. We like to imagine the Hall as a monument. But monuments are built by people, and people are notoriously poor at measuring the past while they are living in it. The same problem appeared in the discussion of extra innings. Someone watching a game late at night made an observation that would have sounded absurd to a baseball man of another generation: extra-inning baseball was actually wonderful, and perhaps we had mistaken it for a problem. There was no runner beginning the inning on second. No artificial urgency. The game simply continued. This was not always how baseball was supposed to work, but it was how baseball used to work. Managers once had to consider what would happen if a game went fifteen innings. Pulling a starting pitcher early had consequences. A bullpen was not an infinite resource. The possibility of tomorrow's game lived inside tonight's decisions. Now, in the attempt to protect pitchers, baseball had altered the conditions that had once made pitchers necessary. More roster spots. More pitching. The universal designated hitter. More maneuvering. More specialization. More arms. And still there was a shortage of arms. The paradox was almost beautiful. The more baseball attempted to solve its pitching problem, the more pitching problems it seemed to create. Then the Mets' September games began to take on the quality of theater. The Pirates played Cincinnati. A Mets fan watched. Pittsburgh scored four runs early. Elly De La Cruz hit one. Later he collected another hit, and another. The score remained close. The innings accumulated. There were jokes about the Pirates, elaborate nicknames for them, nonsense cheers and improvised slogans. There was nothing particularly dignified about it. But that is another secret of baseball: when your team's season is on the line and another team's result matters, you can become passionately devoted to men you've never met wearing uniforms you don't own. The Pirates went ahead. Then Cincinnati tied it. Then the game went into extra innings. The ghost runner went to third on a wild pitch. A foul pop failed to score him. A double followed. There was a strikeout. A ground ball. It was the sort of inning that would have been merely baseball in another month. In late September it was fate. Cincinnati and Pittsburgh went to the eleventh. The Pirates scored. Then Cincinnati loaded the bases. The Reds had their last hope. A walk. A ground ball. Pirates win. There was joy in one corner of the baseball world and despair in another, although neither had anything to do with Pittsburgh's season in the abstract. The Pirates were simply the temporary custodians of somebody else's hope. That is how September works. A man can spend his evening cheering for Pittsburgh, a club he may otherwise barely notice, because for three hours Pittsburgh has become the thin blue line between the Mets and elimination. And then, when the game is over, the arithmetic resumes. There are still games to play. There are still scenarios. There are still 32,768 possible worlds, at least in theory. But baseball has never really been played in 32,768 worlds. It is played in one. In that one, the pitcher throws the ball. The batter swings. The ball goes somewhere. A man runs. Another man throws. Someone drops a ball. Someone catches one. A season that has occupied six months can turn on something that takes less than six seconds. This is why the arithmetic never quite replaces the game. It can tell you how many ways a season can end. It cannot tell you which one will happen. It can make one outcome 3.12 percent and another 31.25 percent, but it cannot make the 3.12 percent outcome feel any less real when it arrives. Baseball is full of percentages until the moment it isn't. Then it is a man standing at the plate. A ball in the air. A runner rounding third. A throw home. And somewhere, perhaps twenty-six years later, somebody remembering the expression on Mike Piazza's face when the pitch went to the backstop and Melvin Mora scored. The season was not a number then. It was a sound. It was a face. It was a night. And that is what September eventually leaves us with—not the calculations, not the 32,768 possible endings, not even the standings, which will soon be forgotten and replaced by another set of standings. What remains is the memory of having needed somebody else's team to win. Of having watched a game between strangers as though you belonged to both sides. Of discovering that a pitcher you had not thought about in years was suddenly the most important man in baseball. Of arguing about mathematics because the alternative was admitting that you were afraid. And of realizing, somewhere near midnight, that the season was almost gone. Baseball had been giving you tomorrows since April. Now it had begun taking them away.

I also looked and couldn't find one. Surely we must have.

Chapter 5: The Man Who Was There Summary: The piece uses Sandy Johnson’s unlikely rediscovery in a rehabilitation room to explore the forgotten men behind baseball’s famous players, tracing his path from minor-league player to influential scout and executive whose contributions helped shape generations of Mets and major-league talent. It broadens that meditation to consider how baseball preserves its history through uniforms, ownership, stadiums, names, and memories, ultimately arguing that history records the stars while memory keeps the people who stood beside them. Baseball has a way of keeping its ghosts. They do not always appear in Cooperstown, or on plaques, or in the photographs that hang in the corridors of stadiums. Sometimes they are found in less likely places: in a physical-therapy room, sitting beside a stranger, waiting for an exercise to end. That was where Sandy Johnson was found. He was eighty-five years old, and to the people around him he was simply an elderly man recovering from a fall. He had been running on a track at a gym when he fell. A therapist, apparently believing that age had taken more from him than it actually had, spoke loudly to him, as though volume could compensate for whatever she imagined he no longer understood. Another woman in the room noticed. She began talking to him. The conversation turned to injuries, and then to baseball. He mentioned that some of his injuries had come from his years in the minor leagues. He had played in the Pittsburgh organization in 1966, reaching Class A. It was a small career, if measured by the usual standards. No major-league statistics. No famous photograph. No baseball card that generations of children had carried in their bicycle spokes. The woman asked his name. "Sandy Johnson." The name was familiar. Not because of what Sandy Johnson had accomplished as a player, but because baseball careers do not always end when playing careers end. There, buried in an old Mets media guide, was the rest of the man. Sandy Johnson had become a scout, then an executive, then a vice president of scouting. He had worked for the Rangers and the Padres before joining the Mets. His fingerprints were somewhere on the careers of Ivan Rodriguez, Sammy Sosa, Kevin Brown, Rob Nen, Benito Santiago, Sandy Alomar Jr. and Mitch Williams. He had hired Omar Minaya as one of his scouts with Texas. Years later, Minaya brought Johnson into the Mets organization. This is one of the strange things about baseball history. A man who never becomes famous may help make famous men. His name disappears from the newspaper while the names of the players he helped discover remain. Johnson had played minor-league ball with Willie Stargell, Steve Blass, Dock Ellis, Al Oliver, Manny Sanguillen and Gene Alley. These were not anonymous men. They were the young men of another baseball, a baseball that traveled by bus and train and stayed in towns whose names have largely vanished from the memories of people who did not play there. In 1966, they were simply teammates. That may be one of the purest forms of equality baseball ever offers. The future Hall of Famer and the man who will peak at Class A share a clubhouse. They dress beside one another. They eat together. They play the same doubleheader. They wait for the same bus. Nobody knows yet. Perhaps that is why the minor leagues can seem, in retrospect, like a country of prophecy. Everybody is young. Everybody is trying to become something. A few will. Most will not. And the men who survive the longest are not always the ones who were best at playing. Some become scouts. Some become coaches. Some become executives. Some disappear. Johnson did not disappear. He moved behind the curtain. By the time he came to the Mets, his work was less about standing behind home plate with a radar gun and more about constructing the machinery that allowed other people to find players. He hired scouts. He assigned territories. He helped establish systems of cross-checking and organization. He was part of the machinery of discovery. Baseball likes to tell stories about discovery as though it happens in a single instant. A scout sees a young pitcher. He sees something. He signs him. Years later the pitcher is famous. But discovery is rarely that clean. It is a chain of people, judgments, mistakes, arguments, reports, recommendations and second looks. Somewhere in that chain there are men whose names will never be remembered. Sandy Johnson was one of them. And now, decades later, he was sitting in a rehabilitation center while somebody shouted in his face. There was something almost unbearably baseball about the scene. The sport had once required him to evaluate young men and decide whether they belonged. Now somebody else was evaluating him. The irony was not lost on the people who heard the story. Perhaps it is never wise to assume that an old man has become small simply because he has grown old. Baseball knows better. Baseball is full of old men who once were young men, and young men who do not yet know what they will become. It is also full of uniforms. The uniform is another kind of history, perhaps a more visible one. A team changes its clothes and tells itself it has not changed. Fans argue about piping and scripts and colors as though the soul of a franchise might be sewn into a sleeve. For the Mets, the argument is especially complicated because the past is never very far away. There are the pinstripes, which seem less like a design than a declaration: this is what the Mets look like. There is the classic road gray, which carries with it the memory of an older game. There are the black uniforms, which belong to one generation of Mets fans in particular. Some love them because they grew up with them. Others see them as an unnecessary detour. There are newer uniforms, newer colors, newer ideas about what a baseball club ought to look like in an age when every jersey is also a piece of merchandise. One fan argued for simplicity: home pinstripes, road gray, perhaps a blue alternate. That was enough. It is an old man's argument, though not necessarily an old man's uniform. It is an argument for recognition. You should be able to look into the stands and know immediately that you are looking at Mets fans. Blue and orange. White and blue. A little orange mixed into the crowd. The colors become a kind of communal language. Uniforms do that. They turn individuals into a crowd. They make strangers look related. And perhaps that is why people become so emotional about them. A uniform is not merely what a ballplayer wears. It is what a person remembers his father wearing. It is what he saw on television as a child. It is the shirt he wore to his first game. It is a photograph of a summer that no longer exists. A uniform can outlive a player. Sometimes it outlives an owner. Lorinda de Roulet, who died at ninety-five, belonged to one of the older chapters of Mets history. She inherited a franchise that had been created by her mother, Joan Payson, and eventually became its president and chairman of the board. Her time with the Mets is remembered differently depending upon who is remembering it. For some, she was the person who allowed M. Donald Grant to exercise too much authority during the years when the club deteriorated. For others, the history is more complicated: the family ownership had become fragmented, the franchise had been passed among children with differing interests, and de Roulet, though a fan, did not possess the sort of baseball-management background that would have made running a major-league club simple. The Mets of the late 1970s became one of those historical periods in which responsibility hardens around a few names. Grant became one of them. History likes villains because villains make complicated stories easier to remember. But baseball history is rarely easy. The Mets had begun as a curiosity and become a civic institution. Joan Payson had understood something about baseball that accountants do not always understand: that a team can be a kind of public trust even when it is privately owned. Her daughter inherited that trust without necessarily inheriting the knowledge required to manage it. And so the franchise drifted. Players were traded. The stadium acquired an unfortunate nickname. The organization fell apart. Years later, the Mets would try to repair some of the damage by bringing back Tom Seaver, Dave Kingman and Rusty Staub. This is another baseball instinct: when the present becomes unbearable, retrieve pieces of the past and hope that memory can be converted back into reality. It rarely works. But people keep trying. That is what baseball does. It makes people try again. The game also keeps its own peculiar calendar. Rules change. Uniforms change. Owners change. Players change. Even the language changes. A crossword puzzle, of all things, can expose that. A clue appears. The answer is Kiner. Somebody remembers Ralph Kiner. Somebody else notices that the game itself has changed so much that a crossword editor might as well be living in another baseball universe. There are new rules now. New strategies. New ways of organizing extra innings. New ideas about what should happen on a baseball field. And yet the answer is still Kiner. That is the trick. Baseball changes constantly while pretending to be permanent. The players disappear, but their names remain. The uniforms are redesigned, but the old ones are still in closets. The owners die. The executives retire. The scouts grow old. The stadiums are demolished. The rules are rewritten. And somewhere, in a quiet room, an eighty-five-year-old man sits with the history of the game inside him. He remembers Willie Stargell before Willie Stargell was Willie Stargell. He remembers the minor leagues. He remembers the buses. He remembers the scouts. He remembers the meetings. He remembers the young players who became famous and the young players who did not. He remembers baseball when the Mets were still new enough that nobody had yet decided what they were going to become. And perhaps he remembers himself as a young man, too. Sandy Johnson. Sanfrid Johnson, it turns out, which makes the name Sandy seem less like a baseball nickname than a small piece of family history. At eighty-five, the distinction hardly matters. The game has already decided what it will remember. But memory is not the same thing as history. History records the stars. Memory keeps the men who stood beside them. And sometimes, if you are lucky, memory finds one of those men sitting in a rehabilitation room and reminds everybody else that he was there. He was always there. We simply did not know to look.

Chapter 4: The Things Baseball Keeps Summary: The piece reflects on baseball’s peculiar ability to preserve people, places, and moments long after the players and ballparks themselves have disappeared, using figures such as Sandy Alomar Sr., Tom Seaver, and Larry Burright alongside unforgettable Mets memories. It argues that baseball’s true immortality lies not in statistics or records but in personal memory, as ordinary games and players become inseparable from the lives of the people who witnessed them. Baseball has a way of keeping people alive after they are gone. Not literally, of course. The dead remain dead. Time is not sentimental in that way. But a name can survive. A photograph can survive. A particular afternoon can survive, or the memory of a man standing between two angry ballplayers on a September afternoon at Shea Stadium, or the sound of a radio announcer saying a name that has since disappeared from the box scores. This is one of the strange gifts of baseball. It records everything and preserves almost nothing. Sandy Alomar Sr. died in October 2025, just short of his eighty-second birthday. He had played for the Mets in 1967. Four decades later he coached for them. His sons Roberto and Sandy Jr. would also wear the uniform. That is a baseball life measured not simply in seasons but in generations. There was a time when Sandy Alomar was young, when he was a ballplayer rather than somebody's father or coach, when the future was still an unopened thing. He became a footnote in the history of the Mets as a player, but then, years later, became part of one of those strange scenes that baseball remembers even when the standings forget it. In 2007, José Reyes and Miguel Olivo were fooling around—or thought they were. Then the joke became something else. Olivo came toward Reyes. Reyes did not run. And Sandy Alomar, sixty-three years old and apparently without the slightest interest in calculating the risks, stepped between them. “I have no fear whatsoever,” he said afterward. “I was going to protect Jose.” That is a baseball sentence. Not because it is profound. It isn't. But because baseball is full of men who have spent their lives doing precisely that: standing between one thing and another. Between the pitcher and the hitter. Between a runner and home plate. Between a teammate and an opponent. Between the past and the future. And then, years later, someone remembers. This is what happens when baseball people talk about Tom Seaver. Seaver is not merely a man who pitched for the Mets. He has become a measuring stick. Somebody asks for the Tom Seaver of golf, and the answer is Jack Nicklaus. The Tom Seaver of hockey is Mark Messier. The Tom Seaver of the 1960s sitcom is Andy Griffith. The Tom Seaver of game-show hosts is Alex Trebek. The Tom Seaver of apples is Granny Smith, because even a baseball conversation can eventually arrive at fruit. The question is absurd. That is precisely why it works. To call someone the Tom Seaver of something is to say that he represents a certain combination of excellence, recognition, authority, image and historical permanence. It is to say that even people who do not know the details understand the name. Seaver. The Franchise. There are people who remember him pitching. There are people who remember him broadcasting. There are people who remember meeting him in an elevator. Those memories are not necessarily compatible. One man remembers the pitcher. Another remembers the announcer. Another remembers a stone-faced stranger who would not speak to a group of children at Shea Stadium. All of them are remembering Tom Seaver. That may be the uncomfortable truth about memory: nobody owns the complete version of a person. The public figure and the private man coexist, sometimes uneasily, in the minds of everyone who encountered them. And so the years pass. Larry Burright dies at eighty-eight. He had been a Met in 1963 and 1964, back when the Mets were still young enough that a player's career could become entangled with the history of the franchise simply by being there at the beginning. Burright had opened the 1963 season with a single at the Polo Grounds. The Mets lost that day, 7-0. They would lose 111 games that year. It would be easy to look at that line and see only failure. But there is another way to see it. A man stood at the plate in the Polo Grounds and became, for a moment, part of something that would outlive him. His final major-league game was played at Shea Stadium. The beginning was the Polo Grounds. The end was Shea. That is a life compressed into two ballparks that no longer exist in the form in which he knew them. Someone later noted that Burright had been one of the oldest living Mets. With his death, another name moved into the list. Then another. Cleon Jones appeared higher. The list changes. The names move upward. Eventually, every name moves off it. Baseball does this without malice. It simply keeps going. Perhaps that is why people argue so fiercely about which games matter most. They are not really arguing about games. They are arguing about memory. Was it the 2000 National League Division Series? Was it the game that ended with John Franco striking out Barry Bonds? Was it 2006? Was it Game 6 of the 2006 National League Championship Series? Was it the 2015 postseason? Was it the night Wilmer Flores hit the home run? Was it the game in Philadelphia when the Mets scored seven runs in the ninth inning after trailing 7-1? Was it a regular-season game in 2013 when Marlon Byrd and Kirk Nieuwenhuis turned eight innings of dreariness into a sudden eruption? There is no answer because there cannot be one. A baseball game is never only what happened on the field. It is where you were. Who you were with. How old you were. What you believed was going to happen. What you thought the team might become. One person remembers the 2015 Division Series at Citi Field and the feeling that the stadium had become delirious. When Yoenis Céspedes hit his home run, the thought came: We're going to win the World Series. Another remembers the Nieuwenhuis walk-off and being so certain nothing was going to happen that he was still lying on the couch when the ball was hit. He stood up before it landed. That is the difference between watching baseball and remembering baseball. While you are watching, you think you know what is happening. Years later, you realize that you were watching your own life at the same time. The Mets have always been particularly good at this kind of memory because the franchise has so rarely permitted anything to remain simple. The great moments arrive with complications attached. The joy has anxiety behind it. The failure has beauty somewhere inside it. A player becomes beloved and then leaves. A star becomes a memory. A promising season becomes an almost-season. A game that meant everything when it happened becomes, eventually, a date in a database. And yet the date remains. October 2015. September 2007. June 2013. May 2022. October 2024. The numbers sit quietly on the page. The people do not. That is why Pete Alonso's future could become such a difficult question. By October 2025, people were wondering whether Alonso would remain a Met. Four years? Five? Six? What was the right number? What would another team offer? What should the Mets offer? The arguments were about dollars and years, but underneath them was something older and harder to quantify. What does it mean when someone has become part of the place? Pete Alonso is not Tom Seaver. He is not David Wright. He is not any of the men who came before him. But every long-tenured Met eventually encounters the same question: when does a player stop being merely a player and become part of the memory of the franchise? That transformation is invisible while it happens. Nobody announces it. There is no ceremony. One day a man is simply on the roster. Then, years later, someone says his name and an entire season comes back. That is what baseball does. It turns men into years. Years into games. Games into moments. Moments into stories. And stories into the only kind of immortality available to ordinary human beings. Somebody remembers Sandy Alomar stepping between Reyes and Olivo. Somebody remembers Larry Burright's single at the Polo Grounds. Somebody remembers Tom Seaver walking into an elevator. Somebody remembers the sound of Citi Field when Céspedes hit the ball. Somebody remembers being on a couch when Kirk Nieuwenhuis hit his home run. Somebody remembers where they were when the Mets came back from seven runs down in Philadelphia. And somebody, years from now, will remember Pete Alonso—not necessarily for a particular statistic, or even a particular season, but because there was a time when he was simply the Mets' first baseman and the future seemed to be sitting somewhere just beyond the next game. That is the part baseball never tells you. It does not tell you which night will become sacred. It does not tell you which ordinary player will become unforgettable. It does not tell you that the man you are watching now will someday be the answer to a question nobody has thought to ask yet. You only know later. Much later. When the ballparks have changed. When the uniforms have changed. When the children have become old. When the players have become names. Then somebody says: “Do you remember?” And for a moment, the years disappear. The Polo Grounds is there. Shea is there. Citi Field is there. The crowd is roaring. A pitcher is standing on the mound. A runner is taking his lead. A coach is stepping between two men. A ball is rising into the night. And baseball, which has spent all this time moving relentlessly forward, has performed its oldest trick. It has brought the past back.

Chapter 3: There He Was Summary: The piece explores the idea of the baseball dark horse through the 2025 Mets, focusing on overlooked players such as Jonathan Pintaro, Justin Hagenman, Max Kranick, and Huascar Brazobán who emerged from the margins to become useful contributors. More broadly, it celebrates the uncertainty and discovery inherent in a baseball season, where careers can change with a single phone call or opportunity and an unknown player can suddenly become someone everyone remembers. There is a particular kind of baseball player who arrives without an announcement. No parade waits for him. No one has spent the winter arguing about his contract. His name does not appear in the conversations about the future of the franchise. He is not the prospect whose autograph everybody wants, nor the free agent whose statistics are studied as though they were weather maps. He is simply there. Perhaps he has been in the organization for years. Perhaps he was signed out of a league most people have never heard of. Perhaps he was twenty-seven years old when somebody finally decided to give him a chance. He has spent his summers riding buses, staying in anonymous hotels, playing in ballparks where the crowd is measured in hundreds rather than tens of thousands. And then, one afternoon, his telephone rings. This is how baseball sometimes introduces a man to the world. In February 2025, Mets fans were asked to choose their dark horse. The rules were almost severe in their purity. The candidate could not be an established player. He could not be a famous prospect. He could not be somebody everyone already expected to contribute. He had to be the sort of player whose disappearance before Opening Day would barely be noticed. In other words, he had to be almost nobody. That was the point. The obvious names were rejected. The good young players were too obvious. The established major leaguers were too established. The exercise demanded something purer: a player about whom you could reasonably say, Who? And so the names began to appear. José Butto. Justin Hagenman. Jared Young. Huascar Brazobán. Luke Ritter. Paul Blackburn. Brandon Waddell. Jonathan Pintaro. Kevin Herget. One person chose no one at all. There was even, for reasons that belonged more to comedy than baseball, a vote for George Harrison. But Jonathan Pintaro was the sort of name the exercise had been created to find. He was twenty-seven. He had come out of the Pioneer League, pitching for the Glacier Range Riders, a name so improbable that it sounded invented by somebody trying to make a minor-league team sound like a minor-league team. He had moved through Brooklyn, Binghamton and Syracuse. Across three levels he had posted a 2.68 ERA over 74 innings. This was not fame. This was evidence. And there is an enormous difference. The Mets had signed him in June of the previous year. He had been, essentially, another arm. One of the hundreds of men whose professional lives exist beneath the level at which most fans begin paying attention. But baseball is full of such men. It has to be. For every Jacob deGrom there are dozens of pitchers whose names appear briefly in organizational transactions, whose careers take place in the margins of the sport. They are the men who arrive in spring training early and leave late. They carry their own equipment. They learn the names of trainers and clubhouse attendants. They know which minor-league towns have the worst hotel breakfasts. They wait. Waiting is one of the great skills of professional baseball, though nobody puts it on a scouting report. The dark-horse exercise was partly a joke, but jokes often reveal something serious. It revealed that baseball fans love the unknown. They love it because the known has already disappointed them. The established player carries a history. The prospect carries expectations. The free agent carries a contract. Each comes with a story that has already begun. The unknown carries nothing. He can become anything. That winter, someone suggested Justin Hagenman. There was not much in his résumé to recommend him to anyone who wasn't looking closely. He was a career minor-leaguer. He had never appeared in the major leagues. His Triple-A numbers were not the sort that inspired poetry. But the Mets gave him a major-league contract. Then, in April, circumstances intervened. Pitchers got hurt. A starter was unavailable. The roster needed another arm. And suddenly Justin Hagenman was no longer a name in a discussion about possibilities. He was a major-league pitcher. The Mets used him in an emergency role. He was moved between starting and relief. He became useful precisely because he could do things that were not glamorous: absorb innings, give the team length, stand on a mound when somebody else could not. The game has always needed such men. It has never celebrated them enough. The dark horse, by definition, is not supposed to be the star. He is supposed to become necessary. That distinction matters. A star can be wonderful without being surprising. The dark horse is different. His value comes partly from the distance between what people expected and what actually happened. That distance is where some of the best baseball stories live. There was Max Kranick, another name that initially seemed too small to carry much meaning. In spring training, he began pitching well. Then better. Then well enough that people started talking about him. Nine and a third innings. A 0.96 WHIP. A 1.93 ERA. Of course, spring training numbers mean almost nothing. Everyone knew this. And yet people looked at them anyway. This is another thing baseball does to intelligent people: it persuades them to believe things they have already admitted they should not believe. A spring-training ERA can be meaningless. A good one still feels good. Kranick had been chosen as a dark horse by one person only after the others had already started naming names. Suddenly the joke became less of a joke. Perhaps this was the man. Perhaps the answer had been sitting there all along. Or perhaps not. Baseball has never promised that the dark horse will actually win. That would ruin the game. The dark horse is valuable even when he fails because he represents the possibility of discovery. Every season contains hundreds of these little discoveries. Most disappear. Some last a week. Some last a month. A few remain. Mets fans' monthly awards offered another way of watching this happen. In April, Pete Alonso was Player of the Month. Kodai Senga was Pitcher of the Month. Max Kranick was Reliever of the Month. Luis Torrens was the bench player. In May, Francisco Lindor and Senga appeared again, with Edwin Díaz taking the relief honor and Jeff McNeil the bench award. June belonged to Juan Soto, David Peterson, José Butto and Lindor. July brought Brandon Nimmo, Peterson, Díaz and McNeil. August brought Alonso again, Nolan McLean, Tyler Rogers and Brett Baty. September brought Soto, McLean, Díaz and Mark Vientos. Read as a list, it is simply a record. Read as a season, it becomes something else. It becomes a procession. The Mets moved through 2025 with different men carrying them at different times. Some were supposed to. Some were not. Some had been famous for years. Others were still learning how to be recognized. And this is perhaps the thing the dark horse idea understood best: A baseball season is too long for one story. It requires many. A player can be irrelevant in April and indispensable in August. Another can look like the answer in May and disappear by September. A pitcher can spend the first months of the season being shuttled between Syracuse and New York and then suddenly find himself standing on a major-league mound in a game that matters. There is no straight line. There is only accumulation. One inning. One at-bat. One phone call. One opportunity. Huascar Brazobán became somebody's dark horse. Later, in July, he was optioned to Syracuse. The timing was almost cruelly appropriate. The man who had been imagined as a surprise success was suddenly back in the minor leagues. But even that was not the end of his story. He returned. The Mets needed pitchers. Everyone needed pitchers. Baseball had become, as it so often does, a matter of finding another arm. The dark horse was no longer a prediction. He was a resource. By September, Justin Hagenman was promoted again. So was Luisangel Acuña. Jared Young came up. Kevin Herget came up. Men who had spent much of the year outside the center of attention were suddenly appearing on the roster. The names kept changing. The season kept asking. Who can help us now? That may be the real question behind the dark horse. Not Who will be the star? Not Who will win the award? But simply: Who can help us now? Baseball is an unforgiving employer. It does not care how long a man waited. It does not care how many buses he rode. It does not care that he was once released, overlooked, injured, optioned, demoted or forgotten. When his chance comes, he must be ready. There is something beautiful in that, although it is not always kind. The men who become dark horses have usually spent years being told, implicitly or explicitly, that they are not the next great thing. They are simply trying to stay. And staying is not nothing. It is a career. It is a life. It is a collection of small victories that nobody outside the organization sees. Then one day, the manager says his name. The stadium announcer says it. The television camera finds him. The crowd learns him. For a little while, the unknown becomes known. Perhaps that is why people become attached to these players so quickly. The established stars belong partly to baseball already. They have been claimed by history. Their photographs are on cards. Their names are in statistics. Children know them. The dark horse still belongs to himself. For a moment. Then the season gets hold of him. It turns him into a number. A memory. A story. Sometimes into a star. More often into something quieter: a player whom somebody remembers seeing before anybody else did. Years later, that may be all that remains. Someone will say, "Do you remember him?" And someone else will. That is enough. Because baseball is not only the story of the famous men. It is also the story of the men who appeared from nowhere and, for a little while, made themselves impossible to ignore. Every spring, the game begins again with hundreds of players hoping to become somebody. Every spring, most of them fail. A few succeed. And somewhere among them is a man nobody is talking about. Not yet. He is riding the bus. He is throwing in the bullpen. He is waiting by the telephone. And he has no idea that, before the year is over, somebody may look back and say: There he was. We just didn't know it yet.

Chapter 2: The Season That Would Not Let Go Summary: The 2025 Mets' season unraveled through pitching failures, bullpen instability, questionable management decisions, and a broader loss of identity that left fans eager to move on while debating who deserved blame and who deserved another chance. Yet as the season faded into winter, the familiar cycle of baseball began again: mistakes became memories, hope returned, and the Mets' uncertain future once more became an invitation to believe that the story might end differently. There are baseball seasons that end with a clean sound. A fly ball settles into a glove. The players shake hands. The clubhouse empties. The lights go dark. By morning, the season has become a number, a record, an entry in a book that will eventually be forgotten by everyone except those who lived it. And then there are the other seasons. They linger. The 2025 Mets belonged to the second kind. By the end, there was a peculiar desperation in the desire to make lists of things that should never be seen again. The names accumulated: Cedric Mullins, Ryne Stanek, Reed Garrett, various middle relievers whose faces had become familiar in precisely the wrong way. There were the scoreboard spectacles and the advertisements, the five-borough race, the synthetic cheerfulness of a giant celebrity telling people to believe. There was even a longing for the impossible: perhaps, someone suggested, the designated hitter could disappear too. But beneath the jokes was something more serious. People wanted the season to be over. They wanted to put it somewhere behind them. The Mets had begun the year with the usual optimism that accompanies a team whose possibilities seem larger than its weaknesses. The previous season had left behind a particularly dangerous kind of hope—the kind that comes from having watched a team unexpectedly become something. A club that had seemed ordinary became exciting. Players emerged. The manager looked clever. The front office looked cleverer. Things that had seemed like mistakes became strokes of genius because baseball, for a while, had decided to reward them. Then came 2025. The pitching was supposed to be uncertain. That was understood. What was harder to imagine was the extent to which uncertainty would become collapse. The rotation was constructed on possibilities: health returning, pitchers rediscovering old forms, veterans becoming something better than they had recently been, young arms arriving at the proper moment. There was a kind of faith in the machinery behind it all, in the modern baseball laboratory and the measurements that promised to reveal what the naked eye could not. But baseball has always been cruel to people who confuse information with knowledge. The pitchers threw harder and sometimes struck out more batters, but too often they did not last. A starter could make a hitter look helpless and then disappear before the game had properly begun. Eight strikeouts could look wonderful in a box score until one noticed that the pitcher had not survived the fifth inning. The Mets needed innings. They needed pitchers they could trust. Instead, they acquired explanations. By September, the question was no longer whether the pitching staff was good enough. The question was how so many pieces that had appeared reasonable in March had become so inadequate by September. Manaea had not been what was hoped. Peterson had faded. Senga, whose return had been expected to stabilize everything, could not stabilize himself. Montas became a question almost before he became an answer. Holmes, the one member of the protected group who seemed to hold together, eventually began to fray himself. And so the bullpen became a revolving door. Forty-six pitchers appeared for the Mets during the season. That number had the quality of a joke, except that nobody was laughing very hard. Relief pitching is strange that way. Every October, people talk about the importance of the bullpen. Every winter, they imagine that they can construct one. By August, they discover that relief pitchers are human beings, and human beings eventually become tired. Some of them were good enough. Diaz remained a foundation. Raley had value. There were arguments for keeping Brazoban, Rogers, Smith. The problem was not that every pitcher was terrible. It was that there were too many nights when the Mets seemed to have no pitcher who could make the game feel safe. That is what people really mean when they talk about trusting a pitcher. It is not statistical certainty. It is the feeling that, when he walks toward the mound, the game has not yet become dangerous. The manager became the easiest place to put the blame. Carlos Mendoza had been Manager of the Year material the year before, or at least close enough that people had talked about him that way. Now he was being described as a man driving a Maserati in first gear, or falling asleep at the wheel. Perhaps there were games in which he made the wrong decision. There certainly were. One July game against Cincinnati became a kind of miniature version of the season. Manaea had given the Mets four innings and allowed one run. The Mets led 2–1. The bullpen was rested. Mendoza went to Alex Carrillo, who surrendered the lead, then returned for another inning and surrendered more. By the time he was removed, the Reds had scored five runs. It was one game. Baseball is full of one games. But one game can become a symbol when enough people have already become convinced that something is wrong. The opposing argument was more complicated. Managers do not manufacture pitchers. They do not decide who gets hurt. They do not control whether a deadline acquisition reproduces his old performance in a new uniform. And they do not operate entirely according to their own instincts. There are organizational philosophies, analytical recommendations, workload restrictions, medical information, and instructions from people whose names never appear in the box score. Perhaps Mendoza was making bad decisions. Perhaps he was executing somebody else's decisions. Perhaps the distinction did not matter as much as everyone wanted it to. This is the difficulty of assigning blame in baseball. The game encourages the idea that every failure has an author. A pitcher gives up a home run, so we blame the pitcher. A manager removes him, so we blame the manager. A general manager acquires him, so we blame the general manager. Eventually the blame travels upward until it reaches the owner, and then downward again until it reaches the player who struck out with runners on base. The truth is usually less satisfying. A baseball team can be wrong in many places at once. And the 2025 Mets seemed to be. There was a looseness that had disappeared. Players were picked off. Balls were mishandled. Runners failed to run. Pitchers were pulled early, or left too long. The club seemed to play tight and sloppy at the same time, which is a difficult combination to achieve. The previous Mets had lost to the Dodgers because the Dodgers were better. This Mets team sometimes seemed to lose because it had forgotten how it wanted to play. That distinction mattered to people. It mattered because talent can be replaced. So can pitchers. So can relievers. So can center fielders. But a team that has lost its sense of itself requires something more difficult to repair. And so, when the season finally began to disappear, the arguments turned toward the future. Who stays? Who goes? Who deserves another chance? Who has had enough chances? The answers were not as simple as the lists made them appear. A relief pitcher who had made a fan miserable for three months might still be a perfectly useful major-league pitcher. A veteran who had failed might be one mechanical adjustment away from becoming useful again. A player who looked finished in September might look completely different after a winter of rest. This is one of baseball's oldest tricks. It makes us believe that the person we saw yesterday is the person who will exist tomorrow. He isn't. Nobody is. That is why the arguments about the Mets' future could never really be settled. They were arguments about versions of people who had not yet arrived. The front office would have to decide how much to trust the pitchers it already had. How much to invest in another starter. How much patience to have with the young arms. How much of the bullpen could be rebuilt. Whether the laboratory had failed, or whether the experiment had merely produced a bad sample. And somewhere in the middle of all this stood the manager. Mendoza was expected to return. That fact produced no universal satisfaction and no universal outrage. Instead there was something more distinctly baseball: a shrug accompanied by a hope that the next roster would make the manager look wiser. Perhaps that is what happens when a team has spent enough years changing managers. Eventually you begin to suspect that the manager is not the whole story. The Mets have fired managers before. The problems have often remained. A new man arrives carrying the promise of clarity. For a while everyone watches him carefully. Then the games begin, and the same arguments return under a different name. The names change. The Mets remain. There is something almost touching about the way baseball fans refuse to accept this. They know better and do it anyway. They predict 99 wins in March. They predict 79. They imagine a championship parade. They imagine disaster. They decide that a pitcher will be the ace, that a prospect will save the bullpen, that a veteran has finally turned the corner. Then the season begins, and none of them knows anything. This is not a failure of intelligence. It is the bargain of being a baseball fan. You must believe in things that have not happened. The 2025 Mets had asked for a great deal of that belief. The pitching staff required it. The returning veterans required it. The manager required it. The entire structure required it. And for a while, the Mets got away with it. Then they didn't. By the end, people were no longer asking whether the season could be saved. They were deciding which pieces of it they could bear to carry forward. That may be the saddest part of a baseball season. Not losing. Not even missing the postseason. It is watching a team you once believed in become a collection of things you hope never to see again. Yet winter has a peculiar mercy. It erases the daily evidence. The pitchers go home. The clubhouse becomes quiet. The scoreboard stops shouting. The mistakes become stories instead of fresh wounds. A bad outing becomes something that happened in July. A blown lead becomes a line in an old box score. A manager's decision becomes something argued over rather than something that costs you the game tonight. And eventually, almost against your will, hope returns. It always does. Someone signs a pitcher. Someone throws a bullpen session. A prospect has a good spring. A veteran arrives looking leaner, stronger, healthier. A number appears on a screen and suddenly seems meaningful. You look at the roster and begin rearranging it in your mind. The season that you could not wait to escape has become the season you wish you could play again. That is baseball. It is cruel in September and generous in February. It takes everything you believed and gives you eleven months to believe it again. The Mets will return. The names will change. Some will remain. The pitching staff will be rebuilt, the bullpen rearranged, the manager watched, the young players judged, the old players reconsidered. And somewhere, in the first warm days of spring, somebody will throw a baseball toward somebody else. For a moment, nothing will have gone wrong yet. That is the moment baseball gives you every year. Not certainty. Something better. The possibility that this time, the story will end differently.

Using the power of modern technology (I didn't write these, in other words), I'll be presenting a retrospective of the 2026 campaign in the style of Roger Kahn. This is based entirely on threads and posts from this forum. See if you can identify your posts and arguments in it. It's chronological, starting with a thread posted on the second-to-last day of the 2025 season, September 27, and will run through the 2025-2026 offseason, the 2026 regular season, and where we are now. This will be a project for the whole offseason, hopefully, so it'll give folks here quite a bit to read. ------ Chapter 1: Between What We Know and What We Hope Summary: The Mets enter the 2025-2026 offseason facing familiar but consequential questions about center field and the starting rotation, with Luisangel Acuña representing intriguing possibility while established options such as Tyrone Taylor, Cedric Mullins, and Cody Bellinger offer varying degrees of certainty. Beneath those roster debates lies a larger baseball tension between trusting what is already known and gambling on what a young player, reclamation project, or new acquisition might become, because the past can be measured but the future never can. There are certain questions in baseball that refuse to remain questions. They begin innocently enough. Who plays center field? Who starts the fourth game? Which pitcher can be trusted when October comes? A season ends, and before the last echoes have gone from the ballpark, the mind moves ahead. The names change. The uniforms remain. The arguments begin again. This is part of the strange durability of baseball. The game gives us numbers, and we use them to construct stories. It gives us history, and we use history to argue with the present. It gives us young men whose careers are unfinished and asks us, with a straight face, to tell one another what they will become. For the Mets, as September gave way to whatever comes after September, the questions were particularly plain. The center-field position seemed unsettled. The rotation had become a source of unease. There were veterans whose futures could be imagined in several directions and young players whose futures could be imagined in almost any direction. Luisangel Acuña was at the center of one of these arguments. Acuña possessed the things that make baseball men dream: speed, quickness, athletic ability, the look of a player who might belong somewhere on a field even before anyone has decided exactly where. He was an infielder by trade, and there was a temptation to look at the open spaces in the Mets' outfield and wonder whether the solution might already be wearing their uniform. But center field is a peculiar place. It looks simple from a distance. You stand there. You run toward the ball. You catch it. The simplicity disappears when the ball is hit into the air and the field becomes enormous. A player can be fast and still take the wrong route. He can have a good arm and misjudge the flight. He can be an excellent shortstop and discover that the grass asks different questions of the body. The infield is a world of angles and reactions; center field is a world of anticipation, distance and instinct. And so someone pointed out that Acuña had scarcely played the position. Someone else pointed out that this did not mean he could not play it. Both statements were true. That is where baseball arguments become interesting. There was a time when the possibility of an infielder becoming a center fielder would scarcely have seemed exotic. Casey Stengel understood that certain athletic gifts could travel. Mickey Mantle moved from the infield to center field and became the most famous example of the transformation. Bobby Murcer followed. Tony Kubek, in another variation of the same idea, moved between positions. Mickey Stanley could play center field and shortstop for the Tigers. The lesson of history was not that every shortstop could become a center fielder. It was almost the opposite. It could be done. You simply had to have the right person. The difficulty was in determining whether the person standing before you was the right person. This is one of baseball's oldest problems: the present is visible, but the future is not. We know a player's age. We know his statistics. We know where he has played. We know, sometimes down to the decimal, what he has done. What we do not know is what he will do. Age is a fact. It is not a destiny. A player who is older can improve. A player who is younger can fail to improve. Neither proposition is particularly profound, yet baseball people repeatedly forget both of them because the human mind wants the future to behave like a schedule. The Mets' center-field question therefore became something larger than a question about Acuña. It became a question about what we believe when the evidence is incomplete. One side saw possibility. Another saw three innings of evidence and wondered why anyone would mistake possibility for proof. Another looked at the established alternatives and found reasons to prefer the known quantity. Tyrone Taylor had defensive value. Cedric Mullins had a history of major-league success, even if his present season was troubling. Acuña had youth and athleticism, but youth and athleticism are not the same thing as a major-league center fielder. Then someone mentioned Cody Bellinger. That changed the temperature of the room. Bellinger represented the other baseball solution, the one that does not require imagination so much as acquisition. Instead of asking whether Acuña could become something, you acquire someone who has already been that thing. The attraction was not merely that Bellinger could play center field. There was another, more emotional argument: if Bellinger wore the Mets uniform, he would no longer have to hit against the Mets. This, too, is baseball logic. It is not statistical. It is tribal. There are players who seem to have an unpleasant talent for appearing at precisely the wrong moment from the perspective of your team. You see them often enough that they become larger than their statistics. You begin to think of them as belonging to the opposing side of the universe. And when someone suggests bringing such a player over to your side, there is a peculiar satisfaction in the thought. No longer would the Mets have to endure him. They could make somebody else endure him. The center-field debate eventually wandered into a deeper disagreement about certainty. One voice insisted that nobody really knows what any player is. We see trends and patterns. We infer likelihoods. We call these things knowledge because otherwise it would be difficult to conduct a baseball season. That may be the most honest description of the business. We do not know. We make educated guesses and then become emotionally attached to them. The same problem waited in the starting rotation. The Mets had finished with a pitching staff that ranked eighteenth in ERA and twenty-third in WHIP. The staff had collapsed in the second half, and suddenly the future seemed to contain a familiar baseball temptation: run it back. Most of the pitchers were already signed. Holmes was coming back. Peterson was coming back. Senga was coming back. Manaea was coming back. One could imagine trading one of them, but then one had to admit that Senga, for all the uncertainty surrounding him, had the ability to pitch like a No. 2 starter when healthy and effective. Holmes had been the best of the group, though his future might lie in the bullpen. The young pitchers made the picture more complicated. McLean had done enough to suggest that the beginning of the next season could belong to him. Sproat seemed ready, too. Tong still needed refinement, particularly in his secondary pitches, and Syracuse might be the proper place for that refinement to happen. Christian Scott remained a question mark. There are always more questions in a young pitcher's arm than there are answers. Montas was regarded as a sunk cost. Megill would not return until 2027. The rotation needed something that the Mets did not appear to possess in abundance: dependability. An anchor. Perhaps Sandy Alcantara. Perhaps Dylan Cease. Perhaps someone else whose name had not yet entered the conversation. Michael King had once seemed an appealing possibility, until the risk became visible in the form of a thoracic nerve issue. Baseball is full of such moments. The pitcher you want is not necessarily the pitcher you can safely acquire. The arm that looks beautiful from a distance may contain a small warning that changes everything. And so the Mets faced the same fundamental choice they faced in center field. Trust what you have. Or go looking for what you do not. The danger, as always, was in the solution that sounded clever after the fact. The Mets had already committed to Frankie Montas and the hope that their pitching laboratory could somehow repair what the pitcher had become. That experiment had not produced the kind of faith that inspires repetition. Still, there would probably be another flyer. There always is. Every winter baseball produces a player who becomes the year's Griffin Canning, the low-risk possibility who arrives with a collection of attractive fragments: a pitch that once worked, a season that once existed, a mechanical adjustment that might unlock something, a statistical anomaly that can be interpreted as either warning or promise. Somebody will say that the Mets can fix him. Somebody will believe it. Somebody has to. This is why baseball survives its numbers. If numbers were enough, there would be no need for scouting, no need for memory, no need for the old stories about Mantle moving to center field or a pitcher rediscovering a fastball or a player arriving in spring training looking somehow different. The numbers tell us what happened. The game asks us what happens next. And between those two things—the past we can measure and the future we cannot—there is an enormous amount of room for hope, fear, argument and error. The Mets were living in that space. They had young players who might become important. Veterans who might become useful again. Positions that might be filled from within or repaired from without. A rotation that might be reconstructed around what it already had, or around an acquisition meant to give the whole thing a sturdier spine. There was no certainty. There never is. Baseball merely gives us the illusion of certainty for three hours at a time. The pitcher throws. The center fielder runs. The ball goes somewhere. Somebody catches it or does not. A number appears on the scoreboard, and for a moment the argument is settled. Then the lights go out. The season ends. And somewhere, before the clubhouse has even grown quiet, someone begins asking who should play center field next year.

Update: Juan Soto: 531 predicted, 64% chance at 500. Pete Alonso: 526 predicted, 64% chance at 500. Francisco Lindor: 431 predicted, 16% chance at 500.

Did that season even happen? Jorge Polanco? Luis Robert? Were they even real?

Put it in the books.

Well, this is it. It's almost over. Forever.

Jeoff Long died. https://www.thebiglead.com/former-cardinals-white-sox-infielder-dies-at-84/ Who was Jeoff Long? Jeoffrey Keith Long (1941–2026) was a Kentucky-born professional baseball player whose brief major-league career was shaped by an unusual transition from pitcher to power-hitting first baseman. Signed by the St. Louis Cardinals in 1959, Long struggled badly as a pitcher in the low minors, going 2–14 over his first two seasons. After converting to the infield, however, his bat emerged as his calling card, and he hit 30 home runs for the Tulsa Oilers of the Texas League in 1962, earning a promotion to the majors the following year at age 21. Long appeared in parts of the 1963 and 1964 seasons with the Cardinals, primarily as a pinch hitter and reserve first baseman and outfielder. He later joined the Chicago White Sox after St. Louis sold his contract in July 1964. His major-league career ultimately amounted to just 56 games, 16 hits, a .193 batting average, and one home run, which came against the Milwaukee Braves in May 1964. A knee injury suffered after slipping on the wet grass at Fenway Park that July severely limited him, and chronic knee problems eventually kept him out of baseball for several seasons. After attempting a minor-league comeback in 1969, Long retired from professional baseball and entered the family business, Cincinnati Drum Service. He later found an unexpected sporting distinction away from baseball: in 1975, as a 15-handicap amateur golfer, he won the inaugural National Open Long Driving contest, defeating a field that included several PGA professionals. Long died in Elsmere, Kentucky, on September 25, 2026, at age 84, leaving behind a career remembered less for its statistical totals than for the remarkable path from struggling minor-league pitcher to major-league slugger and long-driving champion. Also... Helen Y'Barbo (1935–2026) was a Texas-born infielder who played for the South Bend Blue Sox and briefly the Kalamazoo Lassies during the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League's final season in 1954, before spending the following two decades playing softball and golf. Long overlooked because of incomplete records from the AAGPBL's final days, her career was rediscovered and officially documented in 2024.

Took longer than I thought, and Manaea's not pitching, but here we are.

It's not often the Mets finish a season without a single pitcher appearing in 50 or more games. But that's exactly what happened in 2026. Can you name the last time, excluding 2020, that that happened? Can you name the pitcher who led the team in appearances that season? Year: 2026 Player: ? Year: 1994 (strike-shortened) Player: John Franco, 47 appearances Year: 1981 (strike-shortened) Player: Neil Allen, 43 appearances Year: 1965 Player: Jack Fisher, 43 appearances Teams whose leader had exactly 50 appearances: Year: 1962 Player: Craig Anderson Year: 1967 Player: Ron Taylor 2020 appearance leader: Edwin Diaz, 26 appearances

"It's a longer drive." Every once in a while, Keith just throws something that makes you laugh out loud out there.