Tag Archives: New York Mets

“A little more competence. A little more care.”

Posted on by
1
Dodger Stadium

The way some people talk, you’d think this was baseball’s version of the ancient Roman Colosseum, the Dodgers are the Evil Empire, Dodger owner Mark Walter is Emperor Nero, and the Dodgers plan to throw Christians to the lions.

The question used to be, “How can you tell whether a lawyer or a politician (do we repeat ourselves?) lies?” The answer, of course, was, “One’s mouth is moving.”

Asking if you can tell whether most baseball owners lie just by moving mouths has not been unreasonable for an unreasonable length of time. Asking likewise of baseball’s commissioner is even less unreasonable anymore.

Rob Manfred leads the charge toward imposing a players’ salary cap at long enough last.  For every time he mentions a players’ salary floor, a minimum payroll per team, the salary cap comes out of his mouth about twenty times, roughly counting.

It’s as though the idea of the owners not named the Dodgers investing conscientiously in putting the most competitive possible teams onto the field in honest efforts to win is an affront to whatever it might be that Manfred holds dear. But it’s a waste of breath to remind anyone anymore than money alone doesn’t guarantee championships.

The 2025 Dodgers didn’t win one of baseball’s most thrilling World Series of all time because they put a $321.3 million player payroll forward on Opening Day. They won it because their postseason roster played championship baseball right down to the last minute.

Their opponents from Toronto didn’t win the American League pennant because they put forth an Opening Day player payroll about $100 million lower. They won it, and damn near won the World Series in the bargain, because their postseason roster played championship baseball right down to the next-to-last minute.

Nine 2025 teams fielded player payrolls of $200+ million. One sub-$200 million payroll went to last year’s postseason (the Cubs, at $196.3 million) and lost in the first round. The number three payroll (the Yankees, $293.5 million) lasted into the second round. Five other sub-$200 million payrolls (the Reds, the Guardians, the Tigers, the Brewers, the Mariners) entered the postseason and two (the Brewers, the Mariners) got as far as each League Championship Series.

The number four 2025 player payroll (the Phillies, $284.2 million) got knocked out by the Dodgers in a division series. Three $200+ million 2025 player payrolls (the Braves, the Astros, the Rangers) didn’t get to the postseason at all.

And the number one 2025 player payroll didn’t get to the postseason either. The Mets were too busy going from as high as 5.5 games above the National League East pack to 13 games out of first place and not even eligible for a wild card—because the Reds, with a sub-$130 million 2025 player payroll, won their season series against the Mets and thus won a wild card tiebreaker.

“Here’s a question: Who, exactly, is the salary cap for?” writes USA Today‘s Gabe Laques. He answers with questions baseball’s would-be salary cappers would rather not confront until the next-to-last minute or a lockout, whichever comes first:

Is it so the upper-middle class teams—your Red Sox, Phillies, Giants, Blue Jays, Yankees, Cubs—can stay within shouting distance of the Big Two?

To provide a puncher’s chance for the most bedraggled among us—your Pirates and Marlins, Royals and Reds?

This is where it gets challenging to determine if the cap would actually help—or if some of those franchises would simply continue their same aversion to serious competition, pocket their shared revenues and lock in even greater profits for every other franchise.

Those last nine words strike to what so often seems the nearest and the dearest to Manfred’s heart, even ahead of his inveterate tinkering: the common good of the game as making money for the owners.

Never mind the Dodgers being pushed out of two straight postseasons in division series losses before they won their two straight World Series, as The Athletic‘s Tyler Kepner notices. (Or, that they’d won exactly one World Series between the end of the Reagan Administration and the beginning of the COVID-19 pan-damn-ic.) Never mind, either, that they got the push-outs from the Padres and the Diamondbacks.

“It is easy now,” writes Kepner, “to forget how random short series really are.”

It’s been a terribly kept secret that Manfred has longed to see baseball achieve some sort of equivalence to the big bad NFL. “Setting aside for a moment the virulent anti-labor landscape of the NFL,” Lacques writes, “it is clear that its salary cap does not solve many of the problems some baseball fans claim is now endemic in their un-capped sport.”

He reminds baseball’s pro-cap Chicken Littles that the past eighteen Super Bowls have featured a whopping . . . eight NFL franchises. (That’s not going to change this year, folks. It’s going to be the New England Patriots and the Seattle Seahawks.)

It gets better. The AFC Championship Game has featured either or both of the Patriots and the Kansas City Chiefs over the past fifteen seasons, a span during which only twelve teams reached the Super Bowl. How many baseball teams have reached the World Series in that same fifteen-year span, starting with 2011, Lacques asks? Answer: Eighteen.

Eighteen, which means it’s easier to reel off the ones who didn’t make the Fall Classic: Baltimore, Minnesota, the Chicago White Sox, Seattle, Oakland/Yolo Countys, the Los Angeles Angels, Miami, Milwaukee, Cincinnati, Pittsburgh, San Diego and Colorado.

The Padres, Orioles, Brewers and Mariners all reached a league championship series in that time. Do the remaining franchises strike you as particularly well-run? Do they have distinguished ownership groups with clear vision and a penchant for innovation? Consistently operate at a high level?

Try one example: The Angels aren’t exactly dirt poor. They were 2025’s number thirteen player payroll. ($190.5 if you’re scoring at home. Not Dodger dollars but not exactly Pirates penury, either.) Anyone accusing the Angels of having a distinguished owner with a clear vision and a penchant for innovation would lose in a court trial.

The Arte Moreno Angels have made tunnel vision a way of life. They’ve wasted the Hall of Fame-worthy prime life of the greatest position player the franchise has ever known. They couldn’t even show the brains to trade the game’s unicorn two-way player for geniune value before his contract expired.

They let Shohei Ohtani escape to free agency with an expected income equal to the economy of a tiny island country . . . before the Dodgers convinced him they believed in winning more than they believed in making generational talents surrealistically wealthy.

It’s not the only such example in major league baseball. The Angels are merely the least obscure of such franchises whose ownerships are vision impaired and innovation challenged. The ownerships that think their problems are . . . all the Dodgers’s or the Mets’s fault. (Did you ever think you’d see the day when the Yankees were no longer baseball’s Evil Empire?)

“The players and owners should find creative ways to dull the Dodgers’ edge, so other teams can come closer to matching it,” Kepner writes. “But you cannot make the Dodgers dumber or less driven to win. And as long as they are smart, motivated and opportunistic, this era will belong to them.” The first two, especially.

“For now,” Lacques writes, “[the Dodgers and the Mets] are the game’s pariahs, their proverbial hands slapped for trying too hard. The industrywide price, in management’s eyes, should be a salary cap. A greater solution: A little more competence and a little more care from those who have displayed precious little of either.”

A little more competence. A little more care. What concepts.

Two Bs and a Tuck

Posted on by
Reply
Alex Bregman

“There’s an excitement in the air about Cubs baseball,” said their new $175 million third baseman Alex Bregman after signing with the team last week.

What a week, right? Just like that, three of the more luminous members of this winter’s free agency class found new homes for varying dollars.

The usual suspects scream blue murder. A few unusual suspects pick up Dodger manager Dave Roberts’s expressed equal adoration for a salary cap and a salary floor. So, who’s coming out how, where, and why? Let’s look with sober eyes.

Da Bear Market Dept.—Think about it: On the same evening the NFL’s Chicago Bears shoved the Green Bay Packers to one side and out of the race for the Super Bowl, in Soldier Field, the Cubs made erstwhile Astro/Red Sox third baseman Alex Bregman a rather wealthy man.

With the Red Sox thought to be pushing a bit extra to bring Bregman back, the Cubs pushed enough to land Bregman on a five-year, $175 million that includes a mutually agreed-upon $70 million worth of deferred money.

You think Bregman’s new teammates weren’t enthused about the deal and their new mate? “I texted him when the news broke: ‘Dude, let’s freaking go’,” said pitcher Jameson Taillon, an Arizona neighbour of Bregman’s according to The Athletic. “He FaceTimed me. He was like, ‘Hey, we’re just finishing up dinner. Can I come over?’”

He wasn’t alone, wrote the journal’s Patrick Mooney: “Pete Crow-Armstrong, the All-Star center fielder, was in attendance at Soldier Field when he found out that Bregman would be a new teammate. Immediately after seeing the reports, Gold Glove shortstop Dansby Swanson called Bregman from a friend’s wedding.”

The Cubs made a run for the postseason last year. After a few years behaving like the big city kid who seemed to be seduced by the outskirts of Four Corners, Nowhere in Particular, they started behaving like the bigger market team they’re supposed to be once the postseason run ended.

“There’s an excitement in the air about Cubs baseball,” said Bregman while he made a bit of a whirl-around Chicago tour last week. “I can’t wait to get after it.” Pause. “After it” means “pennant race” and “World Series trip” for a man who now picked uniform number 3 to indicate he’d like a third World Series ring as well as stability for his family.

He’s known as a student of the game, a disciplined hitter, a sharp-fielding third baseman, and a clubhouse godsend. All Bregman has to do is live up to all that as best a 31-year-old with more than a few miles on him can, as he did when his body allowed in Boston last year. Da Cubs will make sure his appreciation is far, wide, and deep.

Tucker, the Man and His Team Dept.—Meanwhile, an erstwhile Cub lit the fuse on fresh screaming over the big, bad, behemoth Dodgers and their big, bad, behemoth platinum vault. The erstwhile Cub is Kyle Tucker, considered the number one free agent in the winter class by those who thought Bregman was the class’s second banana.

Tucker signed up for four years, $240 million, and opt-outs after years two and three. The deal also includes $30 million in deferred dollars. If Tucker helps the Dodgers to a third straight World Series title, Dodger City will consider it all very wisely spent. If he doesn’t or can’t, well . . .

That screaming won’t be limited to denunciations of the Dodgers as the new Evil Empire. It’ll include audible-in-the-Klingon-Empire demands for explanations as to why a no-doubt talent but with 27.3 wins above replacement-level in eight season is pulling down $17 million a year more than Aaron Judge, Yankee bombardier first class, who earned about 3.0 more WAR just over three of the past four years.

The Dodgers are betting on Tucker’s future coming somewhere near Judge’s present, of course. Aside from the dollars, the Dodgers could offer something far deeper to the low-keyed Tucker. He can do Tucker things without the floodlights baking him too heavily compared to the rest of the Dodgers’ star power.

He might have been the star of this free agency market, when Bregman and Bo Bichette weren’t, but that’s about as far as Tucker seems to care to go when it comes to attracting attention with anything beyond his still-growing bat and his virtuosity playing right field.

What’s Bo Know Dept.—Bo Bichette is a Met. Roll the rhyme around awhile, Metsropolitan New York. Savour the possibilities to come with a healthy Bichette helping the Mets ride all the way to a postseason. (Remember: He came off the injured list to be one of the shining time Blue Jays in last year’s World Series.)

Now, be afraid. Be very afraid. Because the Mets plan for their new $126 million infield toy is to move him from his normal shortstop to third base. Every Met fan since the day they were born will warn you. The Mets don’t have a sterling history of third base conversions. (Mets legend David Wright was born to the position, you may remember.)

Ask what happened when they traded a talented but still-erratic arm named Nolan Ryan to the Angels for a veteran elite shortstop named Jim Fregosi . . . and decided to turn that veteran elite shortstop into a third baseman. Case closed.

Bichette can hit. The only population that doesn’t know that might be a colony of Arctic walruses. But with the glove? He’s 36 defensive zone runs below his league average as a shortstop, and his range factors per game are below the average, too. He played a little second base in the minors but not a lick of third base in the Show.

The Mets turned toward Bichette more seriously (they’d been talking previously) when Tucker went California bound the night before. The Phillies saw the Mets embrace Bichette and elected to reunite with veteran catcher J.T. Realmuto after all.

Now all the Mets have to do is get a read on whether Bichette will be the second coming of poor Jim Fregosi or the first coming of Bo Bichette, third base maven. Not to mention whether Brett Baty, the incumbent third base Met, will have a reasonable future moving to the corner outfield, as some reports speculate.

Well, the Mets have been many things over the decades. Boring has rarely been one of them.

The Polar Bear of Baltimore

Posted on by
Reply
Pete Alonso

The Polar Bear gets his wings in Baltimore.

Those running baseball front offices will never lack for pressure. But there are always those among them who inflict the pressure upon themselves. Sometimes the intentions are noble. Sometimes the foresight is far. Sometimes the vision is blurry. Sometimes the blur becomes blindness.

Today’s Oriole fans have the unexpected luxury of believing their team’s president Mike Elias means business, when he says he was looking to take the Orioles’s promising lineup over the top and signing Pete Alonso was the means to that end.

Today’s Met fans have what they think is the too-familiar lack of luxury in believing their team’s president David Stearns is either talking through his head gear or blowing smoke, when he says the Mets were wary of going as far ahead in time with Alonso as the Orioles ultimately did.

Those Met fans, who’ve made a dark art out of pronouncing a season lost after a single bad inning on Opening Day, can’t fathom how a first baseman who’s still a young enough man, and has been one of their team’s most consistent power hitters since his 2019 arrival, became un-affordable beyond three years and unworthy of even receiving an offer this time around.

Stearns hasn’t kept his wish to upgrade the Mets defensively a state secret. The unfortunate flip side of Alonso’s batting prowess has been his fielding lack of it. As good as he is on the double play, as excellent as he is at snatching throws in the dirt, Alonso has slightly negative run prevention plus below-league average range factors.

The Orioles seem to be counting on Alonso’s formidable bat making up for the fielding shortfalls. The Mets seemed unwilling to continue taking that chance no matter how many home runs, no matter how many extra base hits, no matter that Alonso nudged Darryl Strawberry to one side as the franchise’s all-time home run hitter.

Alonso wasn’t the first free agent Stearns allowed to change addresses. The day before the Orioles landed him, relief ace Edwin Diaz elected to sign with the Dodgers. Three years and $96 million—and the largest average annual value for a reliever yet—wasn’t a figure the Mets couldn’t equal if they were thinking in three-year increments as seemed to be the case with Alonso.

So what made the bullpen bellwether return west? Part of it might have been Stearns signing bounceback relief candidate Devin Williams, with whom he was familiar from their time in Milwaukee. Part of it, too, and perhaps especially, might have been their coaching overhaul following the season included Jeremy Hefner, a pitching coach Diaz liked and respected.

The 2025 Mets had pitching issues that had nothing much to do with Hefner. But Diaz took his dismissal to mean the Mets suddenly got unserious about something dear to his heart.

“I spent seven years in New York,” the righthander said after he signed with the Dodgers. “They treated me really good. They treated me great. I chose the Dodgers because they are a winning organization. I’m looking to win, and I think they have everything to win. Picking the Dodgers was pretty easy.” Owitch.

And Alonso? He was both a fan favourite and an undisputed team leader, on the field and off it, known as much for his charitable acts as his bat and his fun-loving leadership style. But he spurned a significant extension offer a few years ago, and he re-upped with the Mets last winter in the face of a thinner market, taking two years with an opt-out after 2025. He exercised it after a big bounceback season and found a more accommodating new market.

Never underrate the power of betting on yourself and winning big even if it’s moving from the Grand Central Parkway to Cal Ripken Way.

“I’ve really enjoyed playing in New York,” said the Polar Bear, whose Oriole introduction included a large stuffed white polar bear on the table to his right and a brief struggle to button up his new Orioles jersey properly. He took number 25 only because his long-familiar number 20 has been long, long retired by the Orioles in honour of Hall of Famer Frank Robinson.

“I’m very gracious for that opportunity,” continued Alonso, who may have landed himself the Yogi Berra Malapropriety Award with that phrasing. “There’s some amazing people over there. Whether it be the locker room staff, clubbies, it was phenomenal. I really enjoyed my time. But this right here, this organization, this city, I’m so proud to call it home.” Double owitch.

“Losing franchise stalwarts Díaz and Alonso on back-to-back days is something a Mets fan might have expected from the Wilpon ownership—only with some ridiculous positive spin on how the team will be better for it,” said The Athletic‘s Ken Rosenthal.

Now, fans might wonder if Fred and Jeff Wilpon are practicing voodoo on David Stearns and owner Steve Cohen.

Stearns and Cohen have not said much of anything. That’s to be expected as they start to clean up the mess they’ve created, the baseball equivalent of a flooded kitchen floor. But they had better provide some answers quickly, and with actions, not words.

Maybe reuniting with Stearns gives Williams a clean shot at a big bounceback following a testy 2025 in Yankee pinstripes. Maybe bringing aging, injury-recovering Marcus Semien aboard—at the cost of another fan favourite, Brandon Nimmo, going to the Rangers—helps the Mets begin the defensive remaking Stearns has sung as a mantra. Maybe adding Jorge Polanco on a two-year deal helps likewise, especially since Polanco can play first as well as second with some pop at the plate. (He hit 26 homers last year.)

Alonso solves a huge portion of half the Orioles’s issues. They need pitching upgrades and  the best Alonso can do about that is help give that staff runs to work with. But they’re getting a class act who seems unable to wait to have a clubhouse impact as well as a scoreboard one.

“How I’m going to help is share my experience, and pretty much share whatever has helped me kind of step and rise to the occasion,” said Alonso, who has a sterling postseason resumé including an intergalactic moment or two. “I want to be an open book, pretty much to everyone in the clubhouse. For me, I take pride in that. Not only do I love performing, but ultimately I love forging great relationships and being a great teammate.”

That sounds like just the kind of guy the Mets should have wanted to keep.

Published originally at Sports Central.

The long, slow Mets deflation

Posted on by
Reply
Juan Soto

Juan Soto—Not his fault.

A choke? Not exactly. More like the Mets stuck a pin in their $340 million blimp, somehow,  and it deflated slowly enough, agonisingly enough. The team that started the season as the best and most expensive in Show finished . . .

No, they didn’t go from the top of the mountain all the way to the rocks at the bottom. They did finish second in the National League East. On the surface, that doesn’t look anywhere near resembling terrible. Know how many teams would jump from the top of the Flatiron Building if it meant finishing second for a change?

Why, over yonder in the American League Central, the Tigers could have been called going down harder. On 12 June they had an eight-game division lead over the next in line. At one point, the Guardians were 15.5 games out of first place in the group.

Then the Tigers deflated painfully themselves to settle for a wild card while the Guards dug, clawed, gnawed, and shoved their way back to take a division that once looked like the Tigers’ exclusive possession. But since the Tigers get to meet the Guards in a wild card set, the magnifying glass is over the Mets.

And how.

How on earth did a team finish play on 12 June and sit 21 games over .500, with a Show-best 45-24 record, and five games ahead of the eventual NL East champion Phillies, but go from there to play .408 ball the rest of the way?

How did that come to include a 10-15 September that featured an eight-game losing streak and a season-ending weekend in which they looked as though they’d signed surrender papers instead of commitments to fight for their very baseball lives?

Juan Soto regrouped after early inconsistency to get within two thefts of posting a 40-40 season and finish the year leading the National League in on-base percentage. Francisco Lindor posted a second 30-30 season in three years. Pete Alonso Alonsoed (38 home runs and leading the league in doubles with 41). But . . .

“A few players thought [manager Carlos] Mendoza’s communication was not as sharp as it could be,” said The Athletic‘s Tim Britton and Will Sammon.

Others suggested that he showed some unnecessary panic early in the season when he kept shuffling roles for different players. That will be part of the conversation this winter.

“I really think he’s done everything in his power,” another club source said. “In this market, you want that type of leader: somebody who is steady and going to be honest.”

That doesn’t mean Mendoza’s coaching staff is safe. The Mets’ defense was a season-long issue. While the offense put up good overall numbers, it operated far too often in boom-and-bust cycles. The pitching staff never put it together in the second half, with many of its purportedly reliable arms underperforming.

Let’s not wait ’till next year. They’ll have all winter to solve the coaching staff, the booming-and-busting, the pitching inconsistencies, and the defense that would guarantee a war over five minutes after it begins—with the Mets on the wrong side. How should we begin to outline the manner in which this year’s blimp deflated?

* When Kodai Senga, one of the best pitchers in the game for the season’s first month and a half, exited his 12 June start with a hamstring injury incurred covering first base, was brought back just before the All-Star break instead of getting that one extra minor league rehab start, and looked nothing like that early-season ace from there, ending up in Triple-A to get himself straightened out?

* When the Rays swept them in early June, which didn’t look that ominous—the Mets were 4.5 in front of the National League East and owned that 45-25 record going in—until you saw the bullpen’s meltdown over the set, and began to get the awful feeling that it wouldn’t be the last time the pen would prove the cobras’ own mongooses? (C’mon, Mr. Webster, make it official and let us use mongeese as the plural!)

* When they rumbled into Pittburgh, where the sunken Pirates were two months past forcing manager Derek Shelton to walk the plank, and got themselves swept by the Pirates in three straight, outscored 30-4 in the set, letting the Pirates drop at least nine runs per game against them during—without Pirates ace/should-be National League Cy Young Award winner Paul Skenes facing them even for a third of an inning?

* When they lost two out of three to the Reds coming out of the All-Star Break, with the 2-1 lead they gifted back-in-the-rotation Sean Manaea squandered by one reliever whose Show debut was just a month earlier but wouldn’t turn up in a Met uniform again? When the Mets won the third game but those first two losses all but handed the Reds the wild-card tiebreaker?

* When relief ace Edwin Díaz’s otherwise stellar season (the finish: 1.63 ERA; 228 FIP; 0.88 WHIP) was rudely interrupted when the Brewers’ Isaac Collins blasted a game-ending home run 10 August, sending the Mets back to New York with their second of a pair of seven-game losing streaks?

* When the Mets turned to Nolan McLean in Philadelphia for his fifth career start, the young man responded with a one-run/5.2 inning performance that would have been enough for the Mets to win . . . if only they could have found a way to score even once? Leading to a Philadelphia sweep and any lingering hope of the Mets reclaiming the NL East they once owned in the trash compactor?

* When the Mets finally gave Jacob deGrom substantial run support in Citi Field—forgetting that deGrom now pitches for the other guys, the Rangers in this case, who’d drop another loss on them the following day for a season-longest eight-game losing streak?

* When the dead-last Nationals beat them 3-2 in the final Mets home game of the year, abetted by a pair of acrobatic fielding plays (robbing Brett Baty of extra bases; swiping a home run from Francisco Alvarez that would have tied the game) by Nats center fielder Jacob Wilson?

* When the Marlins channeled their 2006/2007 ancestors and told the Mets, “Not so fast, boys,” with the Mets needing to scale the Fish on Saturday, the Reds already losing to the Brewers, to nail the third wild card?

* When the non-Díaz bullpen surrendered four in the fourth, forcing manager Mendoza to bring Díaz in early to bind up the wounds?

* When the Mets ended up stranding ten runners, Pete Alonso hit a bases-loaded cruise missle stopped cold by Miami left fielder Javier Sanoja, and the Mets finished 2025 0-70 for the year whenever the other guys led after eight innings? (The number of Mets ninth-inning comebacks this year: zero. The number in 2024, when they got to the League Championship Series: eight.)

“There’s no other way to sugarcoat it,” said Alonso, who didn’t wait too long to let it be known he intended to opt out of his two-year deal and test his market, while leaving a door open wide enough for a reasonable-length deal with the Mets. “Super-talented team and we didn’t even get to October.”

In a sane major league game in which the leagues were aligned and divided reasonably, in which no such thing as regular-season interleague play existed, in which no team earned the right to postseason play unless its fannies were parked in first place at season’s end, the Mets wouldn’t be half the topic they are now.

In a sane baseball world, we wouldn’t have just gone through another wild race of thrills, chills, and spills, on behalf of seeing who’s fighting to the last breath (or rolling over dead trying) to finish . . . in second place.

“Sane” and “Mets” rarely fit comfortably in the same sentence. But this was one of those Met seasons about which you could say it’s liable to get them thrown out of the nut hut.

The Mets finally support Jacob deGrom

Posted on by
Reply
Jacob deGrom

These meatheads couldn’t get me even three runs a start even if I offered to pay for them to bribe the other teams into taking dives. Now they get me six, and I’m supposed to be trying to beat them? Just. So. Mets.—What Jacob deGrom could have been forgiven for thinking before he went to work against his old team on Friday night.

Having been a Met fan since the day they were born, I’ve seen enough cringe to last three lifetimes and two Hall of Fame careers. Enough so that I’ve earned the stripes required to tell today’s Met-fans-come-lately (say, strictly this century) that even the Mets deserve not to be written off entirely for a season over one bad inning . . . in April.

Friday night almost changed my mind.

When Jacob deGrom was the best Mets pitcher this century, winning two Cy Young Awards on merits that (among other things) should have shattered the myth of the pitcher “win,” he did it despite getting an average of 3.3 runs to work with per inning pitched in his starts. He could have taken the Mets to court and sued for non-support, and no judge would have remanded him to the nut farm.

“So are you still asking why we’re ignoring wins?” The Athletic‘s Jayson Stark asked, then answered. “[T]here isn’t a single entry on the state sheet that tells us less about how this man has pitched than the entry that most people used to check first. That’s why.”

“Jacob deGrom’s issue wasn’t that he ‘didn’t know how to win’.” It was that he didn’t know how to not be on the 2018 New York Mets,” wrote Anthony Castrovince, in A Fan’s Guide to Baseball Analytics. That was deGrom’s issue in 2019, as well.

So. After more injury miseries and one change of address, deGrom finally showed up in Citi Field Friday night. The Mets thanked him for his distinguished previous service with a video presentation that had the righthander very appreciative. “It was really cool,” he said after the game. “Like I said before, this is where it all started. And then coming back here, I thought it was going to be a very special day. So thankful to the Mets for playing that. And you know, like I said, these fans were great to me when I was here. And you know, that was a really nice thing they did.”

What a difference three years makes. The Mets got deGrom six runs to work with before the first inning was over. There was just one little problem with that, before you start thinking about old times’ sake. They gave him the runs to work with before he even had to take the mound.

DeGrom pitches for the Rangers now. (More injury miseries kept him from pitching more than nine games for the Rangers between 2023-24.) It’s not that he would have objected to getting six runs for a cushion before he even had to go to his office, but you couldn’t blame the man if he allowed himself even one moment to think: These meatheads couldn’t get me even three runs even if I offered to pay for them to bribe the other teams into taking dives. Now they get me six, and I’m supposed to be trying to beat them? Just. So. Mets.

Of course, deGrom could have laughed like Figaro that he might not have wept. The Rangers hit the plate against young Mets starter Jonah Tong, a pitcher with promise getting perhaps a too-early education in shaking it off and starting over. That’s after his first major league start found him sitting prettily enough with twelve runs to work with after two innings. (Against the Mighty Marlins, 29 August, en route the Mets’ 19-9 Fish fry.)

Now, in his third major league start, Tong started by walking Josh Smith, striking Wyatt Langford out, walking Joc Pederson, and getting Jake (Whata) Burger to fly out to center field, pushing Smith to third. Two out, two on. And then . . . and then . . .

And then along came Jung. Josh Jung, lining a single to right to send Smith home and Pederson to third. Then came Alejandro Osuna to poke a first-pitch single into shallow enough left to sent Pederson home. Then came a walk to Jonah Heim to load the pads for Cody Freeman to shoot a 2-2 fastball into right for a two-run single. Then came a full-count fastball for Michael Helman to line down the left field line for a two-run double. And then came Huascar Brazoban to lure Smith into flying out for the side.

The Mets did manage to pry three runs out of their old buddy in the bottom of the third, when Francisco Alvarez greeted him with a home run to open, then a single and a double turned to Juan Soto and Pete Alonso going back-to-back with sacrifice flies. The Rangers made it 8-3 to stay when Dylan Moore yanked a two-run homer off Mets reliever Gregory Soto in the top of the seventh, before deGrom’s evening ended.

DeGrom sports a neat 2.82 ERA and a staggering 0.92 walks/hits per inning pitched rate this season. Neat enough for a guy who turned 37 while we blinked in his absence. A guy who enjoyed getting another chance to pitch in front of Mets fans once again. “[T]he fans were great to me tonight,” he said of the ovation he got pregame and after his evening looked over. [He pitched seven strong.] They were great to me when I was here. So I always enjoyed taking them out in front of this crowd. So tonight was just as special.”

But getting six runs to work with from the Mets right off before pitching against them, deGrom must have felt unable to decide whether to call for a glass of champagne or the Looney Limousine.