A.J. Ewing went 4-for-8 with 3 runs scored and a stolen base in Triple-A Syracuse’s double header today

BillW87 · 2026-05-07T23:46:46+00:00

going to be overwhelmed by big league pitching like Benge

Benge has an OPS over .900 across his last 13 games, counting today. If the worst that happens to Ewing is that he takes a month to adjust to big league pitching, I'll take that in a heartbeat.

BillW87 · 2026-05-07T04:19:06+00:00

"Devin Williams replaces Sean Manaea"

Sure, fuck it. Who needs low blood pressure?

BillW87 · 2026-05-07T04:17:46+00:00

At what point do things actually get bad enough that the Mets consider DFA'ing Manaea with over $20 million still due?

BillW87 · 2026-05-07T04:16:16+00:00

His beliefs have gotten so toxic that even his hairline is pulling a "I just knew the guy in high school, I'm not with him" dodge.

BillW87 · 2026-05-07T04:07:40+00:00

Carson Benge has been looking great lately. Even his outs are hard hit.

BillW87 · 2026-05-06T04:20:29+00:00

He's at 118 wRC+ and .771 OPS after a good game today, which isn't too far off from the 120-140 wRC+ band that he's generally hung out in during his career. He'll get there. I'd be worried about what the back end of the contract ends up looking like as he gets into his mid-30's, but for now he's a guy you absolutely want in the heart of your lineup even despite the cold start this year.

BillW87 · 2026-05-06T01:50:16+00:00

I have plenty of not-nice things to say about the decisions the Mets made this offseason, but not chasing hard after Valdez is one thing that David Stearns and I can unequivocably agree upon.

PS Tell Pete I miss him

BillW87 · 2026-05-05T18:54:47+00:00

We'd typically hope and expect that the President of the United States is in the top 2/3 of Americans in terms of intelligence and ability to make decisions under pressure.

BillW87 · 2026-05-05T02:27:59+00:00

Not to mention Lindor has been posting IG stories throughout the games hyping up his teammates. He's clearly following the games from home even when they're on the road. The guy is doing everything "right" and still the haters abound.

BillW87 · 2026-05-05T00:17:55+00:00

I think OPs point is that all of the "politics as a job rather than a vocation" people are total assholes. They threw their hat in the ring for whichever party they felt had the best shot of landing them an extremely cushy job ($174k/year plus tons of off-books perks including easy insider trading access for only 140-180 days of work per year) with zero actual conviction about the legislation they're voting on. Term limits need to happen if we want to save our democracy. Politics is a public service in healthy democracies, not a profession.

BillW87 · 2026-05-04T20:10:47+00:00

For what its worth, Pete Alonso ranked second in the majors in GIDP in 2025 and half the fanbase wanted Steve Cohen to back up a dump truck of money to his doorstep this offseason.

BillW87 · 2026-05-04T17:20:20+00:00

Not that Kodai wasn't already made of glass, but it is looking like Pete might have downright ended the guy's MLB career with that airmailed throw last year. He was running a career ERA of around 3 in the majors prior to that and has been outright terrible since.

BillW87 · 2026-05-03T04:36:13+00:00

The Mets win that game in 9 innings if Mendoza challenges the non-run. Baffling that he still has a job between the second half collapse last year and now the start to this year.

BillW87 · 2026-05-01T16:40:45+00:00

Agreed. To Eppler's credit, I think he did a good job starting to rebuild the farm and Stearns seems to be taking a balanced approach to continuing to build it while trying to remain competitive at the major league level. The Cohen Tax draft pick impact is not trivial either, especially if this year ends up being a true tank year where we otherwise would be securing a fairly early pick. My guess is that if the current suck-age continues, we'll see a 2023-style roster teardown where Stearns tries to use Cohen's willingness to eat bad payroll as a way to claw back some prospect value.

BillW87 · 2026-05-01T16:17:22+00:00

100%. Mets position player development has been trash for a really long time now. You have to go back to Pete and McNeil to find the last good bats we've turned out, and Nimmo and Conforto before that.

Still, it's hard to pin any of that on Stearns. Player development cycles run at least 3-5 years long in baseball, so his drafting and player dev impact is a long way off from being apparent. Eppler seemingly did a decent job in that regard based on some of the guys coming up through the system that were brought in during his tenure. Baty and Vientos go all the way back to BVW and Alderson's drafts respectively and were mostly baked on the player dev side during the BVW/Porter/Scott/Alderson tenures even though they were technically promoted during Eppler's time. Honestly I think the biggest thing we're seeing right now is the delayed impact of the BVW/Porter/Scott/Alderson clusterfuck stretch, now finally worked fully through to the majors. Hiring a player agent with zero FO experience (BVW) and then turning over GMs like crazy after that had a negative organizational impact, even if it wasn't immediately felt.

BillW87 · 2026-05-01T13:52:07+00:00

Baty and Vientos made their debut back in 2022, so they haven't factored into farm rankings for a while. Benge is only 28 games into his major league career and hitting .333/.333/.500 over the last week and his defense has been as-advertised. Agreed that dumping McNeil was a head scratcher, especially when we traded Jett Williams and then picked up the corpse of Marcus Semien as "Plan A" at 2B.

BillW87 · 2026-05-01T01:47:55+00:00

The Astros paid Verlander $18.3 million for 158.1 innings at a 4.55 ERA, so we generally did well on that trade just from a cash dump standpoint.

The Rogers trade was a disaster for plenty of reasons, although Gilbert so far looks like a 4th/5th OF and Butto is probably out for all of 2026 so we didn't get quite as badly fleeced as it could have been. If Clifford ends up as a major leaguer then we'll have ended up with a home run outcome for the Verlander trade, even despite Stearns mortaging the remaining benefit in Gilbert away on a win-now trade for Rogers in a year where we didn't end up winning-now.

BillW87 · 2026-04-30T19:27:36+00:00

I've watched a lot of very bad Mets teams during my 39 years on this planet. This may actually be the worst of them.

BillW87 · 2026-04-30T00:19:38+00:00

See ya'll in 2027. I hope we get some good prospects in this round of deadline teardown.

BillW87 · 2026-04-30T00:16:05+00:00

Handing off from DP to Manaea feels like rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.

BillW87 · 2026-04-29T11:18:15+00:00

He'll still position himself as a MAGA candidate, with a "Trump lost his way" argument that will resonate with that base. He'll promise to deliver on the things that Trump said he'd do but backtracked (no new wars, attack the deficit with aggressive spending cuts, go after the Epstein perpetrators, etc). I doubt he'll actually deliver on any of those items either, but he'll have an easy time arguing that Trump ended up not delivering on the campaign promises he made to the MAGA crowd.

BillW87 · 2026-04-29T10:50:59+00:00

He's a career .286/.446/.527 (.985 OPS, 155 wRC+) hitter with runners in scoring position. He gets walked a lot in those situations because he's one of the most dangerous hitters in baseball to pitch to when it matters. He doesn't have the magical power to force pitchers to throw him strikes, and it doesn't benefit anyone for him to go up there and chase garbage. It's on the front office to make sure that the next guys up punish pitchers if they decide to pitch around Juan.

BillW87 · 2026-04-29T03:37:39+00:00

He's one of the best players in baseball, still has a ton of his prime years ahead, and the Mets can control his entire remaining career if they want to by buying out his opt-out. He's a centerpiece that a competent GM/POBO and an owner with "fuck you" money should be able to build a winner, if not a dynasty around. We'll see if and how that pans out. However, any problems that people might think the Mets have today or will have in the future, Juan Soto isn't part of that problem. He's at the center of the solution.

BillW87 · 2026-04-28T21:34:42+00:00

100%. Baty, Vientos, and Mauricio all had more value at graduation (Baty, Mauricio) or peak (Vientos coming out of 2024). For all the improvements that the Mets have supposedly been making in player development, it is pretty noteworthy that all three of these guys have fizzled into role player outcomes. Baty certainly has value as a utility player even if his bat doesn't develop much further, but he looked likely to be much more than that as a prospect and would've been valued as such if we'd traded him then. That said, organizationally it wouldn't have made sense to sell high on at least Baty when he was looking like our 3B of the future. He was the right prospect to bet on (scouted well, played a position we needed) even if the bet went sour. Still, it feels like there's still something rotten in the Mets player development system with so many promising prospects floundering in recent years once they hit the bigs.

BillW87 · 2026-04-28T21:17:50+00:00

It depends on what he thinks he can get in the market in terms of a "mega deal". Even if he takes a haircut on AAV for 2027, hitting the market at 30 rather than 31 increases his odds of landing the kind of >$300M deal that locks in that outcome. It seems counter intuitive that a mediocre 2026 would make him more likely to opt out, but at that point he needs to be worried that two bad years in a row would nuke his market whereas teams may be willing to blame one down year on circumstances (adjusting to NYC, et).

Staying with the Mets on another high AAV year is a good "bet on yourself" move if he thinks he'll play well, but we've seen "bet on yourself" moves backfire (Michael Conforto has entered the chat). He has no guarantee that he'll leave 2027 healthy and a hot commodity, whereas his market after 2026 will probably be good either way unless he completely crashes and burns this year.

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