A long-suffering fan surveys the last quarter century of Metropolitans baseball — and brings receipts.

The calendar goes dark when baseball stops. Its absence creates a void into which you heap reflections on what’s past and aspirations of what’s yet to come—wherein you step back and make meaning of what you’ve seen. The void is most pronounced in January, less so but undoubtedly there on a Monday after a get-away-day in San Francisco, and certainly present during the All-Star break, when the screeching momentum of July baseball is suddenly arrested, leaving you unmoored and searching for something to grab onto.

This past off-season, off the heels of the Mets 10-5 Game 6 loss to the Dodgers in the 2024 NLCS, I once again confronted the void. This time, unlike each time before, I was buoyed and enthusiastic and filled with possibility. The Mets had not only completed one of the special single-season rides in team history, but they had punctuated the first quarter of this century with it. Twenty-five years of Mets baseball in the new Millennium was now a matter of history. This felt significant to me; like I needed to make something of it. And so, as I hurdled through the darkness of the void, unmoored and searching for something to grab onto, I reached out for it and grabbed hold…

Throughout my journey as a baseball and sports fan, I’ve been obsessed with making lists. It helps me make sense, add meaning, and create order. I struggle with people who refuse to unpack these sorts of questions, people who say, “It’s impossible to compare” or “I have multiple favorites” or “I can’t say what’s best.” It’s hard for me to engage with people like that; especially so when it comes to sports, and especially so when it comes to baseball. And so, I suppose it is this constant desire to apply order to disorder that ultimately compelled me to engage in this exercise, of applying some sort of order to the last 25 years of the Mets experience.

It all really began with a debate over Francisco Lindor. A question I had been mulling over and become prone to bringing up regularly when having a few beers with other Mets fans was the question of Lindor and what I felt was a criminal underappreciation of his greatness by the vast majority of fans. Before the second-half run of 2024, I would have put Lindor easily in my top five Mets of the last 25 years and couldn’t understand why people were ranking guys like José Reyes or even Daniel Murphy above him. That subsequently led to debates about who was a greater Met—DeGrom or Wright? And it led to debates further still about where our old friend and erstwhile manager Carlos Beltrán fell. Which led to still more agitated arguments about the greatness of Matt Harvey and how, actually, if you really look at it, R.A. Dickey might have been better.

And so, as these arguments volleyed back and forth and rattled around my head over the years, I thought it important to clean up and stack them into my own definitive point of view. To organize myself for the many future debates and to make the case for guys who are disrespected or undeservedly held up in Mets lore. To try and apply order to this wonderful, sometimes awful, experience of being a Mets fan.

Why 25 years and not all time, or the last ten, or some other frame? Partly because 25 years to me feels like a clean and crisp organizing framework, encapsulating a tidy number of eras, iterations, and versions of the Mets experience. Partly because the all-time Mets thing feels like a song already sung by many voices. And partly because the signing of Juan Soto, to me anyway, felt like a clean break into a new era of Mets baseball, and it’s important to look back before we move into something that, I hope, is markedly different.

And what of my credentials?

I’ve been a Mets fan my whole life. My dad grew up in Queens, and I grew up on the Mets; on WFAN, on Bob Murphy, Howie Rose, and Gary, Keith, and Ron. Baseball has always been deeply rooted in family for me, far more than any other sport. Some of my earliest memories were of Shea Stadium in the ‘90s or of being woken up by my Dad to watch a record being broken somewhere around the sport. After my mom died in my mid-20s, it was Mets season tickets that brought me and my Dad closer together, Eventually Citi Field became the place where the most important family business was executed. And now, as I’ve become a father myself, I’ve been able to live through the singularly beautiful and profound experience of taking my own son to his first Mets game. Pride hardly describes the feeling of being able to sit with your three-year old as the Mets blow a 6-1 lead in the eighth, don the cloak of tradition worn by generations of yore, and look him square in the eye insisting that this, my boy, is the way.

I am not a baseball journalist, historian, or expert. I have not met any of these players. I was never a Mets beat writer. Baseball is simply my favorite game and pastime, and I have strong opinions about quality and its absence.

This is just one guy’s opinion.

Here’s how I arrived at it.

Methodology

Timeframe

This is a list of the 25 greatest Mets of the last 25 years. That means that we’re only considering performance between the 2000 and 2024 seasons, ignoring any statistical accumulation or achievement from years outside this window—including the current 2025 season. If a player had great seasons in the 90s, wonderful, but it’s not relevant for this list. That means, I am not considering Mike Piazza’s or Al Leiter’s or Edgardo Alfonzo’s total Mets career, just the seasons that took place between 2000-2024, and that of course dings their resumes a bit. It also means that the accumulation of stats and goodwill generated during the first half of the 2025 season are off the table. Check back in 2050 to learn how Brandon Nimmo’s .784 first-half OPS impacted his ranking on the top 50 list.

Defining greatness

How to define great? You’d need another 30,000 words to do so in a baseball context, but for me I use traditional, surface-level baseball statistics (e.g., batting average, runs, RBI, Home runs, ERA, WHIP, etc.) alongside some advanced metrics (e.g., WAR, FIP, etc.) This is not an exercise on why advanced metrics are good or bad, but the smartest people in the sport look at them to assess a player and so they are an important way I also think about greatness. I reference Wins-above-replacement (WAR) a lot because it’s a great equalizing statistic—what value does X player provide a team compared to a replacement-level player. In Mets terms, what is the value-add of Francisco Lindor over Omar Quintanilla? You don’t need advanced metrics to tell you the answer is a ton, but there’s a stat that does tell you specifically and it’s called WAR.

Throughout this exercise I use WAR a lot and in several different contexts and so it’s worth a few more words of clarification about how it works. WAR is a cumulative stat, the more you play the more it impacts your WAR. Importantly, WAR accounts for fielding as well as hitting.

You can look at a player’s WAR for a single season, a specific timeframe encompassing multiple spans, and their entire career. The simple rule is the higher your WAR the more valuable you are. For a single season, if your WAR is between 4.0-5.0, you’re probably an all-star level player (you’ll often hear people describe this as being a 4-win player, or 5-win player). If your WAR is 5.1-7.0 in a single season, you’re one of the game’s elite players and in the conversation for an MVP or Cy Young award. 7.1 and above and you’re on the shortlist for MVP or CY Young. Over a career, a WAR of 50 means you had an outstanding career; 65 and above, you’re likely in Cooperstown; 100 and above, you’re an all-time great.

Like any stat, you can apply it to a single season, or you can look at it cumulatively over a player’s career. You can take a timeframe (like the last 25 years as a Met), and identify the total cumulative WAR (i.e., the total cumulative value), the per-season WAR (i.e., what was their average value on a per-season basis), or even the per-162 WAR (i.e., how valuable were they if their performance was prorated to a full 162 game slate).

What about quantifying defensive value? There’s lots of baseball writers, smarter than me, that prefer other defensive metrics besides defensive WAR (dWAR). Outs above average, for instance, is a preferred one, but didn’t become widely tracked until 2020. Ultimate Zone Rating is another. What we’re going for here is a defensive stat that standardizes performance and allows for comparison. Since I use WAR frequently for offense, I use it for defense too.

For this exercise, where a player is ranked is a combination of their performance (as measured in traditional stats as well as advanced metrics), their performance in high-leverage moments (important regular season and post-season) and intangibles. Intangibles could be the way they carried themselves on the field—were you proud to be a Met, did you do so with honor and integrity, and did you exhibit a high degree of character—or the way they made you feel watching baseball.

Eligibility

To be eligible for the list you had to finish within the top 10 of WAR in any one season between the 2000 and 2024 seasons. I then assessed the rosters of all 25 seasons to find players that may have fallen through the cracks but deserve a mention in the history of this century. No one who fell outside of the top-10 in WAR in any given season rule ended up making the list. I also disqualified players who spent one season or less in a Mets uniform.

Century ranks

For these eligible players, I extracted their Mets career stats between the 2000 and 2024 seasons to develop their century-specific statistical profile. I then ordered the century-specific stats for each player and compared them against each other. At the top of each player’s write up, you’ll see a table that presents their century statistics and where they stack up against peers within this time frame. For each statistic, I’ve indicated the total count of each stat (e.g., the number of homers, the number of hits, the number of strikeouts) and where that value ranks among eligible players this century. For example, in the table to the right, we’re looking at runs scored. This indicates the total number of runs scored by the player this century (227), and where this ranks among other eligible players this century (16^th). I also called out any relevant awards and recognition for each player and identified what I saw as their peak stretch of performance. Yes, it’s helpful to consider Matt Harvey’s overall career but isn’t it also worth understanding what his performance looked like at the peak of his powers?

Final rankings

Using these metrics, alongside memory, and many hours watching highlights and pouring over baseball reference, it just came down to judgement calls. Almost everyone who reads this list will have different opinions, reached through their own unique methods for assessing greatness. Some don’t have time for advanced stats. Some don’t care about anything other than postseason play. And that’s okay, that’s the point even. To each their own, and here’s mine.

The 25 greatest Mets of the last 25 years.

25. Juan Lagares, CF | 2013 – 2020

From the jump, I want to give you an opportunity to turn back. To walk up to the edge of the trenches, peer out over the muddy and unforgiving walls, and consider the kingdom of pain which hath been wrought these 25 years.

We are not beginning with what feels good—you will not find Mark Vientos or Candelita here—but we must begin nonetheless. Enter Juan Lagares, he of a .254 career Mets batting average and .651 OPS. As I said, not pretty. However, if you have decided to trudge forward on this journey with me, you know that Juan Lagares is here not for the bat, but for the glove.

More than Beltrán, more than Ángel Pagán—have I mentioned there would be some low points on this journey?—Lagares is the most gifted center fielder and maybe overall defender I’ve seen play in a Mets uniform. He could not hit—like at all—and his defensive abilities atrophied by his late twenties, but at his peak Lagares was the best center fielder in baseball. You needn’t the numbers to tell you this, if you watched him play it jumped out at you the way Frankie Lindor playing shortstop does, but the numbers tell you too and they are staggering.

During his age 24 and 25 seasons, Lagares posted defensive WAR numbers of 3.2 and 3.1, doing so in 121 and 116 games respectively. These defensive metrics are good for top 100 all time in the history of the sport, and he achieved this with less than full seasons of playing time. If you prorate this out to 162 game averages you get a 4.3 defensive WAR, tied for 10^th all-time in the history of baseball. They are also the second and third greatest fielding seasons in Mets history, behind only Rey Ordóñez’s 1999 4.0 dWAR season.

What made Lagares great? For one, it was the efficiency of his movement. His jumps on balls off the bat were instantaneous, appearing to be in full stride by the time the camera cut from a finished swing to the field of play. The precision of his angles to the ball were so exact it appeared that he was following a line of best fit drawn for him by the gods of baseball instinct. Many times his jumps were so good, representative of so much confidence that he would be able to get to a spot at a given speed, that he appeared to be moving in slow motion or with a casualness that betrayed your assessment of the danger between ball and outfield grass. But Lagares was at his greatest when someone hit a ball in the gap, or to the center field wall, and you got to see him track baseballs at full speed, knowing the outcome of the play was very much an open question; that’s when you knew you were going to see something special, and you often did.

But ultimately, the Juan Lagares experience became one of waiting—waiting for his bat to develop—and wondering—wondering where the elite defensive ability ran off to in his mid to late 20s. Remember, this was a guy with aspirations for superstardom, the next great center fielder in Mets history. It wasn’t that Lagares never posted good defensive numbers again—he had a 1.9 defensive WAR in his age 28 season—but it came and went, and lower body injuries and lack of natural strength and athleticism started to outweigh his instinct and natural fielding ability far too quickly. His one decent offensive season gave you a glimpse at what might have been, with Lagares hitting .284 and putting up a 5.2 WAR season in just 116 games in 2014—an all-around season Lagares would never again come close to.

Lagares never had the defining moment that is played on the Citi Field scoreboard these years later, but he made about 95 plays that are worthy of remembrance. Do yourself a favor, take ten minutes to watch Lagares’ defensive reel. I’m partial to those plays in which Lagares retreats in a dead sprint, activates military-grade tracking systems, and somehow gets his body and glove to the sole position that will allow him to make the grab. The fact that Lagares, a player with a .659 OPS, ranks top 20 in WAR this century tells you all you need to know about how great Lagares’s glove was in center.

24. Max Scherzer, SP | 2022 – 2023

I suspect you may have a reaction to this one. I must admit, I hear you. It doesn’t please me to carry forward the case for Max Scherzer—a $43.3M, 40-year old starting pitcher who, when it mattered most, simply could not get the job done—as a great Met in any context. I probably don’t need to remind you about Scherzer’s last two starts of 2022, a must-win regular season matchup in Atlanta with the division on the line and the wild card start against the Padres, but in case you’ve blacked these out, here they are:

The Wildcard meltdown in particular was all-time let-down stuff. The Mets first playoff game since 2016, wearing the black jerseys, a raucous Friday night in Flushing—there was serious early 2000s Shea Stadium vibes. That lasted for all of five minutes, as Scherzer gave up a first-inning, two-run bomb to Josh Bell and another solo shot to Trent Grisham in the second, before ending his night after surrendering two dagger homers in the fifth.

The next season, Scherzer just wasn’t the same, battling injuries and time he pitched to a 4.01 ERA before being convinced to waive his no-trade clause in a deal with Texas—one that secured him his second World Series ring and further flexed the financial might of Steve Cohen, paying down huge portions of salary in vets-for-youth trades to maximize prospect capital.

With all of this on the table, how is Scherzer one of the great Mets of this century? For one, in 2022 Scherzer accumulated 5.2 WAR and 173 strikeouts in just 145 innings, pitching to a 2.29 ERA in helping the Mets win 101 games, their second most wins in franchise history. Among players on this list, only two starting pitchers have had a lower ERA over the course of a single season—that would be Jacob DeGrom’s 2018 season (1.70) and Matt Harvey’s 2013 season (2.27)

But more than his performance on the mound that season, Scherzer’s most significant impact took place independent of on-field performance and before he threw a pitch in a Mets uniform.

During the 2021 offseason, after the Mets had shamed themselves with the Javy Baez-led thumbs down fiasco and a 77-85 season, there were already questions about Steve Cohen’s ownership tenure. The Lindor trade and extension was looking somewhat suspect, and fans were anxious for the promise of Cohen’s wealth and commitment to bear fruit. No marquee player of significance to that point had chosen, of their own free will and accord, to sign with the Mets, Lindor’s trade and extension notwithstanding.

Even with Cohen’s inexhaustible financial resources, there remained doubt about whether signature, marquee, professional players would choose to sign on to the Mets experience. Even as the Mets were named as a possibility for Scherzer among baseball insiders, most thought it impossible that a player of his caliber, his professionalism, his pedigree would sign here. And when he did, it was seismic. It signaled something significant about Steve Cohen and something significant about the direction of the Mets. It was nothing less than a tectonic shift in the great power structure of major league baseball. Was it mostly about money—probably a lot of it was, yeah. Did it end up working out for Scherzer in a Mets uniform—honestly, no. But his choice to sign with the Mets created an aperture through which all future players could consider Queens as a serious option. There would be no Juan Soto, New York Met, without Max Scherzer, New York Met.

He further stabilized a Mets clubhouse—along with Buck Showalter—that had a year prior disgraced themselves in ways that were profoundly wounding to the fanbase. The man we all love and hold up as the next captain of the Mets—Frankie Lindor—was at risk of demonization and ostracization after his poor 2021 and literal f*ck you to the fans. Scherzer’s competitiveness, professionalism, accountability, and on-field achievement in 2022 went a long way toward washing away the taste of 2021, taking the pressure of guys like DeGrom and Lindor, and lighting the runway toward the expectation of sustained and expected success.

And so while Scherzer came up small when we needed him most, and lasted less than two years in a Mets uniform, he is an incredibly important and impactful figure in franchise history. Without him, there would be no Juan Soto, and time will tell what significance that bears on the history of the New York Mets.

This. It hit like nothing else until…this.

23. Tom Glavine, SP | 2006 – 2009

Another one eliciting audible groans, Tom Glavine is one of two players on this list who is defined by a single failure above all else. Tied with the Phillies atop the NL East after a brutal month of September in which they relinquished a 7.5 game division lead in less than three weeks, Glavine took the hill in the season’s final game with a chance to wash it all away and pitch the Mets into their second straight postseason. With palpable anxiety ripping through the Mets clubhouse and fanbase, the last-place Marlins—an angry bunch who the day before had participated in two bases clearing brawls and plenty of sh** talking—stood in the way and Glavine was sent out to face them. So mad were the Mets at the Marlins for their antics the game before, they apparently posted Hanley’ Ramirez’ quotes upon the clubhouse wall, writing underneath it, “Make them Pay.”

They most certainly did not make them pay.

Instead, Glavine authored one of the truly catastrophic innings in Mets history:

Managing just a single out and ultimately allowing seven earned, Glavine slunk off the mound in disgrace as boos rained down and the Mets all-time collapse was cemented. A 7.5 game lead on September 12 had evaporated. Collapse. Shame. Pain. Suffering. This is the way.

After reliving the disgrace of Glavine’s final game—if you’re in the mood for some self-loathing, definitely worth watching the first 17 minutes of the condensed footage from that day!—how could he possibly be mentioned with the great Mets of this century?

Taking a deep breath and a step back, it must be acknowledged that Glavine was one of the more durable and reliable Mets starters of the last 25 years. This is hard to reconcile, I realize, with the utter lack of reliability he is remembered for, but Glavine pitched five full seasons with New York, averaging 33 starts, 201 innings, and 3.97 ERA per season over that span. In his best three seasons in New York, he pitched to a 3.65 ERA, averaging 207 innings per year and 3.7 WAR, and was named to two all-star teams.

He was the best pitcher on the division-winning 2006 team, victorious in 15 games and providing stability to a poorly constructed and rickety rotation. His excellent 2006 postseason goes entirely forgotten, in which he pitched to a 1.59 ERA over 17 innings, including two consecutive scoreless gems in game 2 of the NLDS and Game 1 of the NLCS. Overall, he pitched more than 1,000 innings, earned 61 victories—including career win number 300—and took the ball every fifth day without fail. His 15.3 WAR is good for the eleventh most valuable Met this century and third among pitchers. He did all of this during his age 37-41 seasons.

There are going to be pitchers on this list who are recognized for their elite peaks, those brief flashes of brilliance on par with the greats of their time. There are others whose overall body of work was defined by consistent value and regular production over an extended period of time. Glavine is, of course, the latter. This combined with an overlooked role on the 2006 team and his outstanding postseason performance, is enough to warrant a place in the top 25 players this century—even if we’ll never forgive him for 2007’s final game.

One of the worst single moments this century, Glavine’s first inning of the season’s final game was the perfect microcosm of the Mets entire 2007 September asphyxiation.

22. Ángel Pagán, OF | 2008 – 2011

The first, “oh yeah, that guy!” on this list, Ángel Pagán was a dancing ember among the thick black smoke of the late aughts and early tens. Acquired from the Cubs for a whole lot of nothing, Pagán played a reserve role for his first Mets season in ’08 (0.5 WAR in just 31 games) and began the 2009 season on the disabled list. Upon activation in mid-May, Pagán began a two-year tear of elite two-way play, serving as the best and most valuable player on the Mets roster.

Accumulating the fifth highest defensive WAR this century, Pagán could could go get in the outfield, on par with the other great Mets center fielders of all time. He could fly on the basepaths—he put up 162 game averages of 35 steals and 12 triples—although he often flew with such reckless abandon that he’d make infuriatingly stupid baserunning decisions. While he didn’t hit for much power (topping out at eleven in 2010), he hit .284 as a switch hitter during his Mets tenure including a .296 average during his peak years, a peak that is on par with some of the great, great players of this century. Taking Pagán’s injury shortened but elite 2009 season and the full season of 2010 together, you get the following per 162 averages:

Over these two years Pagán was the Mets most valuable player by far. His 4.0 WAR in just 88 games was first on the 2009 Mets and his 5.3 WAR over the full 2010 season was also first on the team.

Sadly there isn’t a lot of great tape on Ángel accessible to a guy like me (i.e., a guy unwilling to spend more than 10 minutes looking for Ángel Pagán footage) and it’s probably for the best someone burned the evidence of the 2009 and 2010 seasons. Still, Pagán’s peak production, defense, speed, hit tool and overall value cement him as the best Mets player of those dark, dark days and among the most underrated Mets of this century.

Sadly there isn’t a lot of great tape on Ángel accessible to a guy like me (i.e., a guy unwilling to spend more than 10 minutes looking for Ángel Pagán footage) and it’s probably for the best someone burned the evidence of the 2009 and 2010 seasons. Still, Pagán’s peak production, defense, speed, hit tool and overall value cement him as the best Mets player of those dark, dark days and among the most underrated Mets of this century.

I’m not an inside-the-park-homer guy, just doesn’t do it for me. But Pagan’s rendition against the Phillies in August of 2009 is his signature moment for several reasons. First, it nicely demonstrates the sort of opposite field, tailing liner, gap-to-gap hitter Pagan was at his peak. Second it gives you a sense of the speed and physical freneticism Pagan ran with—him kicking it into gear around third gives you a bit of Reyes vibe, doesn’t it? But more than anything else, the foolishness of the ball getting stuck, the Citi Field walls being black, the Mets getting absolutely housed 6-0 in the FIRST INNING, it was just exactly how things were back then. (In case you’re wondering, Oliver Perez started that game and gave up two three-run homers before being pulled before recording three outs. This is the way.) It’s why I chose the card I did for Pagan—the feeling of rock bottomness that Ángel and all of us more-or-less felt during the dark times.

21. Edwin Diaz, CP | 2019 – 2024

* Century ranks for relief pitchers are isolated from starting pitcher statistics. 21 relief pitchers were eligible for this list based on top 10 finishes in single season WAR between the 2000 and 2024 seasons.

Every Mets closer I’ve ever known has disappointed me, significantly so in most cases. Closers are expected to be perfect and when they inevitably fail, it almost always results in game turning consequences eliciting intense feelings of anger and betrayal. Benitez, Looper, K-Rod, Familia, and even Hall-of-Famer and owner of 9.53 postseason ERA as a Met Billy Wagner possess an impressive body of work of screwing things up in huge spots despite long stretches of good or even elite performance. That’s the life of a relief pitcher, whose season-to-season variance in stuff and statistical output swings more wildly than any position in sports. Relief seasons are like wine in that way, a peak vintage year can be followed by forgettable one the next.

“Sir, can I interest you in the 2022 Edwin Diaz?”

“Do I endeavor—as a man of integrity and substance—for peace, health, and prosperity for myself and those I care for? Absolutely, good sir, uncork the ’22 Diaz.”

“Sir, how about a glass of the 2019 Edwin Diaz?”

“I think I’ll have a beer.”

Diaz’s first season as a Met was an abject and utter disaster. The man who the year prior saved 57 games and pitched to a 1.96 ERA as a 24 year old, donned a Mets uniform and immediately flatulated a 5.59 ERA with seven blown saves and a 2.33 HR/9, which was dead last among all major league relievers. Being the worst at giving up homers when your job description is to pitch well with the game on the line isn’t great!

Just as bad as the numbers was his mound presence and demeanor. Diaz did not look long for New York as he over and over again stared with a sort of amused disbelief as a game losing missiles sailed out and over the Citi Field walls. He famously and reflexively would point up in the sky to indicate he had engendered a routine fly ball, only for an absolute nuke to put a dent in the left field seats. The man was totally lost and the Mets bullpen era that year (4.99) was fifth worst in all of baseball.

To his immense credit, he was able to put 2019 behind him and—despite the momentary blips and inevitable screw ups here and there—has been among the dominant relief pitchers in baseball since. Between 2020 and 2022, no reliever in baseball has been more valuable by WAR and despite missing the entire season in 2023, he’s still the fourth most valuable reliever in baseball and leads all relivers in FIP and K/9 over the last five seasons. Diaz’s 2022 season specifically was the greatest year by a Mets closer this century, posting 3.2 WAR with a 1.31 ERA, 0.90 FIP, and 118 KS in just 62 innings. It was the closest thing to a sure thing I’ve ever seen from a closer, with Diaz striking out more than 50 percent of the batters he faced and posting a 17.5 K/9. He was absolutely unhittable, erasing images of a bewildered Diaz from 2019 and replacing them with the sounds of trumpets thundering down around him as he took the mound as the most feared late-inning arm in the game.

And unlike his peers this century, Diaz is one of the few Mets relievers who has a rather sparkling postseason resume: 2.38 ERA in eleven innings, and only one blown save, from which he was able to recover and lock down a pivotal Game 4 victory against Philadelphia in the 2024 NLDS.

Diaz being a Mets player and 2022 being so special for him meant that, by rule, he had to tear his patella tendon pitching in a meaningless exhibition tournament before the 2023 season. This is the way. But Diaz once again bounced back in 2024, albeit slowly and not to the elite levels of 2022. There were ups, there were downs, there was removal from the closer role for a bit there, there were moments of brilliance in the postseason, along with moments of cardiac arrest. This is the life of a closer, and one that Diaz has been able to navigate as well as anyone. Here’s hoping that the 2025 Edwin Diaz vintage goes down smooth.

Diaz’s slow unfolding heart attack of an outing against the Phillies in Game 4 of the 2024 NLDS showcased everything you love about the Edwin Diaz experience. Clinging to a three run lead provided by Frankie Lindor’s heroic grand slam, Diaz walked the first two batters he faced—classic Edwin!—only to avert disaster by stuffing a 101 mph heater past Kyle Schwarber, sending Citi Field into a frenzy and the Mets to an improbable birth in the NLCS.

20. Yoenis Céspedes, OF | 2015 – 2020

There’s a case to be made that no player is more representative of the Mets experience—no better manifestation of the spirit of rooting for this team—than Yoenis Céspedes. The highs were brief and brilliant, the lows were as low as they were bizarre. Promise and optimism quickly dissipated into waiting, wondering, and, ultimately, disappointment. This is the way.

The at-the-buzzer trade for Céspedes at the 2015 trade deadline brought in the most intoxicating and exciting position player the Mets have had since José Reyes and ignited a wildfire within and around the Mets that carried them a division title and NL pennant.

Clad in neon yellow batting sleeves and an armory of accessories and apparel, Céspedes sauntered around Citi Field like the chieftain of a frontier people theretofore unbeknownst to Mets fans. We had never before called a guy like this one of our own, an emissary of the new era of baseball stars that were loud in every respect. The man hit bombs with swagger and gusto, and he hit them long. I mean really long. Céspedes homers were up there with Reyes triples and DeGrom’s 100mph on the black as the most thrilling Mets experiences of the last 25 years.

In the field, he gave you a bit of everything, didn’t he? He famously had one of the all-time greatest throwing arms and at times made you marvel at his athleticism, but at other times was absolutely erratic, somehow being entrusted with center field responsibility in World Series games. His chiseled physique soon became brittle and watching him exert himself even mildly in the outfield became an act of anxiety, akin to watching Giancarlo Stanton run from first to third.

Off the field, Céspedes was an enigma. He was often injured—sometimes caused by baseball, sometimes by wild boars, sometimes by playing golf—held a proclivity for ripping cigs in the clubhouse tunnels and in the video room, and after showing up for ten games to begin the COVID-shortened 2020 season, famously abandoned his teammates and contract obligations without so much as a word to anyone.

After playing 132 games in 2016—the year in which he went on the DL and played golf on the same day—he never again appeared in more than 82 games. Over his five plus seasons with the Mets he appeared in just one out of every two possible games (51 percent). He also disappeared in the 2015 World Series, amassing just three hits in 20 at-bats and driving in a lone run.

But in those games where he actually did play, he hit. No one this century has a higher slugging percentage, and in the history of the franchise he’s second in slugging and third in OPS. There’s a strong case to be made that without his bat in the lineup the Mets don’t reach the World Series in 2015 and miss the playoffs altogether and that his acquisition is one of the greatest trades in franchise history. Still, I think the Céspedes narrative, his loud and aesthetically pleasing style of play and swoop in to save the season vibes, overshadow what was a pretty disappointing Mets career.

I was at the first postseason game in Citi Field history, Game 3 of the NLDS against the Dodgers. There are two memories that will stick with me from that experience, both of which are sound-related. This was the first game after Chase Utley’s dirty slide broke Ruben Tejada’s leg. Everyone knew when they introduced Utley as part of the pre-game introductions it would be ugly, but I truly have never heard such a violent and resounding rage; a medieval and sincere thirst for blood. The other sound I’ll never forget was the joyful delirium of Céspedes’s game sealing three-run bomb. A true no-doubter on the biggest stage and how I’ll remember Céspedes’ Mets career. And of course the boar, and of course the cigs.

19. Jeff McNeil, IF/OF | 2018 – 2024 

Take a look at the players below:

Player A, in 100 less games, is seven wins more valuable than player B. If you prorate Player A’s numbers out to the same number of games as Player B, he eclipses him in every category besides RBI and steals. Given this vast disparity in WAR, you have to assume Player A is an exceptional fielder and Player B is a below average fielder. If I’m starting a team right now, I’m taking Player A. Player A is Jeff McNeil and Player B is Daniel Murphy. Jeff McNeill is a better baseball player than Daniel Murphy, and it’s not that close.

However, if you change the question from “who is the better baseball player?” to “who is the greatest Met?” the debate changes entirely. Daniel Murphy is held up as a hero in Mets lore and Jeff McNeill is held up as…I’m not sure exactly.

For me, Jeff McNeill has been one of the hardest Mets to root for over the last 25 years, mostly because he has the emotional self-control of my three-year-old son, manifested in frequent tantrums after what have become routine failures in big spots, brawls with and alienation of teammates, and embarrassing and irrational outbursts at opposing players, forcing his teammates and manager to defend and cover for him without merit. He’s like that friend at the bar who drinks too much tequila and starts aggressively hitting on the waitress, is asked to leave by the bartender, and then tries to fight the bouncer on the way out. You have no choice, really, but to halfheartedly defend, defuse, and deflect but there is immediate and post facto shame and self-loathing for having to stand up for such a troubled and foolish compatriot. “Come on, Jeff, let’s get out of here. That’s enough, Jeff, it’s time to go. Sorry, sorry, everyone, here’s a ten spot for the trouble. Damn it Jeff, get in the f*cking cab.” That’s what it’s like trying to root for Jeff McNeil.

And despite being a player I’m at time embarrassed to call our own, he has had an honest-to-goodness great Mets tenure. He’s had two seasons of 5.0 WAR or greater—both within the top 35 most productive seasons in franchise history—won the NL batting title, hit .310 or better four times in seven Mets seasons, and has been able to play excellent defense at four different positions (left, right, third, and second). In Mets franchise history he’s the eleventh most valuable position player, seventh in batting average, eleventh in doubles, fifteenth in hits, sixteenth in defensive WAR, and top 25 in OPS. This century he’s the seventh most valuable player and his top ten in hits, average, runs, total bases, and defensive WAR. There was a multiyear stretch where there was no one I wanted up more with the game on the line than McNeil who delivered some of the toughest at-bats in all of baseball.

He did have a pretty big hit in Game 2 of the 2022 NL Wildcard round, but his overall postseason numbers pale in comparison to his regular season performance, he’s hit just .182 with a microscopic .394 OPS in across eight postseason games. And after two years of mediocre play and a stable of young infield prospects on the way, it’s fair to wonder if McNeil will fade as an afterthought in the not-too-distant future. Ultimately, it’s hard for me to hold McNeil up with pride, as an artifact explaining what I think it means to be a great player and what makes me proud to be a Mets fan. And so in my view, there are few players this century who have such a significant gap between their statistical achievements and place in Mets history than does McNeil.

I am really fond of Jeff McNeil’s ninth inning at-bat in the finals of the 2023 WBC—he actually made me proud to call him a Met there!—when he worked an absolutely dogfight of an at bat against Shohei Ohtani to get on base for a potential USA comeback. As far as his greatest Mets moment, it has to be the admittedly clutch two-run double to help secure a win-or-go home victory against the Padres in the 2022 NL Wild Card round.

18. Curtis Granderson, OF | 2014 – 2017

An all-time easy-to-root for and all-around good guy, Granderson sat atop the Mets lineup for most of four seasons, including on the 2015 pennant winning team and the 2016 Wild Card team. He gave off vibes of another era: socks rolled high, baggy uniform, quiet swing mechanics, a gait and way of moving that felt natural and unedited by a sports scientist in a performance lab somewhere, and, of course, the class.

Granderson signed on with the Mets after four very strong, but successively less effective, seasons with the cross-town Yankees. While not close to the seismic earthquake the Juan Soto signing represented, Granderson choosing to play here signaled a belief in the Mets direction that—after nearly a decade of irrelevance—seemed to say something about the future direction of the team.

After a disappointing debut season in 2014 (1.2 WAR, .714 OPS in 155 games), Granderson put up a five-win season in 2015, bumping his batting average close to .260, to go along with 27 homers, 60 extra base hits, and 100 runs scored. Overshadowed by Daniel Murphy’s legendary playoff run, Granderson was the team’s second-best hitter that postseason, leading the Mets in postseason RBI to go along with a .283 average and .866 OPS. He also was one of the few Mets hitters that came through in the World Series, hitting three homers with an OPS over 1.000.

During that playoff run, Granderson had multiple clutch moments when the Mets felt close to the brink. In Game 3 of the NLDS, with the Mets tied in the series but down 3-1 early in the game, Granderson hit a two-out, bases clearing double off lefty Brett Anderson that put the Mets back ahead and ignited an offensive barrage that made the first playoff game in Citi Field history a jubilant and triumphant affair. In Game three of the World Series, with the Mets down 2-0 in the series and 3-2 in the game, Granderson hit a go-ahead, two-run homer in the third inning to give the Mets a lead they would not relinquish. And in a must-win Game five, Granderson hit a leadoff homer to set the tone, a run that nearly stood up as the game winner if not for Harvey’s and the Mets’ ninth inning collapse.

And despite being a below-average fielder by the time he got to the Mets, Granderson made some huge plays in big postseason spots. Including robbing a homer in the 2015 NLCS and making a game preserving play in the 2016 Wild Card game, crashing into the center field fence in the sixth inning with a man on second to keep the game scoreless.

Granderson’s overall regular season numbers as a Met are just okay—he had just the one great year and three pretty meh years otherwise—but he was brought in to help the Mets win and that’s what he did. He simply was a winning player, and a guy you wanted on your team in and in your clubhouse.  Combined with being an all-time class act, Granderson’s overall resume is good enough to vault him over several more talented peers on this list.

While it’s worth mentioning the 2016 regular season game in which Granderson hit a game tying homer and walk off homer all in extra innings, Granderson’s tenure with the Mets was defined by his clutch postseason play. He had as many big playoff moments as anyone this century, but none more illustrative of his coolness under duress than the World Series homer in Game 3. Down 2-0 in the series and 3-2 in the game, Granderson poked a two-run homer to right, giving the Mets a lead they would not relinquish on their way to their second World Series win this century, which would also be there last.

17. Noah Syndergaard, SP | 2015 – 2021

Syndergard was, at times, the best in the longstanding Mets pitching tradition: The aspirational, definitely-will-be, kind-of-was-for-a-minute-there, oh-no-might-not-be, damn it, definitely-won’t-be, dynastic dream. With a build, set of lettuce, and arsenal that made even the most callous and dull Mets fans embrace the Thor moniker, he was peerless in his mound presence when at his best, rivaling even Matt Harvey’s screw you demeanor and approach to pitching.

Possessing a triple digit fastball—in the beginning none of the other Mets aces threw this hard, this consistently—and a break from the heavens curveball, Syndergaard debuted in the middle of the 2015 season and was dominant from the start. His call up, fittingly, was to replace Dillon Gee in the rotation, who had for years been one of the Mets most effective pitchers despite having a career ERA over 4.00. No shade on Gee, who went out there and battled over his six Mets seasons and had some nice moments, but replacing Gee with Syndergaard was the type of Honda for Lamborghini upgrade that felt representative of the hope and optimism ushered in by that 2015 team and the rotation in particular.

Thor pitched to a 3.24 ERA in 24 starts during the 2015 regular season striking out 166 in 150 innings, finishing fourth in NL Rookie of the Year voting. He made three excellent starts in the postseason that year—one in each round—posting a 3.32 ERA over his three starts and one essential NLDS relief appearance in which he held the Dodgers scoreless in the seventh inning, backing up Jacob DeGrom and ultimately helping the Mets secure the series. His tough as nails Game 3 start in the World Series—catalyzed by brushing back Royals shortstop and rock-in-your-shoe annoyance Alcides Escobar—was among the most important and memorable victories this century. Down two games to none, in the first World Series Game at Citi Field, Syndergaard was perfectly cast for that moment and did not let us down.

Like Harvey in 2013 after a breakout 2012, Syndergaard backed up his 2015 debut with his best professional season in 2016. In 30 starts, he posted a 2.60 ERA over 183.2 innings and led all of Major League Baseball in FIP (2.29). While his WHIP jumped by a full point compared to his rookie year—Syndergaard seemed to always struggle in trusting his stuff, relying and aiming for strikeouts over efficiency that cost him going deep into games—his stuff was as nasty as ever. Relying more on a low 90s slider instead of the hammer curve to strike out 218, earning his first and only all-star appearance, and finishing eighth in Cy Young voting. As the most valuable and available starter that year (5.0 WAR), Syndergaard got the ball in the 2016 Wild Card game and pitched one of the great postseason games this century: 7 innings, two hits, 10ks. Ultimately outdueled by Madison Bumgarner who went the distance and shut out the Mets—no surprise there—and failed by a late inning Jeurys Familia collapse—no surprise there—Syndergaard’s heroic outing solidified him as the Mets co-ace of the future, truly on par with DeGrom and Harvey.

And then, like it seems to come for all starting pitchers throwing triple digits and especially so for should-be Mets aces, injuries and arm problems emerged and would really never go away. After a lost 2017 season (just seven starts), Thor bounced back with a strong 2018 (3.03 ERA in 154 innings). After a mediocre 2019 (4.28 ERA in a full season of work), we kicked off Spring Training in 2020 with news that Syndergaard had torn his UCL and would miss all of 2020 and much of 2021. The Thor experience was over, ending not in a sudden clap of lightning, but a slow moving car crash of injuries and atrophy. In many ways similar to the feeling of watching Harvey’s star slowly extinguish in bitter disappointment and a way-to-soon over the hill-ness. This is the way.

Unlike Harvey, though, whose personal choices and lifestyle contributed to his downfall, which makes assessing his legacy slightly more complicated, I have nothing but love for Syndergaard. His best two seasons as a Met coincided with two postseason appearances and one of two World Series appearances this century. Throughout these postseason runs, he did not falter a single time, not once. His 2.42 postseason ERA is fourth all-time in franchise history, better than DeGrom, better than Harvey, better than Leiter. Only DeGrom has a better FIP this century.

Dueling toe-to-toe with all-time great postseason ace Madison Bumgarner in the 2016 Wild Card game was probably the most impressed I’ve been with Syndergaard, but the first thing I’ll tell my kids about when asked about Thor is the this-is-my-mound moment in Game 3 of the World Series. Down 2-0 in the series and needing a quick start in the first ever World Series Game at Citi Field, Syndergaard buzzed Alcides “the gnat” Escobar inside to let him know what’s what, and then proceeded to blow him away with 99 at the letters. It set an unquestionable tone the Mets rode to their only win of that World Series, despite holding leads in the eighth inning or later three other times. This is the way.

16. Michael Conforto, OF | 2015 – 2021

Michael Conforto was supposed to be the next David Wright—that’s how I felt about him anyway. The Mets 2014 first round draft pick (tenth overall) and a consensus top 100 prospect, Conforto’s advanced approach, maturity, and experience at the highest levels of NCAA ball earned him a major league call up within a year of being drafted. Thrust into a divisional dog fight and an NL pennant race, Conforto responded by posting a 2.1 WAR in just 56 games, debuting an elegant left-handed power swing and plus athleticism that screamed future star, future face of the franchise.

After playing a meaningful role in securing the Mets first division title since 2006, Conforto had several huge moments throughout the run to the 2015 World Series, including a homer in his first ever postseason at bat and a two-homer game in Game 4 of the World Series. It’s hard to watch the Game 4 tape—the first inning, no-doubt nuke to put the Mets ahead in a must-win World Series game at home and the way he hangs in on a brutal left-on-left matchup and muscles the ball over the right field wall for his second homer that night—and not lament how it could have been, how it could have turned out different for Conforto.

It’s probably fair to say that the 2015 postseason run was Conforto’s zenith as a Met, that he failed to live up to the profound expectations cemented in Game 4 of the World Series and the incredible rookie run that preceded it. But for half a decade, we waited and looked for glimmers that maybe, finally, Conforto was putting it all together and becoming the greatest home-grown position player since David Wright.

After a dreadful sophomore season in 2016—a year in which Conforto was sent down to the minors and posted a 0.6 WAR in 109 games—Conforto responded with an all-star season in 2017. In 109 games, he slugged 27 homers, hit .279 with a .939 OPS, and accumulated 3.7 WAR, reigniting hopes of his possibility. That is, until, he dislocated his shoulder taking a seemingly innocuous swing in August, robbing him of the rest of the season and, we were told, compromising his performance throughout 2018 (2.7 WAR in a full 153 games).

2019 saw Conforto bounce back yet again (3.6 WAR…33HR…92RBI…856 OPS) and he was one of the games best players in the 2020 COVID-shortened campaign (2.1 WAR….927 OPS). But he struggled mightily in 2021, hitting just .232 with a .729 OPS, resulting in franchise reluctance to offer him a long-term deal. And after rejecting a one-year qualifying offer, Conforto elected free-agency. That was it, he was gone.

I really thought Conforto would be the guy, that he would be the face of the late 2010s and early 2020s, that he would one day be the Mets all-time home run leader, number retired, and a World Series champion. His failure to live up to even half of those expectations hurts. But Conforto remains one of my favorite Mets, an all-around excellent human being, and a century great—he’s eighth all-time in Mets homers, tenth in slugging percentage.

After two so-so seasons with the Giants, Conforto this offseason signed a one-year, prove-it deal with the Dodgers. I’m virtually certain that if the Mets once again meet LA in the playoffs, Conforto will inflict profound pain upon the fanbase through a big clutch hit or bomb over Shea Bridge in a big spot. Whatever the odds are, I’ll take them. This is the way.

It’s hard to beat hitting two bombs as a rookie, at-home, in a must-win World Series Game, but I’ll always remember that wild game against the Nationals in August 2019 where the Mets were making a feisty little postseason push (they did not make it). Following Todd Frazier’s best moment as a Met, Conforto hit a walk-off double and had his jersey rabidly torn off by his teammates, sending an already deranged crowd into further frenzy. That’s how it was with Conforto. There were these moments that allowed you to dream on him as the guy. On that night, if just for a moment, it felt that way once again.

15. R.A. Dickey, SP | 2010-2012

Was R.A. Dickey’s Mets tenure real life? Did it really happen? Or was it just a fever dream, simultaneously one of incredible achievement and absolute irrelevance.

Unfairly labeled as a one-hit, one-season wonder, the knuckleballer turned in three very good seasons, including two years of No. 2 starter averages in 2010 and 2011: 3.6 WAR…192 Innings…119 Ks…3.08 ERA…1.20 WHIP…3.71 FIP.

But it was an uptick in stuff, control, and the variance of his knuckleball velocity that contributed to the out-of-nowhere, Leicester-City-winning-the premier-league-season in 2012. That year he went 20-6 over 233.2 innings, struck out an eye popping 230 batters, posted ERA/WHIP/FIP lines of 2.73/1.05/3.27, accumulated 5.7 WAR, tossed five complete games—three of which were shutouts—and became the first knuckleballer to ever win the Cy Young award.

Watching the snowball of Dickey’s Cy Young candidacy grow was one of the few highlights of the dark 2012 season. In an eight-start stretch between June and July Dickey became appointment television, going 7-1 over 62.2 innings, striking out 76 batters against nine walks, allowing just six earned runs (0.86 ERA), and hurling three complete games, including consecutive one-hit shutouts.

RA was a cerebral, reflective, and sincere guy, and was one of the few Mets players I’d make an effort to hear out in post-game press conferences. It’s a shame he never played for a winner or had the chance to pitch in front of packed houses, or take the ball in a postseason game. He—like so many on this list—deserved better. It makes it hard to place him above the young Mets starters of this century, whose zeniths represented such significant optimism and hope for the future. Dickey’s brilliance simply never approached the stakes or carried the emotional weight of Harvey’s and Syndergaard’s, even if his numbers and average season were better, and they were better.

Still, Dickey’s recognition as the best pitcher in the National League in 2012 is historic, his performance representing the best in baseball for a full season, something Harvey and Thor never accomplished. And if you had to draw a card to play in a must-win spot, pulling from a pool of all individual seasons of Dickey, Harvey, or Syndergaard, you absolutely have to pull a Dickey card. He was more reliable and more consistent than both, despite not having the noise around him, hope latched to him, and the opportunity to showcase his ability on a postseason stage.

Despite Dickey’s achievements, the Mets were uncharacteristically shrewd to capitalize on his career year and land the aforementioned Syndergaard and Travis D ’Arnaud during the 2012-2013 offseason. It was an incredible return and a final line in a resume for one of the least appreciated great Mets of the last 25 years.

During the oh-sh**-is-this-really-happening phase of Dickey’s 2012 season he delivered back-to-back yes-it-absolutely -is-happening starts, pitching consecutive 1-hitters against the Rays and Orioles.

14. Carlos Delgado, 1B | 2006 – 2009

When I first sat down to map out this list, I had Delgado absurdly high, like in the five-ten range. My memory of Delgado was purely positive, a classic slugging left-handed first baseman that gave you 35 homers and 110+ RBI per season. Unlike Piazza or Alonso, the other pure sluggers of this century, Delgado’s swing was quiet and the way he sometimes seemed to flick the ball the other way over the left field wall undermined your assessment of just how strong he was. He brought experience, professionalism, and a clinical approach to hitting that lifted up the young talent present on the mid-aughts rosters. More than anything, I remember him as someone who—unlike many of his peers—delivered in big spots.

In the 2006 postseason, for instance, he hit .351 with a 1.199 OPS, homered four times and drove in eleven runs in just 10 games. In the Mets first postseason game since 2000 (Game 1 of the 2006 NLDS) he went four for five with a homer (40:30). In Game 2 of the 2006 NLCS he had a two homer, four RBI game, and in Game 4 of that series he added a homer and knocked in five. The 2006 lineup was so good there’s a case to be made that Delgado did all of this as the Mets’ fourth best player.

During the 2007 September collapse, he missed half of the season’s final month but when he was in the lineup hit .321 with a .949 OPS along with four bombs and ten driven in. In the 2008 rendition of the September choke, he was even better, delivering a .340 average, 1.050 OPS, along with eight homers and 22 driven in over the course of the Mets final month. He added some memorable regular season, clutch moments and authored the most productive offensive game in Mets history in Yankee stadium.

But when you move beyond memory and dig into Delgado’s resumé, his comparative value does not hold up. Delgado’s 4.8 all-time Mets WAR is thirty eighth among eligible players this century, putting him closer to guys like Amed Rosario, Ike Davis, and John Maine than guys like Beltrán, Lindor, and Wright. You might argue this is why advanced metrics sometimes fail, but I think the poor comparative value is rooted in two things that are an accurate reflection of his greatness or lack thereof. First, Delgado’s defense was absolutely abysmal. The image of Carlos on this baseball card is probably a fair representation of his fielding acumen. Second, it’s important to remember what the first base position looked like in the mid 2000s. Delgado put up good numbers, no doubt, but look at what his peers around the game were doing in 2006:

It’s a list that makes you marvel at Albert Pujols—a healthy practice every once and a while—and also puts into perspective the type of all-around value Delgado provided compared to his peers at the position. Really good, but also not anywhere close to elite. And this comparison above considers Delgado’s best season for the Mets by far, with his other three Mets years never coming close to this level of statistical output.

Comparative value aside, Delgado still feels underappreciated when talking about Mets greats. He didn’t carry the Mets to the World Series the way Daniel Murphy did—although he did everything in his power to do so—but his postseason numbers compared to Murphy are pretty similar, maybe even better:

This is not a WAR-only list, it’s a big part of it, but there are plenty of lenses through which greatness ought to be considered. And so while Delgado’s comparative value in the eyes of advanced metrics is borderline forgettable, he anchored the second best Mets lineup of all-time and is the Mets franchise leader in postseason average and slugging percentage. What are we doing here if we don’t over index postseason performance? In many ways it either cements your legacy (see Daniel Murphy) or sinks it (see Carlos Beltrán). In Delgado’s case, it uplifts him to the top 15 of this list, one of the great Mets of the last 25 years.

So proud of Carlos for the 2008 subway series game in ’08 where he hung nine rib eye steaks on the Yankees, but when you remember Delgado you remember the postseason, and for me Delgado’s most heroic performance was Game 4 of the 2006 NLCS. Down two games to one, Delgado let us know we’d be alright early with a three-run bomb in the bottom of the first and a solo shot in the fourth. Delgado is one of the all-time great postseason Mets.

13. Brandon Nimmo, OF | 2016 – 2024

Baseball is a story that grows with and alongside us. Watch it long enough, and you’ll start to have the narratives beyond the numbers wrap themselves around you. Brandon Nimmo ‘s journey—from awkward teenager, to first-round pick and the first ever from Wyoming, to injury-plagued-might-be-bust, to franchise corner stone—has been one such narrative that has taken very good on-field performance and elevated it to something more. Nimmo’s enthusiasm for New York and the Mets and the game of baseball not only translates positively to his on-field performance, it simply makes watching the game of baseball a better experience. Nimmo is uplifted by this attribute as much as anyone else this century and it’s one of the reasons he has a decent chance at his number being retired when it’s all said in done despite performance data that is certainly good, but not great.

But what does the data say? Traditional stats betray Nimmo a bit. Taking per-162 averages across Nimmo’s surface stats you get a nice player but hardly someone you’d hold up as a great this century:

The eye-test also betrays him a bit—he’s not fast, his gait is a bit stiff, he’s always smiling, he sprints after walks, all stuff that invokes a kid in the school yard more than an elite athlete. He’s also always been a bit overmatched defensively in centerfield—now leftfield—despite significant improvement in this area; and he struggled to stay on the field at the beginning of his career, although he has topped 150 games each of the last three seasons.

Of course, building a winning baseball team is not about putting together a sequence of gaudy stat lines per se, there is requisite variance in the shapes of the pieces that comprise the overall puzzle. Nimmo is at his best not when he’s pursuing the gaudy stat lines—in fact the years he’s sold out for more homerun power, 2023 and 2024, have been his worst overall statistical seasons—but when he is doing nearly everything possible to win baseball games. What does Brandon Nimmo do more than anything else—points to Jonah Hill—that’s right, he gets on base.

Nimmo’s immaculate eye and approach at the plate, combined with good enough over-the-fence pop and excellent extra-base tallies, has resulted in one of the most valuable Mets players this century and indeed the history of the franchise. His career WAR (23.3) is eighth all-time, just one win shy of Mike Piazza. He has four seasons with more than 50 extra base hits and five seasons with an OPS above .800. He’s sixth all-time in walks and on-base percentage, and within the top 15 in games played, OPS, runs scored, total bases, doubles, triples, homers, and extra base hits. Nimmo has at times carried the offense during extended stretches, and at other times slots in as the type of supporting piece you need to win divisions and playoff games.

Nimmo possesses a motor and disposition you can hold up with pride, he loves being a Met, he appears to be on track to play his entire career in Queens, and will likely finish top five all time in most statistical categories, assuming he can reverse what has been a two-year slide in production.

In 2024, a torrid hot streak before the all-star game notwithstanding, Nimmo hit just .224 with a .327 OBP and .727 OPS, all this despite setting or coming close to career highs in homers, RBI, and steals. Nimmo does not need to set career highs in homers, RBI, and steals, it’s not what makes him valuable. As we move into 2025, Nimmo must endeavor to return to an approach at the plate that has made him so valuable henceforth, the things that have made him such a winning player. Lindor’s production in the leadoff spot unfortunately bumps Nimmo elsewhere the lineup and I would prefer him hitting second or ninth, instead of the middle of the order, to maximize his skill set and prevent him from overextending for homers moving forward.

But wherever he hits, Nimmo produces one way or another, he gets on base, he helps you win baseball games. He’s a beloved Met and is on track to have his number retired when it is all said and done.

Nimmo brings more of a let-me-help-you-cross-the-street-ma’am vibe than a cutthroat vibe to competition, and so that’s what made his cutthroat homer against the arch-rival Braves in 2024’s 161^st game so special. There were so many big moments for the 2024 New York Vibes that this one gets a bit lost. It’s quite possible, though, that there would be no Alonso homer, no Lindor Slam, without Nimmo’s three-run blast.

One other moment deserving mention was his best and most important play as a centerfielder. In August 2022, the Mets and Dodgers felt like the league’s two best teams. With DeGrom on the hill and the Mets locked in a dog fight, Nimmo robbed former Met Justin Turner of a game-tying homer on the way to a Mets win and series sweep. It was the reward for Nimmo’s dogged work ethic in transforming himself from a below average to half-way decent center fielder.

12. Daniel Murphy, 2B/1B | 2008 – 2015

Daniel Murphy is a player that tests your methodology for greatness. He makes you look in the mirror and ask yourself, at the end of the day, what really matters. There are some people who would look at Murphy’s advanced metrics and make the case that Murphy should be behind guys like McNeill and Nimmo and Conforto. Hell, there’s even half of my brain that, when looking back in detail at Murphy’s overall Mets career, asks the other half, “was this man really that good?” And I think the answer to that is at once, “no he probably wasn’t,” and “it doesn’t really matter.”

Despite a lengthy Mets career—his 903 game tenure ranks third this century, allowing him to accumulate hits, doubles, RBIs, batting average, and even steals that are good for top ten over the last 25 years—Murphy failed to author a season of more than 3.0 WAR and his 1.65 per-season WAR is 43^rd this century. His elite hit tool and gap-to-gap prowess were dragged down by his below-average glove and lack of power—he never hit more than 15 HR or drove in more than 80 runs. He never found a defensive home at which he was comfortable, shuffling from left field to second base, to first, to third, not because he could play all of them, but rather because he could play none of them.

His motor and toughness endeared him to fans, but it was this motor in part that led to regular injuries—most minor, some significant—limiting Murphy’s availability to three out of every four games (76 percent) throughout his eight-year Mets career. If you hold up their stats on paper—as we did earlier—the Mets’ other super utility player this century, Jeff McNeil, has had a far more valuable career and it’s not close. In fact, when looking at regular season performance, there’s a decent case to be made that no player holds more incongruence between their place in Mets lore and their actual performance than Daniel Murphy, which, to put it more plainly, means that Daniel Murphy is possibly the most overrated Met of this century.

And yet…

This list—one trying to sort through and order greatness—is not solely about regular season performance; a rote exercise of stacking up accumulation of WAR. When asked about the most memorable Mets moments of the last 25 years, it’s unlikely you’d offer me Jeff McNeil’s 5.7 WAR season in 2022, or the fact that Brandon Nimmo has quietly accumulated the eighth highest WAR in franchise history during this period—although I’d respect you if you did and those accomplishments are worthy of celebration.

What you most certainly will mention in the first few minutes of that conversation is Daniel Murphy and his 2015 postseason run. Seven homers, six of which came in consecutive games, 19 total hits, and a two-round stretch of Barry Bonds-level presence at the plate. His seven homeruns were hit off a group of elite pitchers that together have amassed five Cy Young awards and 25 all-star selections, including two of the greatest lefties of our generation: Clayton Kershaw, Clayton Kershaw, Zack Greinke, Jon Lester, Jake Arrieta, Kyle Hendricks, Fernando Rodney

Like Delgado and Granderson, Murphy is defined by what he did on the postseason stage, and what he did was significant and great.

Still, it must be said, that as soon as the Mets got to the World Series, Murphy became a liability. He hit just .150, failed to drive in a run, and his Game 4 error in the eighth inning cost the Mets the game and perhaps the series, putting the Mets in a 3-1 hole from which they’d never climb out. There’s an argument that it’s the costliest error of the last 25 years.

After 2015, the Mets front office—probably looking at Murphy’s regular season numbers and deciding the 2015 postseason run was an aberrative hot streak—extended only a qualifying offer to Murphy, who rejected it and went on to sign with a division rival and finish runner up in the 2016 NL MVP vote. To further stick our nose in it, Murphy absolutely raked against the Mets whilst wearing a Nats uniform: hitting .355 with 12 bombs and 1.061 OPS in 52 games. To become such a beloved Met, to deliver the most memorable single postseason hot streak in decades, before signing with a division rival and becoming one of the league’s best players, leaving in his wake a return to mediocrity and sadness, feels as representative of the Mets experience as anything else these past 25 years. This is the way.

Take your pick from the 2015 postseason. For me, it was the tie-breaking, game-winning homer in Game 5 of the NLDS off Clayton Kershaw.

11. Al Leiter, SP | 2000 – 2004

There are certain guys who played for the Mets in the 90s and early 2000s that I associate with my coming of age as a baseball fan; guys who I knew were important based on the way my Dad would tell me to watch them, or the way I’d hear fans in the upper tank at Shea celebrate or criticize them, or by some other notable and interesting characteristic. Some of these guys weren’t great or good even, they just had some defining magnetic thing about them that drew me to the sport.

Rico Brogna was the first player I can ever remember having an awareness of, due in part to the fact that the sheer absurdity and baseball-ness of his name must have been a profound awakening for my four-year-old mind, like I was being introduced to a super hero or cartoon character. I didn’t know guys could be named Rico Brogna, and I didn’t know 50,000 people could pack into a concrete palace next to scrap yards in a place called Flushing and watch a man named Rico Brogna play a game called baseball. What was this!

Bernard Gilkey and Butch Huskey and Todd Hundley and eventually of course Mike Piazza taught me how fun hitting bombs were. Not only could players hit this tiny ball moving at the speed of light, but sometimes they did so with gusto and physicality, with swagger and flair, with distance and majesty, and doing so ignited a frenzy of sound and energy I had theretofore never experienced. This, I thought, was magic.

Why am I sharing this in a write-up of Al Leiter? Because early on it was the guys with the clubs that I adored—pitching and fielding didn’t do it for me. Rey Ordonez ultimately taught me about the wizardry of fielding your position. And it was Al Leiter that made me aware of the beauty of pitching and particularly pitching with your left arm. He made me pay attention to pitch selection, sequence, psychology. Which is to say that watching Al Leiter gave birth to and ultimately catalyzed a love for the art of pitching.

And beyond my personal affection for Al Leiter, his Mets resume—hurt slightly by considering only what occurred in 2000 and beyond—is excellent.

Leiter didn’t possess the loud, dominant stuff of Harvey and Syndergaard—and by the time he reached the 2000s was in his mid-30s meaning he did not engender the excitement and newness and hope that are so often attached to young up and coming aces—but he matched Harvey and Syndergaard’s peak seasons and was far more consistent and available. Syndergaard had one 5-win season, Harvey had a 5.3 win and 4.9 win season, and Leiter had had 4.8 and 4.9 WAR season. Leiter averaged 191 innings per season during the 2000s and accumulated 3.8 WAR pet season, while Harvey and Syndergaard averaged 112 IP/2.1 WAR and 120IP/2.3 WAR respectively As we discussed with RA Dickey, it does actually matter if you take the ball and pitch every fifth day.

Like Fonzi and Piazza, Leiter is dinged a bit by not counting years taking place in the ‘90s. For Leiter, that means putting aside a 6.7 WAR season in 1998 and his most iconic Mets outing, the 1999 wild-card tiebreaker against the Reds, in which he delivered a two-hit, complete game shutout that sent the Mets to their first postseason in more than a decade.

Still, Leiter ranks as the fourth best pitcher this century. He will be remembered as a hometown kid, who grew up a Mets fan, and epitomized class, grittiness, and durability. He was also as consistent a postseason pitcher the Mets have had. During the run to the 2000 World Series, Leiter was the Subway Series Mets’ most consistent and reliable arm, going deep—and not our current standards of deep, we’re talking 140 pitches deep—into ball games:

He also gets overshadowed a bit in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 because Piazza’s home run was so iconic. But four days before Piazza’s homer in the team’s first game in New York since the attacks, the Mets actually played a road series in Atlanta. Leiter—he of Tom’s River New Jersey—took the mound that day and tossed seven innings of emotional, one-run ball in a Mets victory.

In franchise history, Leiter ranks fifth in pitching WAR, sixth in games started and victories, seventh in innings pitched, eighth in strikeouts, and second in postseason innings pitched and strikeouts. He’s up there with David Wright in all-time good dudes who played for the orange and blue.

The Mets lost the war to the Yankees, but Leiter’s 142 pitch battle in Game 5 of the Subway Series was as gritty an effort that any Mets pitcher has given in the last 25 years.

10. Matt Harvey, SP | 2012 – 2018

I remember exactly where I was when Matt Harvey debuted for the New York Mets. It was late July in 2012, the Mets were mired in a fourth straight season of mediocrity and a particularly nasty spell of incompetence that year, and I was out with friends at a crowded bar. The game was out in Arizona, so it was a bit of a late start, which was perfect viewing for a Thursday night out. Amidst the sea of people with their faces buried in conversation or their drinks, there was a small minority of people with their heads tilted upward toward the TV in the corner of the bar, locked in as the Mets 2010 first round pick took the mound for the first time. It was like that scene in Ocean’s 11 when Terry Benedict demolishes Elliot Gould’s casino, the crowd turns to watch, but Clooney and Damon remain set on what matters. You could tell who the real ones were that night.

Harvey not only delivered in the box score—5.1 innings, 3 hits, 11 Ks—he immediately brought a presence and swagger that we had forgotten was possible for a Mets starting pitcher. He combined elite stuff and a come-get-it-if-you-can approach in the zone with an ace build and a sauntering and quiet smugness that made him totally magnetic from the very first pitch. Harvey’s debut, in which he set the Mets record for most strikeouts in a first career start, doused his star in rocket fuel.

Harvey took the ball nine more times during the 2012 season, posting a sub three ERA and striking out 70 in 59 innings. With a full offseason of hype—and it was otherwise a particularly limp offseason for the Mets who, outside of extending David Wright, signed $4.75M worth of free agents—Harvey exploded out of the gates in 2013, posting a 5-0 record with a 1.85 ERA and 85ks in 78 innings over the season’s first two months. It was at this point Sports Illustrated cemented his place in the local and national baseball landscape as the Dark Knight of Gotham. And just like that, less than ten months after his major league debut, Harvey was a legitimate superstar; someone who craved, embraced, and thrived in the spotlight; someone who elevated the Mets’ brand; and, after a half decade of deep, deep despair, gave you something to be proud of, to dream on.

That’s the thing about Harvey that cannot be understated—the timing of his ascent. He was the first. Like being in a house that’s burning down and the first firefighter breaks down the door and reaches out a hand. There was something heroic about him. He was a bulldog with a bulging lip and stiff lower jaw, an all-everything ace who brought late 90s Pedro energy to the hill: climb up on my back, it will be okay, I’ve got this. It was this feeling that made Harvey Day and the Dark Knight moniker and all the superhero metaphors that enveloped Matt feel appropriate in those early seasons, and we all bought in.

His 2013 season rolled on and Harvey continued to pitch well, albeit slightly less torridly compared to those first two months (2.60 ERA between June and August). In one of the coolest moments of the early 2010s, he took the Citi Field mound to start the 2013 All-Star game and fired two scoreless innings, navigating the likes of a young Mike Trout, Big Papi, Miguel Cabrera, and Cano. All-star games don’t often mean much, but for Harvey to validate his rising star on a national stage with the game in Queens was incredibly important for the collective psyche of Mets fans.

But in August, after a velocity and strikeout dip, imaging on Harvey’s elbow revealed a torn UCL. Season over; 2014 off the table; the express train toward superstardom stalled; hope deferred; pain. It was as brutal an injury diagnosis I can remember. An absolute gut punch and reminder that the Mets really just can’t have nice things; that this is the way.

Harvey, to his credit, returned to ace form in 2015. Rejoining a rotation that now included 2014 Rookie of the Year Jacob DeGrom and hopeful ace-to-be Noah Syndergaard, Harvey pitched 190 regular season innings, posting a 2.71 ERA with 188 Ks. Despite famously wavering when it came to his post Tommy John workload—a concern that was quite rational it turns out—Harvey had no restrictions in the postseason and delivered three rounds of outstanding playoff starts:

His Game five start in the World Series was as legendary of a Mets start we’ve seen in the last 25 years, but perhaps fittingly and illustratively—both for Matt and the Mets—ended in utter disaster and with the Royals celebrating on the Citi Field mound. You all know what happened, I don’t need to get into it, do I?

But that was it, wasn’t it. Just like that, the ride was over and we never saw superstar Matt Harvey again. Sure, he was present, especially if you survey the NYC nightlife industry at the time, but his stuff and command and presence, they were simply gone and would never return. Harvey battled shoulder injuries and constant rehab for the better part of three seasons between 2016-2018 before being traded to Reds for Devin Mesoraco. An absolutely wild and incomprehensible transaction if you looked at it from the vantage point of the Citi Field mound circa Game five of the World Series.

Despite the brevity of his excellence, it must be acknowledged that Harvey was the team’s biggest superstar of the last 25 years, achieving fame in New York City more than any Met since Mike Piazza, and it was status he paid dearly for. His proclivity for partying and booze and drugs made it challenging for many to rally behind him as he worked his way back through long stretches of rehab and poor performance. And it obviously became something he couldn’t control and contributed to catastrophic consequences for those Harvey associated with. It’s hard to bash a guy struggling with substance issues in this way, and I when I look back on Harvey’s career I do so with genuine sadness and empathy for the guy. He seems to be coming back into the Mets fold—and crushing it as Senior VP of Sales for Nationwide!—and I think that’s a good thing.

Harvey reached heights of superstardom that no other player this century has—not DeGrom, not Wright, not Lindor. And his postseason excellence combined with the resurrective impact he had on a moribund Mets franchise supersedes a whole lot of disappointment and bitterness.

2015 World Series Game 5 almost went down as one of the single greatest postseason starts in Mets history, and who knows how it would have turned out had Harvey and the Mets secured the win that night. DeGrom was slated to pitch Game six and all bets are off in Game seven. Instead, it lives in history as Matt Harvey in a microcosm: the almost superstar, the almost next great Mets ace, the almost superhero, almost, but never quite it.

9. Edgardo Alfonzo, 3B | 2000 – 2002

Compared to the next position player on this list, “Fonzi” is lifted up by his intangibles — not dogged by them. He was a consummate professional, exuding humility and a go-about-your-business demeanor that endeared him to Mets fans. Fonzi is perhaps the player most hurt by the fact that we aren’t counting years prior to 2000, where he delivered two six-win seasons (1997 + 1999) and signature regular season and playoff moments and that are more significant than anything he did thenceforth.

Still, two of Fonzi’s three seasons this century were great. In 2000, he was the team’s best-all-around player—yes, better than Piazza—on one of the two pennant winning teams this century, leading the Subway Series Mets with a 6.4 WAR, 25 HR, 94 RBI, 109 R, 324/.425/.542, and a .967 OPS. He led the team in postseason batting on their way to the World Series, hitting .444 in the NLCS and delivering one this century’s most clutch hits in Game three of the NLDS. This more than anything is how I remember Fonzi—the approach, the quiet confidence, the clutch hits in huge spots.

After an injury plagued 2001—injuries that turned out to be chronic and sapped him of mobility and power—he delivered a final very good year (5.0 WAR), in which he was unceremoniously asked and graciously accepted a move to third base to accommodate the disaster incarnate Roberto Alomar.

I suspect that many Mets fans, and particularly younger Mets fans, would be happy to argue that Daniel Murphy is this century’s greatest second basemen, especially considering we’re looking at Fonzi through the lens of this century only and against the backdrop of Murphy’s 2015 postseason run. But the reality is Daniel Murphy is not in the same universe as Edgardo Alfonzo.

Daniel Murphy was an average hitter hidden away at second base, whereas Fonzi hit for both average and power and was an exceptional fielder, able to play second and third base at a high-level. Murphy failed to author a season over 3.0 WAR, whereas Fonzi accumulated as much WAR in his three seasons this century than Murphy did in all seven seasons as a Met. Murphy is defined by his 2015 postseason homer binge, but Fonzi too carried the Mets to the World Series in 2000. Both players disappeared in their respective World Series, and were ultimately allowed to walk away in free agency—for Fonzi that was the right call, for Murphy it was not.

Ultimately, Fonzi is right up there with Lindor, Beltrán, and Wright as the great all-around, two-way players this century. In the history of the franchise, he’s fourth among position players in WAR (29.6), sixth in defensive WAR (6.3), fifth in career average (.292) and hits (1,136), and top ten in games played, total bases, doubles, extra base hits, and runs batted in. In Mets postseason history, no one has had more hits, doubles, extra base hits, runs scored, or runs batted in.

Fonzi’s signature attribute was coming up big in big spots. 1999 was probably Fonzi’s greatest postseason achievement—the two homer, 5 RBI, grand-slam-to-win-the-game game against Randy Johnson and the D’Backs—but 2000 held a great one too. Down by a run in a pivotal Game three of the 2000 NLDS, Fonzi delivered a game tying double off then-untouchable Rob Nenn to set up a crucial 2-1 series lead and ultimately a 3-1 series victory on the back of Bobby Jones’ 1-hitter the next night.

8. Johan Santana, SP | 2008-2012

Best remembered for the first no-hitter in franchise history, many forget how elite Johan Santana’s first season—and really his first three seasons—as a Met actually were. This in part because his signature 2008 season ended with the second consecutive self-immolations that kept the Mets from the postseason.

In no way was this the fault of Johan Santana who, in his first year as a Met delivered one of the ten greatest pitching seasons in franchise history: 7.1 WAR…34 GS…234 IP…206 Ks… 2.53 ERA…1.15 WHIP…3 CG…2 SHO. The overall season numbers stand on their own—Santana finished 3^rd in the CY Young that year—but his numbers in September are even more impressive:

Remember that just the year before, the Mets had blown a 7.5 game lead with 17 left to go. Santana was brought in to wash the blood stains from the carpet, to erase our memories of ’07, and in 2008 the same thing was happening again! Grim does not begin to describe the feeling around this team, it was peak fatalism and panic, and amidst all of this Santana didn’t flinch: 4-0 W-L…44.1 IP… 47 Ks… 1.83 ERA…2.18 FIP, punctuated by the one of the greatest I’m-him starts in the last 25 years. With the baggage of 2007 slung around his neck, Santana on short rest and in the final weekend of baseball at Shea Stadium for the rest of time, through a 3-hit shutout in game 161 that kept the Mets alive—they, of course, died the next day.

The Mets were not competitive in 2009 and 2010, but Santana delivered excellent—albeit slightly less elite—seasons nonetheless. This three-year peak from 2008-2010—with averages of 5.0 WAR, 200 IP, 165Ks, 2.85 ERA, 1.18 WHIP, 3.59 FIP—is second only to DeGrom in sustained dominance in the last 25 years. Time came quickly for Santana, as it does for all Mets aces. He missed all of 2011 with shoulder surgery and sacrificed his left arm and career in 2012 for the Mets first no-hitter in franchise history.

Quickly on the no-hitter: while I think it was a bit overblown from a significance perspective—like does it really matter that much and should Santana have pushed his surgically repaired shoulder to the limit to achieve it—I can’t deny it was one of the most memorable Mets moments of my life. It was the night of my brother’s high-school graduation party and three generations of Mets fans were huddled around a TV drinking keg beer and telling stories as Santana crept towards and ultimately made history. Don’t forget also that the most pivotal moment in that game was not defensive play—although thank you Mike Baxter for sacrificing yourself for history—but our old friend Carlos Beltrán’s sixth inning liner going just foul.

But to the question about whether this was worth it, it was decidedly not for Santana, who was never the same again. He was actually trending to be the same guy he’d always been before he labored through 134 pitches to achieve Mets immortality. Fair trade? I’m not so sure:

Wherever you land on that question, Santana’s peak, historic moments, and performance in big-time spots solidifies him as the second-greatest starting pitcher this century.

Yes, the no-hitter was iconic, but I’ll always remember Santana for his performance in the do-or-die penultimate game of the 2008 season. Alas, even Santana couldn’t save the Mets from themselves, choking away the playoffs in Shea Stadium’s final game the next afternoon. 

7. José Reyes, SS | 2003-2011, 2017-2018

José Reyes is a contradiction; dissonance in baseball player form. He is at once this list’s most exciting and thrilling player and maybe its most overrated and disappointing one. He has been the most exciting and joyful New York Met and the most controversial one. He was a young Met and an old one, beloved and shamed. How to deal with such a player when holding him up against the rest?

Let’s start with the numbers.

The switch-hitter’s three-year peak between 2006-2008 rivals any position player in Mets history, with 162-game averages during this time of: 5.3 WAR…196 Hits…118 Runs…34 Doubles…16 Triples…16 HRs…66 RBIs…66 Stolen Bases….292/355/.461….816 OPS. He added a 4.6 WAR season in 2011—the year he won the batting title.

He debuted at the age of 19 and is third all-time in plate appearances. It’s this longevity that allowed Reyes to accumulate stats on par with the all-time Mets greats:

From an emotional, love-of-the-game standpoint, I would argue Reyes did more than even Wright to get young kids like me into and in love with baseball. He was like a slot-receiver playing shortstop, one of the games fastest and most explosive players, and watching him fly from first to third or out of the box for a triple or stealing second—arms chopping violently, feet blurred, tongue wagging—was an unparalleled baseball experience in the mid-2000s.

So why is Reyes seventh?

The many poor statistical seasons is a place to start. He had eight Mets seasons with WAR below 2.5 and while two of these seasons were before he wrestled away the full-time SS gig (2003-2004) and three were after Reyes bounced from Miami to Toronto to Colorado before landing back with the Mets (2016-2018), two also came during his prime (2009-2010). His per-season WAR of 2.8 puts him 23^rd this century.

During his prime years he got to just one post-season with the Mets (2006) where he hit .222—although his Game six leadoff homer against Christ Carpenter in the 2006 NLCS is arguably his best Mets moment. Amazingly—not in a good way—Reyes hit leadoff and played third for the 2016 Mets in their one-game Wild Card loss against the Giants (he went 0-4). As the Mets suffocated themselves in 2007 Reyes offered little relief, hitting just .205 with a .612 OPS in the season’s final month. The next year, as the Mets suffocated once again, Reyes did only slightly more to stave off collapse, hitting .243 with a .716 OPS.

Like Wright, he failed to elevate the Mets to the World Series in 2006, above water when the ship was sinking in 2007 and 2008, and into contention in the final years of the decade. And unlike Wright, he never had a redemptive moment in the postseason, voluntarily left the Mets for a division rival after the 2011 season, and disgraced himself off the field only to come slinking back to Queens with his tail between his legs when the Mets were the only team in baseball that would employ him.

When I talk about the importance of intangibles, this is what I mean. I prefer the players I root for and hold up to be ones that aren’t linked to allegations of domestic violence (The charges brought against Reyes for allegedly abusing his wife were dropped — but he was suspended for 50 games).

But here’s a final on-the-field Reyes moment that doesn’t sit well with me. In 2011 Reyes was in a tight race to win the NL batting title. On the final day of the season, he bunted for a first inning single to bump his average up to .337, only to then ask Terry Collins to remove him from the game to protect his slim advantage. He ended the season hitting two points ahead of Ryan Braun, securing the batting crown. I don’t remember the batting title as much as I remember Reyes asking out of the final game of the year and his last in a Mets uniform—or so we thought—to win it.

Reyes is having a bit of a revival around town these days, showing up to Knicks games, getting airtime on SNY, and I guess that’s fine. But there are many who are calling for Reyes’ #7 to be the next number shrouded in immortality, crowned atop Citi Field for all time. I personally think we should aspire for much, much better.

We mentioned the NLCS home run, which was Reyes’ most important hit, but the game that I think represents the best of Reyes was the Saturday night at Shea in 2006 where Reyes hit for the cycle. Speed, power, a packed Shea Stadium—it was as electric as José Reyes was. Perhaps just as illustrative, the Mets lost the game.

6. Pete Alonso, 1B | 2019 – 2024

How much can one hit change things?

While I would not classify myself as anti-Pete, I’ve never been a big Pete guy. I think he’s a bit of a try-hard, a bit of an odd duck with quirks that play more off-putting than endearing. His love for and commitment to the home run derby—at first a welcome bit that brought interest and fun back to a tradition that had lost some of its luster—became a far too serious and self-promotional stunt; a bit at which the baseball community was laughing at Pete and not with him. His demeanor and brand, for me, have always felt a half note off, delivering the proper words that we’d want from any leader but doing so in a manner and with a certain flavor that just hasn’t perfectly landed. All he’s ever wanted is for the Mets community, teammates, ownership, and front-office to see him as the leader and face of the Mets, and yet despite winning rookie of the year, setting the rookie home run record, and belting more homers than nearly every Met to come before him—he’s just not.

This is how I’ve always felt about Pete, and that was before the 2024 season. Pete’s contract year was his worst season to date—characterized by an abhorrent approach, erratic swing decisions, accumulation of stats when it didn’t matter, and routinely coming up small in the big spot. As the New York Vibes raged around him—vibes that Pete had always tried desperately to generate on his own—Pete was an island.

The thing that Pete hadn’t realized, or maybe he had realized but just wasn’t able to actualize, was that all the other stuff—the derby, the f bombs, the #LFGM, the shirts being torn off, hitting the ball 500 feet, the charity work, home run derby championships, using the right words about love for team and country—that’s all window dressing, it’s all secondary. None of these things actually catapult you to the places Pete so desperately has wanted to go.

And so rightly, as Pete’s contract year continued to devolve, Mets fans were ready to discard him—first when it appeared the Mets would be sellers at the trade deadline and then again as the Mets appeared on the brink of elimination in Game three of the Wild Card round against the Brewers. Having gone just 1-11 to that point, Pete dropped a routine foul ball in the seventh inning with two runners on. For most fans already fed up with Pete’s poor play, it was the final straw. This had to be it. There was no way he’d be back in a Mets uniform. He was gone. In this moment, I genuinely felt bad for him.

But one hit can change things, can’t it?

Pete’s game winning bomb off the elite Devin Williams—himself owner of a career 1.83 ERA, .157 batting average against, 15 homers allowed ever—was the kind of moment that hasn’t happened for Pete and hasn’t happened for Mets fans. This just absolutely is not the way. I’ll put it this way: for Pete to accomplish this feat after the season, series, and game he had authored up until that moment is the single most impressive and utterly unlikely thing I’ve witnessed in my entire life as a Mets fan. Beyond all the window dressing, it’s the stuff that matters.

While Pete was unable to secure the long-term contract he desired, he is in a favorable spot to try once again, in what is essentially a contract year, to prove he is deserving. Sitting in what will undoubtedly be a cozy spot in the Mets lineup, he doesn’t have to be the guy anymore; he can sit back, hit behind or in front of Soto, and slug 35 bombs and drive in 120 runs. Will he do it for one more year, for five…I have no idea.

But him being back is a good thing and it also allows us to view Pete’s career accomplishments in a more favorable light, accomplishments that are significant. Among players this century, he’s already top ten in WAR, second in home runs and runs batted in, and top five in slugging and runs scored. He’s played 97 percent of his possible games, suiting up day in and day out despite his team’s or personal struggles. Considering the history of the franchise, he’s already third in homers, fourth in slugging, sixth in runs batted in, seventh in slugging. With his new contract it’s very likely he’ll finish first in homers and if he stays for more than a year or two he’ll challenge for the franchise record in hits, runs, RBIs, doubles, and games played. These achievements would place him in the conversation for all-time greatest power hitter in the history of the franchise and among the all-time great Mets period. This is what’s in front of Pete Alonso because of one swing in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

How much can one hit change things? In Pete Alonso’s case, it changed everything.

The moment that changed everything for Pete Alonso.

5. Mike Piazza, C | 2000-2005

I’m not sure if Mike Piazza ever took steroids, but if you watched the man hit balls to right field, a reasonable person might say, “Oh yeah, that dude juices.” Truly, I’ve never seen such muscled aggression the other way. I remember sitting in the old Veterans Field watching Mets take BP in the early 2000s—shockingly Armando Benitez went on to blow the game—and my Dad couldn’t stop babbling in wonder about Piazza putting holes in the right-field seats, “You have to watch this! No one hits ‘em like this! Are you watching this?!” It’s what baseball does to us.

Piazza—the greatest power-hitting catcher of all time—authored one of two World Series runs this century and the most important New York City Sports moment maybe ever. His four year-peak as a Met—including the 1999 season which is otherwise discounted from this exercise—is jaw dropping: with per-season averages of .302/.375/.576/.952 | 85 R 37 HRs 107 RBI | 4.2 WAR.

He was a dreadful catcher and got old and slow quickly—in his final three years as a Met he provided basically league average production (0.8 WAR)—but he is among the most beloved Mets of all time. His homerun in the first sporting event in New York City after 9/11 is the go-to answer when fools who don’t watch sports ask why they matter so much to people. Much has been written and documented about this moment, and I’ll just agree with the general sentiment that sports can do for us what little else in the world can.

He is one of two players on this list in the Hall of Fame, and the only one with a plaque adorned by a Mets cap. No catcher in the history of Major League Baseball has hit more home runs and he his fifth all-time in WAR as a catcher. In Mets history he is first in slugging, third in batting average, third in runs batted in, and fourth in home runs. He was the most important player on the irreverent and scrappy Subway Series Mets in 2000 and hit near .300 with four homers during the 2000 postseason run. This century, he was selected to five all-star teams, won four silver sluggers, and earned MVP votes in two seasons including a third-place finish in 2000.

And more than his achievements, he was just really cool—like peak early 2000s cool, like so cool and so dripping with style and charisma that he had to publicly address rumors that he was not in fact a gay man. He had long hair, he had a mustache, he was ripped, he willed baseballs out of the yard by muscling up, and he helped define a unique Mets culture that brought people in, that made you want to be a part of it. He brought life and energy to Shea Stadium—remember the ten-run inning against the Braves and his all time-iconic fist pump as Piazza rounded first with the exclamation point. He’s up there with Wright and Lindor as players who truly embraced his role as ambassador of the brand and culture and made you proud to root for the Mets.

I imagine many fans would rank Piazza higher. Here’s why I didn’t. First and foremost, this list covers the period between 2000-2024, which means the second half of 1998 after he was traded to the Mets and the 1999 season don’t count. Piazza is probably hurt most by the specific context of this list. Like everyone else this century, his teams just weren’t that good. After 2000, the Mets failed to finish better than third. And compared to the guys above him, Piazza was not an all-around player. And if we’re being really honest with ourselves, Piazza’s peak years came in a Dodgers uniform. He had three elite years during this century, multiple signature moments, and embraced being a Met, but his lack of longevity this century, league average production for half of his Mets career during this period, and dreadful fielding caps his greatness and places him no higher than fifth.

The moment that helped a profoundly wounded city smile again for the first time. It is the most important moment in Mets history and arguably in the history of sports in New York City.

4. Carlos Beltrán, CF | 2005-2011

Not unlike Jacob DeGrom, Carlos Beltrán elicits unreasonably strong and negative feelings from the fanbase despite elite on-field performance. For DeGrom it was leaving in free-agency and never fully embracing the leadership role we expected of him. For Beltrán, it was leaving his bat on his shoulder as an Adam Wainwright curveball ended the season of the greatest Mets team since 1986. Mentions of Beltrán today elicits peerless anger. My Dad refuses to say anything good about Beltrán; he’s dead to him; nothing could bring him back.

I admit, it took me a long time to see Beltrán’s greatness fairly after that. But it wasn’t just that one strikeout; he and all the great ’06 Mets not only failed to get the job done that year, but subsequently choked away two consecutive division titles the next two seasons. Beltrán and Wright and Reyes don’t deserve singular blame for these collapses, but these are the leaders of the teams who failed in the big spot time and time again—and it’s hard to overlook this.

But let’s try.

Here’s the best I can do—and I think it’s pretty good: there’s a case to be made the Beltrán is the greatest all-around position player in Mets history. Playing a premium, up-the-middle position, Beltrán prowled center field like a jaguar with an M16 for an arm. He possessed smooth and easy switch-hitting power, a hit-tool that was good for .280 each year, and elite baserunning instincts. He had maybe the most aesthetically pleasing swing of any Met I can remember.

In a Mets uniform, he won three gold gloves, earned MVP votes three times, and was named to four all-star teams. His 2006 season—8.2 WAR….275/.388/.594….876 OPS…127 R… 41 HR…116 RBI… 18 SB…Gold Glove award—is the second most prolific season by WAR in Mets history. During his three-year peak with the Mets (2006-2008), Beltrán delivered eye-popping per-season averages:

If you were building a Mets roster from scratch and could choose the scouting report/profile of any player of the last 25 years independent of their name and baggage, I’m not sure you’d pass on a gold-glove, 40 homer-power, switch-hitting, baserunning savant as your first pick.

Despite his reputation for coming up small in big moments, Beltrán—unlike Wright and Reyes—mostly carried over his elite regular season play to the post-season. In addition to multiple walk-off home runs in important regular season spots, Beltrán’s .296 BA/1.054 OPS/3 HRs during the 2006 NLCS—the very series he is vilified for—was a significant reason why the Mets were so close to the World Series to begin with.

It is true that Beltrán came up empty when he needed him most and there is a villainous, anti-hero character to doing this without taking the bat off his shoulder. But equally true is that Beltrán is one of the most talented players to ever where a Mets uniform, certainly more talented than Wright and Piazza. He is set to enter the Hall of Fame in 2026 and could very reasonably enter with a Mets cap on his plaque.

A truly fascinating what-if would have been Beltrán serving as Mets manager starting in 2020. It’s probably for the best he wasn’t at the helm in 2020 and 2021, presiding over a COVID-shortened season and a rotten 2021 roster that would have almost certainly resulted in an unceremonious canning and further scorn from the Mets fanbase. I don’t think my Dad would survive watching a Beltrán-managed 2021 Mets team give middle fingers to the fans as they squandered a late-inning lead in September. Fortunately for Beltrán, he avoided this disaster and there is still time to earn forgiveness. And while I’m just not sure Mets fans are ready to give it, Beltrán was an undeniable, Hall of Fame talent that deserves it.

I don’t want this to be the moment—but it just is. How could it not be?

3. Jacob DeGrom, SP | 2014 – 2022 

I was at a wedding recently where I shared the basic concept of this list with a close friend and lifelong Mets fan and how I was struggling with placing Jacob DeGrom. As I attempted to reason through the contradictions of DeGrom’s place in Mets lore—that of elite talent and individual performance combined with the perception that he didn’t care about being a Met—this normally stoic mid-30s finance executive burst out with the emotional restraint of my three-year old son to assert that Jacob DeGrom is the worst Mets player of his lifetime. And while objectively that is an absurd assertion, the dynamic illustrates how many fans feel about him and the challenge of placing DeGrom among the greatest Mets.

I think it’s uncontroversial to say that Jacob DeGrom is the best baseball player, the single greatest talent, on this list. If the list was a ranking solely of ability, DeGrom would be first. He is the single most-talented baseball player to wear a Mets uniform since Doc Gooden. No one else on this list can claim the mantle of best and most dominant player at their position in the entire game, but DeGrom can. For half a decade, between 2018-2022, he was the best pitcher in baseball, and it wasn’t close.

Soft-spoken, long-haired, quiet mechanics, explosive straight line fastball—DeGrom arrived in Queens with little prospect-hype but went on to win NL Rookie of the Year in 2014 as a 26 year old, joining a cadre of young arms that inspired the most optimism among Mets fans since the mid-2000s. He followed up his ROY campaign, with a put-the-league-on-notice all-star appearance, CY Young votes, and a dominant postseason run.

In the Mets’ first postseason game since 2006, DeGrom pitched one of the all-time great games in Mets playoff history, twirling seven innings of shutout baseball in Dodger Stadium, his 13 K’s tying Tom Seaver for the most strikeouts in Mets postseason history. He went on to win two additional games that postseason—the NLDS clincher and game three of the NLCS—and after a pedestrian game two start against Kansas City in the World Series, he loomed as the Game 6 starter had Matt Harvey delivered him the opportunity—one of the great what-ifs of the last 25 years.

After strong but less-than-elite years in 2016 and 2017, DeGrom cut his hair, increased his fastball velocity from the mid-90s to triple digits, and became the greatest pitcher in baseball. In the 2018 and 2019 seasons DeGrom won back-to-back Cy Young Awards, receiving 99 percent of first-place votes both years. DeGrom’s 2018 season—9.5 WAR, 1.70 ERA, 269 strikeouts in 217 innings—is the most valuable single season for a Mets pitcher or batter in the history of the franchise. It was during this season in which DeGrom tied the all-time record for consecutive starts of six innings with three runs or fewer. DeGrom’s 2019 season was only slightly less dominant—7.2 WAR, 2.43 ERA, 0.97 WHIP, 255Ks.

After the COVID-shortened 2020 campaign, DeGrom’s 2021 season began with nothing short of the most dominant stretch in MLB history, on pace for the greatest single season for a pitcher in the live-ball era. After his first 12 starts that year, he held a 0.50 ERA. Before suffering the first of a sad sequence of injuries, he racked up 146Ks in his first 15 starts that year, posting a truly absurd 1.08 ERA.

Since 2000 DeGrom is first in every pitching category that matters. He won the Rookie of the Year Award in 2014, won two Cy Young Awards, earned votes for four others, finished top ten in MVP votes as a starting pitcher twice, and earned four all-star nods. Among the long list of great Mets hurlers all-time, DeGrom ranks first in WHIP, ERA, K/9, and FIP—ahead of Seaver, ahead of Gooden. He’s third in WAR and fourth in Ks. He has the greatest strikeout to walk ratio in the history of major league baseball.

His post-season numbers are also excellent—across five starts in 2015 and 2022 he posted a 4-1 record, 2.90 ERA, 1.16 WHIP, and 37Ks across 31 innings. He was the most valuable player in the 2015 NLDS, winning the opening and clinching games against the Dodgers, pitching 13 innings of 2 run ball, amassing 20Ks along the way. He loomed as the game six starter in the 2015 World Series had the Mets not squandered the ninth-inning, game five lead.

So why is he third?

Like many of the great Mets of this century, DeGrom’s career was doomed by poor roster construction and investment. His all-time great seasons in 2018 and 2019 occurred alongside third and fourth place finishes, and his lack of run support and the Mets comic ability to squander DeGrom-pitched games is stuff of legend. The Mets failed to build a contender around him and the seemingly scripted lack of run support competed with his sheer greatness as the prevailing narrative enveloping the DeGrom experience. His win-loss record during his peak years of 2018-2019 was just 21-17 and the Mets failed to finish better than third in the standings. DeGrom’s individual greatness never translated to team greatness. And like David Wright, DeGrom suffered from a series of injuries in the second half of his Mets tenure, making just 38 starts in his final three years in a Mets uniform.

But perhaps more than anything, you just never got the sense that DeGrom loved being a Met and playing in New York. No one questioned his work ethic or what he gave on the field—he was an absolute gamer and assassin—but he didn’t seem to enjoy it here and rejected the opportunity to be a vocal leader in the clubhouse. He was unable to define and set a culture of winning—it just wasn’t something he was interested in. For some, it’s just not there. This sentiment felt confirmed when DeGrom left the Mets in free agency after the 2022 season, an offseason in which the Mets were reluctant to match the Rangers long-term commitment to DeGrom—ultimately validated as DeGrom’s elbow blew out in his first year with Texas, despite contributing a few starts to a team that won the 2023 World Series. It’s these reasons some fans—like my buddy at the wedding—just simply cannot reconcile with DeGrom. With time and distance, I think DeGrom will return to the good graces of the Mets fans. For now, there’s a bit of a bitter taste and plenty of what-ifs for the best player to wear a Mets uniform this century.

It should probably be game one of the 2015 NLDS, but nothing defined the DeGrom experience more than games in which he pitched his ass off, got zero run support, and won the game with his bat anyway. Ohtani before Ohtaini. Sadly, there are many of these games, but let’s go with April 23, 2021; the most dominant performance of his most dominant season (the injury-shortened 2021 campaign). Against the Nats, he pitched a complete game, two-hit shutout, no walks, 15Ks, 109 pitches AND went 2-4 with two runs scored, an RBI.

2. David Wright, 3B | 2004-2018

In a long line of what-ifs and what-could-have-been’s in Mets history, David Wright represents this century’s most painful. Darryl and Doc; the Dark Knight and David Wright—the chosen ones who weren’t to be. But for Wright it was the spine, not speed; stenosis, not snow.

If I could design a third baseman in a lab, it would look a lot like David Wright. He came up in the mid aughts where being as absolutely ripped (and juiced) as possible gave way to a more balanced strength and athleticism that allowed Wright to hit for average, hit for power, run, throw, field, all of it. He had a million-dollar smile, brought no personal or PED baggage, and gave Mets fans their first home grown superstar in thirty years. In a sport and on a team where countless would-be-superstars fizzle out and betray the faith invested in them, Wright represents faith rewarded.

A wise friend of mine recently shared his love of baseball this way, “Professional sports teams, unlike a favorite television show or celebrity, don’t really go away or end. Sure, there’s new characters, and people come and go, but sports teams are always around, and they grow and change just like we do.” Beyond the statistics, and we will get to those in a moment, it is through this prism we can truly understand why David Wright commands such admiration and loyalty among Mets fans, particularly for fans of my generation. Wright came up in ’04, I was 13 years old and just starting to become a true and knowledgeable baseball fan. With Piazza on the decline and the Mets mired in multiple years of poor performance, Wright was a new and exciting character in the Mets experience defined by, more than anything else, a feeling of hope.

Wright’s first era as a young, burgeoning superstar coincided with a resurrection of the Mets brand, an aggressive move into win-now roster construction—they signed Pedro, signed Wagner, signed Beltrán, Reyes came up, they traded for Delgado—and the team’s single best roster since 1986. Wright was at the center of all of this, a foundation around which all of this was propped up. I was a loud and emotional teenager, quick to fall in love with whatever was in front of me, and it was at this point that I fell in love, deeply and irreparably, with the Mets and with David Wright.

2006 ended in heartbreak, and then so did 2007, and so did 2008, and then Shea Stadium was gone and so was winning. This all happened not because of Wright, who was now in his prime, but in spite of him. Across the 2007 and 2008 seasons Wright averaged…

…and he did everything in his power to prevent collapses in 2007 and 2008—hitting .352 with an OPS of 1.034 and .340 with an OPS of .993 in September 2007 and 2008 respectively. Wright’s 2007 campaign was the greatest season for a Mets position player since 2000: 8.4 WAR…325 batting average…963 OPS…30 bombs…107 driven in…34 steals…73 XBH…Gold Glove award.

Even as the Mets faded into a dark, dark period of financial and performance-related recession, Wright was our light; he was still with us, still commanding a respect and worthiness to the Mets brand. He grew from a kid into an adult, and never wavered in his responsibility of serving as a proud ambassador of an aspirational and better vision of Mets baseball. During this time I went to college, I grew up a bit, my mom got cancer, I started to understand the world a bit more, and started to view baseball in more measured terms, but also for the first time as refuge from the chaos and pain of life, to retreat to it as a safe harbor as the world grew more complex around me. And when I did, Wright was there. Despite the team’s struggles, Wright continued to deliver elite on-field performance. He was simply one of the game’s great players’ and he was ours.

His nine-year peak (2005-2013) ranks up there not just with the greatest Mets of all time, but with the greats of the game period—his 41.7 WAR during this stretch ranked eighth in Major League Baseball. Here is what the average David Wright season looked like for nearly an entire decade:

But it was not to last. Wright’s last great and healthy year was 2012, his age-29 season. For the next six years Wright would spend more time rehabbing—and truly bless him for the amount of work he put in to try and show up for Mets fans day in and day out—than he did playing. And when he did play, it just wasn’t there. Of course there were moments, but you could see it in the way he moved, the way he talked about his health, that this was never going back to the way it was.

Wright battled and struggled through rehab to get back to the Mets in 2015 as the team miraculously hurdled to their first postseason appearance in a decade. He didn’t need to carry the franchise like before, but his presence down the stretch and into the postseason added something absolutely profound to the experience. He was the bridge between playoff teams, across eras, through heartbreak, and despair—it was Wright who was the one constant carrying us through all of this. And so when he finally, after all the years, hit that home run on the World Series stage in front of all those people who battled and struggled through their own lives alongside him, it was an emotional experience that’s quite difficult to put into words.

Wright would play only 40 or so more games across three years after that World Series. During that time the Mets once again returned to the familiar place of irrelevance and darkness, and life carried on. For me this included the loss of my mom, getting engaged, and the election of Donald Trump—personal and societal sea changes of the highest order. And still, Wright was there; perhaps not on the field, but still part of this experience, still trying to get back, still with us.

And so when the story finally ended, when Wright announced that September 29, 2018 would be his final game, I had to be in-person to pay my respects, to say thank you to one of the few constants of this foolish experience of loving a sports team so doggedly and one of the few constants of my own life. Saying goodbye to this character we all loved and adored, 50,000 people with tears in their eyes brought on by the emotional weight generated by 15 years of shared experience, saying one final thank you…this was one of the most profoundly emotional sporting experiences I’ve ever had.

This is the greatness of David Wright. More than anyone else this century—and in my life as a sports fan—he was a constant thread of on and off field excellence tying the experience of life and the experience of sports together. He debuted in and closed down Shea Stadium; he carried the Mets through five separate eras; he was the face of the franchise for a decade and a half and he waivered not once.

Among Mets this century, Wright ranks first in runs, hits, total bases, home runs, RBIs, and WAR. No one is higher. He ranks second in steals and top five in batting average, on-base percentage and OPS. He was a seven-time all-star, two-time gold glove winner, and finished top-ten in MVP voting four times. In the history of the franchise, Wright is first in plate appearances, runs scored, hits, total bases, doubles, rbis, walks, and extra base hits. He is second in games played, home runs, and career WAR. He’s fourth in stolen bases. He was captain of the franchise, loved being a Met, and did not falter as the leader on and off the field. He was on pace to be a Hall-of-Fame third baseman and one of the centuries all-time greatest players. He led the Mets through a period history where self-awareness of our inferiority was at its peak, embracing being a Met and giving us something to be truly proud of both in the national and City baseball landscape. He committed himself to the New York Mets like few in franchise history have and he will be honored with a retired number and, hopefully, a statute outside of Citi Field. If there was a Mt. Rushmore of all-time Mets, Wright would be on it. He is beloved. He’s my favorite Met, and favorite player of all-time.

So why, after all this, isn’t he first?

Because despite all of these achievements, all this emotional weight and connectivity, all this wonderful stuff Wright did, he just couldn’t fundamentally change the Mets way. It wasn’t solely his fault, of course, but his individual greatness was not able to overcome the deeply woven DNA of New York Mets baseball. After serving as an essential piece of the 2006 NLCS team in his age 23 season, Wright-led Mets teams failed to make the post-season for the next nine. His place in my heart and my memory actually does not correlate with as many big moments in the postseason or down the stretch in September as you might think. When he reached the postseason Wright was not effective; hitting just .198, including a .160 clip in the 2006 NLCS against St. Louis. Ultimately he, like most others who came before him, failed to establish a culture of winning and fundamentally change the Mets way.

“Professional sports teams, unlike a favorite television show or celebrity, don’t really go away or end. Sure, there’s new characters, and people come and go, but sports teams are always around, and they grow and change just like we do.”

And so as Wright’s story ended, the Mets, of course remained. Unchanged in many ways despite all his efforts, despite all that was different within us and the world around us, despite all this time. 15 years later, and the sad reality was the Mets hadn’t really changed. The way was the way.

And so after all this, we were left waiting for a new character, someone else to rise up to the unsolvable challenge of fundamentally transforming the defining character of Mets baseball, that despite all the evidence to the contrary, another way was possible.

After a decade as franchise face without a World Series birth and years of lost seasons due to injury, David Wright delivered the most emotionally gratifying home run since Mike Piazza’s post-9/11 blast in Game 3 of the 2015 Fall Classic. Wright’s four RBI secured the Mets first and only World Series victory since 2000.

1. Francisco Lindor, SS | 2021-2024

The first thunderclap of the Steve Cohen era, Francisco Lindor carried with him supreme expectations. Perhaps it was those expectations—and the salary along with it—that have made it so difficult for Mets fans and the broader baseball community to embrace and appreciate his greatness. During his time with New York, Lindor has never been selected to an all-star game, has never won a gold glove, and had never finished in the top seven in MVP voting prior to 2024.

More significantly, Lindor has been the subject of intense criticism among Mets fans. Calls into sports talk radio regularly held up Lindor’s traditional offensive numbers—batting average, home runs, RBI—against the great sluggers of baseball and wondered why we hitched the hopes of our franchise to his wagon, ignoring the obvious leadership qualities, durability, and elite defensive abilities that were evident even when offensive numbers were admittedly lagging. Prior to 2024, the majority of Mets fans held Lindor more closely to Carlos Beltrán than David Wright.

I never sold my stock in Francisco Lindor.

Even before the back half of 2024, Francisco Lindor was a top five Met of the last 25 years (I actually had him three back in May). After an undoubtedly disappointing first season in New York, all Lindor has done since is serve as the best all-around shortstop in baseball.

Since arriving in Queens, among shortstops Lindor ranks first in WAR, second in runs, second in RBI, third in homers, fourth in hits, and seventh in steals. He has amassed a 30-30 season and came one stolen base shy of a second—David Wright is the only other Met to achieve the feat this century. He finished second in MVP voting in 2024 and finished top-ten in 2022 and 2023.

Among Mets this century he has amassed the sixth highest WAR (21.6) and ranks second in defensive WAR. He ranks within the top ten in hits, runs, homeruns, rbis, total bases, and stolen baes—these achievements in just four seasons. His per-season WAR of 5.4 ranks first among all players in the 2000s, nearly a full win above Carlos Beltrán, Jacob DeGrom, and David Wright.

He was the best player on the 101-win 2022 team, but it was his leadership and performance on the 2024 New York Vibes that vaulted Lindor from much-maligned and half-appreciated to all-time Met, serving as the emotional heartbeat of a team that would never say die, vanquishing both the Atlanta Braves and Philadelphia Phillies along the way to one of the more improbable and joyful Mets experiences of all-time. During this run he authored two of the most significant and clutch home runs in franchise history, home runs—you could argue—that created an aperture for Juan Soto to consider, endorse, and commit to the possibility of the Mets experience.

During good times and bad, he has shown up on and off the field. He plays each and every day—92 percent of possible games—and has set a new standard for leadership in a Mets uniform, oftentimes in the face of immense criticism from fans and the media. His belief in the direction of the franchise and his teammates has remained steadfast. His only momentary blip—the thumbs down disaster of the lost 2021 season—represented a low point to which he has never returned. He has grown up, matured, and settled here.

Having just completed his age 30 season, he is on pace to finish top-ten all time in career WAR for a shortstop—surpassing the likes of Derek Jeter and Barry Larkin—and will earn election to Cooperstown, going in wearing a Mets cap.

Is ranking him the greatest Met of the last 25 years aggressive and indicative of a recency bias? Maybe a little. But Francisco Lindor represents the aspirational possibility of true transformation. Of remolding the Mets from what has been into what could be in the decades to come. Think about his peers in this tier: Wright, DeGrom, Beltrán. Each of these players conjures up something very specific and unique about the Mets way, about what it has meant to play for and represent the Mets in the last century. Long stretches of mediocrity. Coming up small in the big spot. Injuries. Tragic endings. Leaving for greener pastures. Lindor has thus far been able to avoid falling into line with these unfortunate traditions—his arrow points upward, he is hope embodied, he is the manifestation of the Mets aspirations to move beyond their DNA, to fundamentally alter the core of what it means to be, play for, and represent the New York Mets.

He hasn’t done it yet—he’s got a long way to go—but there is little doubt that as we sit here at the beginning of the next quarter century, he represents the Mets best hope yet. That maybe, after all, there might be another way.

While the home run in Atlanta to send the Mets to the post-season is as good as any other moment in the last 25 years, Lindor’s grand slam in Game 4 of the NLDS to end the Phillies season and send the Mets to their first NLCS in 10 years is joy made manifest.