Jorge Polanco’s first season in Queens turned into a wreck, and not just because the Mets never got the version of him they thought they were buying.
When New York handed the switch-hitting veteran a two-year, $40 million contract last December, the expectation was clear. David Stearns said in the team’s press release that Polanco would log time at first base and designated hitter while “bouncing around to other positions as needed.” That plan barely got off the ground.
Polanco played first base only twice, and both came in the first two games of the Mets’ season. After a slow spring ramp-up meant to protect him because of past leg issues, he started running into trouble with his lower legs almost immediately. By early April, injury reports were already mentioning his Achilles tendon and heel, and the rest of his season was spent as a DH.
Even that version of the year would have been concerning enough. The part that made it ugly was what happened when he actually got in the lineup.
In 37 games and 145 plate appearances, Polanco hit .148/.201/.230 with a 20 wRC+. His -1.4 fWAR tied Noelvi Marte for the worst mark in baseball.
That number also put him in some grim Mets company. It wasn’t the single worst season in franchise history, but it was the only one of the club’s 10 worst fWAR seasons to come this century.
Before Polanco, you had to go back 15 years to find a Met that far below replacement level, when Ronny Paulino posted a -1.2 fWAR season on a bad team. Mark Vientos nearly matched that misery this year, finishing at -1.1 fWAR.
The strange part is that Polanco’s profile pointed toward a much different outcome. After a rough first season with the Mariners in 2024, he thrived at the plate in 2025 once Seattle pushed most of his playing time into the DH slot.
His defensive resume had already been narrowing for years. He had played shortstop, second base and third base earlier in his career, but the Twins started moving him off short in 2021 and had essentially taken him off the position by 2022, with only 30.0 innings there that season.
From 2022 through 2024, he was mainly a second baseman, with the occasional run at third.
That history, along with what Seattle got from him when the field work disappeared even more, made a full-time DH future look like the likeliest path. The Mets could have used him in a pinch around the infield, but a regular role there would have been a surprise.
If his legs had held up, maybe he could have given them something close to the second-base workload he handled for the Mariners last year. Instead, the injuries wiped out even that possibility.
And while the Mets may have braced for some defensive limitations, what they got still landed well past the low end of the forecast. Leg problems pushing him toward DH again would not have been shocking.
A total collapse at the plate, on the other hand, was a different story. Neither was the idea that he would manage only two games in the field before injuries shut that door for good.
Now Polanco heads into his age-33 season as a huge unknown, unless the Mets decide to move on from him while sorting out their 40-man roster this winter. If he stays, the best-case path is pretty straightforward: a healthy spring, no field work at all, and some kind of return to form as a DH once the season starts. Statcast’s underlying numbers don’t offer much comfort, though, and it would be a major surprise if he rebounded enough to escape mention alongside Jed Lowrie and Frankie Montas as one of the Mets’ most infamous signings.
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