Pete Alonso’s return to Citi Field this week put a familiar Mets debate back in the spotlight, even with the standings offering little left to fight over except a mathematical elimination. His presence gave fans another chance to revisit the decision to let the Polar Bear walk, and it also reopened a few other Mets storylines that have worn out their welcome.
The Alonso chatter was fair game this season. So were a handful of other topics that kept following the Mets around. If things break the right way, the club will get through 2026 without having to hear about these same issues again.
The first one is the supposed friction between Francisco Lindor and Juan Soto.
Something clearly lingered there between the two, even if the exact cause of the split was never made public. Steve Cohen acknowledged it only after it had stopped being the season’s main talking point, which only underscored how long the noise had been hanging around.
When the Mets have had bad years, the conversation has often drifted toward the locker room, and that pattern showed up again in 2021, 2023, and 2025. It carried over into 2026 with the rumored poor relationship between Lindor and Soto serving as one of the main drivers.
That’s a storyline the Mets can do without from here on out.
Another exhausting thread has been the Mets’ habit of keeping the wrong players around too long.
The criticism over letting Alonso go was loud, and the same went, though to a lesser degree, for trading Brandon Nimmo. But the larger issue was that the Mets kept a lot of the 2025 core intact, and the results were ugly.
Mark Vientos hasn’t done anything to raise his value. Ronny Mauricio is a non-tender candidate.
Sean Manaea, Kodai Senga, and David Peterson all came back as starting options, only to spend time in the bullpen. The last push to move Senga into a closer role finally produced something close to a payoff.
That leaves the Mets in a position where they may have to sell a lot of players at their lowest point. It might still be the smart move, because the return is never fully predictable and the offseason is the time to replace those pieces through free agency or separate trades. The bigger lesson is simple: don’t cling to a player and miss out on better options elsewhere.
Then there’s the phrase that became impossible to escape: “run prevention”.
It’s a basic goal for every club, but David Stearns put it front and center early in the offseason, and it became a major theme all winter. The problem was that the idea ended up blowing back on the Mets.
It was used to explain why they made so many of their moves, from Alonso leaving because of his defense to the swap of Nimmo for Marcus Semien for a similar reason. The Mets will still chase run prevention in 2026, but Stearns needs to be more careful about how he sells it when the team isn’t actually delivering it.
For much of the season, the Mets were not elite at preventing runs. The defense did improve, though, mostly because of internal changes and a different distribution of playing time, with more Luis Torrens behind the plate, Carson Benge less in center field, and Jared Young at first base. The run-prevention message isn’t going away, but the version that became a black eye for Stearns is a storyline the Mets should be ready to leave behind.
In Other News...
Pete Alonso Just Gave Mets Fans One Last Emotional Reminder
Pete Alonso has spent enough time around the Mets to know how quickly a season can tilt, so his recent comments about their struggles carried the weight of someone who has lived it. Now with the Baltimore Orioles, he still framed New York as a talented club, but pointed to the familiar mix of injuries and other issues that can drag down even a roster built to contend.
For Mets fans, the most striking part may have been the way Alonso spoke about his own path since leaving Queens. He said hes happy in Baltimore and looked back fondly on his Mets years, including the kind of October moment that tends to stick with a fan base long after a player is gone. [Read more 🡒]
Mets Have A Late Round Pitcher Suddenly Worth Watching Closely
Bryce Jenkins was the kind of late-round draft pick most clubs file away and revisit later, especially after Tommy John surgery cut into his college and early pro workload. The Mets have reason to look back now. In 2026, the 17th-rounder turned in strong numbers across Double-A and High-A, finishing with a 1.66 ERA and a 0.86 WHIP while emerging as one of the organizations better minor league arms.
What makes Jenkins interesting is not just the performance, but the speed with which he could move if the momentum holds. He still looks to be several months from any major league impact, but pitchers who pair strike-throwing with that kind of run prevention tend to keep forcing the conversation. For a Mets club always watching for bullpen help, Jenkins has suddenly become a name worth tracking closely. [Read more 🡒]
Mets Fans Just Found A New Reason To Be Excited About Mitch Voit
After a disappointing 2026 season that led to Carlos Mendozas firing, the Mets have spent much of their attention turning toward what comes next, and Mitch Voit is starting to look like one of the names worth circling. The organization named Voit its minor-league Player of the Year after a strong stretch of development following his move up to Double-A Binghamton, a sign that he has kept moving in the right direction as the club tries to build a younger foundation for 2027.
For a team trying to reshape its outlook, awards like this matter because they point to players who are doing more than just holding their own in the system. Voits rise gives Mets fans another reason to keep an eye on the farm, especially with the major-league club in a reset mode and looking for answers from within. The next question is whether this progress becomes a real part of the big-league picture soon enough to matter. [Read more 🡒]