The New York Mets’ final home weekend of 2026 was supposed to carry two celebrations, but only one of them happened on schedule.
Carlos Beltran got his day on Saturday, with his No. 15 headed to the rafters. Howie Rose, meanwhile, won’t get his retirement ceremony until the opening weekend of the 2027 season. The team said the change came in an update about Sunday’s game, and the new timing will depend on the CBA negotiations and how greedy, vile, or nasty it gets between the two sides.
That delay actually makes sense if it’s what Rose wanted, because standing around in the rain with bigger storms looming was no way for his career to end. The problem is how avoidable the whole thing felt. The Mets had plenty of chances to handle the weekend differently, and this season already spent too much time tripping over its own event planning.
That was the pattern all year. A Freddy Peralta jersey giveaway in August was always a strange choice, and the Marcus Semien jersey giveaway in June was even stranger.
The Peralta item never happened at all, because the Mets switched to a Spider-Man-inspired shirt featuring rookies Carson Benge and A.J. Ewing.
The Semien giveaway, on the other hand, did go out to the first however many fans showed up, even if they didn’t seem all that thrilled to be there.
Sunday’s weather wasn’t the Mets’ fault. The timing of Beltran’s ceremony was.
There was no need to lock that in for the same weekend as Rose’s farewell, especially when Beltran already works for the Mets and didn’t need some elaborate scheduling puzzle to show up. Moving Rose’s tribute to Saturday pregame would have been the cleaner fix, and the organization never seemed interested in making it.
Beltran’s jersey retirement had its own awkward timing too. He has a complicated place with Mets fans because he’s remembered for a strikeout, so there was never going to be a massive outpouring just for the ceremony itself.
His Hall of Fame induction and choice to wear a Mets cap made the retirement necessary, and that part was easy enough to understand. But waiting until September 19, when the focus should have been on the pennant race and on saying goodbye to Rose, was the real misstep.
The Mets knew Beltran was headed to Cooperstown for months. Rose made it clear he was stepping away after this year, too.
Even so, the final weekend of September was loaded with back-to-back planned celebrations, and Rose only had one shot at doing it right. Beltran could have been honored almost anywhere else on the calendar, and probably should have been.
Instead, the whole setup became another example of a team making things harder than they needed to be.
That kind of ceremony probably belongs earlier in the season, or on a special anniversary, not in September when the weather can turn ugly fast. Even setting Rose aside, Saturday’s crowd came in fresh off cheering Pete Alonso and tired of how the season had gone.
Beltran was treated respectfully, but he wasn’t the main attraction for most of the fans who had already bought tickets for what had once been expected to be a primetime game against the Philadelphia Phillies. More than 37,000 seats were sold for that Saturday.
By late April, it was already obvious something was off behind the scenes with the way the Mets were planning their second half. Single-game tickets for those games still hadn’t gone on sale, and the sense was that dynamic pricing was part of the issue. The choices around promotions and scheduling left the season looking less like a baseball calendar and more like a series of missed opportunities.
So for Rose, it became a familiar Mets ending in 2026: wait until next year.
Still, the fans made their feelings clear in the moment. Just days after being criticized for rooting for an ex, they turned up with loud support for Rose anyway, chanting his name as the rain rolled in.
Howie Rose! Howie Rose! Howie Rose!
There’s plenty for the Mets to clean up in 2027, and the first lesson is simple: don’t build the schedule as if everything will go wrong. In 2026, they seemed to do exactly that. At what point they stopped making Jorge Polanco World Series MVP plush dolls, nobody knows.
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