Two of the Mets’ minor league names kept making noise in Week Twenty-Three, even if the paths were very different. MJ Melendez stayed hot with the bat in Triple-A, while Jonah Tong delivered one of the week’s most eye-catching pitching lines and pushed his way back into the conversation.
Melendez turned in a solid six-game stretch for Syracuse, going 8-for-24 with five doubles and two home runs. His week line came out to .333/.360/.792, and he also drew one walk while striking out eight times.
For the 2026 season, he’s now at 58 games and 206 at-bats in Triple-A with a .243/.330/.578 line, 50 hits, 14 doubles, two triples, 17 homers, 27 walks, 64 strikeouts, and five stolen bases in 10 attempts. His MLB season line sits at .192/.315/.350 over 56 games and 120 at-bats, with 23 hits, five doubles, one triple, four homers, 17 walks, 50 strikeouts, and no stolen bases in one attempt.
The bigger issue with Melendez, at least from the Mets’ side, is roster fit. He wasn’t especially productive in his limited big-league chances earlier this year, but he also wasn’t a disaster.
In Triple-A, he hasn’t been so dominant that the Mets have to make room for him, but he has put together a useful little run. The source of the frustration is pretty clear: he sounds like the kind of veteran presence a club can appreciate, especially after he apologized to fans for not being good enough when he went back to Syracuse, but the production still hasn’t quite lined up with the sentiment.
If anything, he profiles as someone the Mets could consider again as minor league depth next season.
Tong’s week had a much louder ending. In his one start, he went seven innings, allowed one hit, and didn’t give up a run or an earned run while walking two and striking out eight.
That outing came in Game One of a double-header against the Lehigh Valley IronPigs, and for a while it looked like Tong might run the table. He retired the first two batters he faced, then kept cruising until Kameron Misner lined a cutter into right field with one out left in the seventh.
That broke up the no-hit bid, but Tong still finished with a one-hit shutout after striking out Carter Kieboom on four pitches.
For the season, Tong has thrown 23 Triple-A starts and logged 107.0 innings with a 4.54 ERA, 88 hits allowed, 64 runs, 54 earned runs, 59 walks, and 126 strikeouts. In the majors, he’s been used in three games, covering 10.0 innings with a 3.60 ERA, eight hits allowed, six runs, four earned runs, seven walks, and seven strikeouts.
August has been a better month for him overall. Entering the month, opposing hitters were batting .238/.349/.447 against Tong.
In August, that line dropped to .170/.271/.436. His fastball and cutter have both played better, with hitters posting .125/.239/.325 against the fastball and .158/.238/.158 against the cutter during the month.
Before August, those pitches had been hit at .213/.353/.386 and .300/.386/.540, respectively.
Still, the source notes that the underlying numbers behind those pitches - velocity, spin rate, movement - haven’t really changed, so the improvement may be more about a .148 BABIP than a true fix. Even so, with September here and the Mets not really having a fifth starter, Tong looks lined up for another shot in Queens. The expectation is that he’ll get called back up and appear in a few games, though there’s some concern about how he’ll fare after International League hitters have had success against him.
The season’s weekly honors list also shows how often the same few names have surfaced. Earlier winners included Hayden Senger, Cam Tilly, A.J. Ewing, Christian Scott, Randy Guzman, Jose Chirinos, Channing Austin, Ryan Clifford, Jonathan Santucci, Vincent Perozo, Frank Camarillo, Nick Morabito, JT Benson, Daviel Hurtado, Noah Hall, Mitch Voit, Elian Peña, and others, with Melendez last appearing on the Week Seventeen list alongside Noah Hall.
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