Wednesday catch-all thread (5/20/26)

Please use this thread all week to discuss any Mets-specific topic you wish.

There were two articles recently in The Athletic that ranked all 30 MLB teams. The first one was written by former GM Jim Bowden, which should tell you all that you need to know. Bowden’s article hook was discussing the trade deadline, whether the team would be buyers or sellers and then focused on one area that the club needed to upgrade. For the Mets, he chose the bullpen. He ranked the team 25th overall, which was reasonable. Choosing the bullpen was not. Here was my response yesterday, addressed to another commenter who claimed Bowden was lazy:

I agree his take on the Mets was lazy. What really got me was his assertion that the Mets need bullpen help. The team has a 3.40 ERA from the pen, which ranks 9th. Its 198.1 IP ranks fifth. It's 1.291 WHIP ranks 12th. It's 2.74 K/BB ratio ranks 6th. It's 2.0 fWAR ranks as fifth best in the majors.

For a team that he ranked 25th in the majors - this seems like a terrible place to focus upon an upgrade.

The other article was a straight power ranking, which had the Mets at 18. A bit more optimistic yet still reasonable. This was done by several people, including Tim Britton, who writes about the Mets for that site. The hook here was a piece on what each club was missing. Britton chose Francisco Lindor.

There was no comment from me on this one but it seemed somewhat of an odd choice to pick Lindor. Sure, it would be wonderful to have Lindor back, especially as he was just starting to heat up when he got injured. But if I could wave a wand and get anyone currently injured back, my choice would be Clay Holmes. Lindor will return before Holmes and both Brett Baty and Bo Bichette have been doing better here recently at their new/old positions. Not sure now is the time to throw a monkey wrench into that situation.

Plus, the choice was not limited to an injured player. Here were the rules set up in the article:

Maybe it’s the one who got away in free agency or was shipped off in a regrettable trade. Maybe it’s an injured player. Maybe it’s a top prospect toiling at Triple A.

It would be nice to have a do-over on the trade that brought Marcus Semien here. And depending on how much of a strict constructionist one is on “got away in free agency,” it would be nice to pick Munetaka Murakami over Jorge Polanco.