How Quickly Can the Mets Retool?

For the New York Mets, the 2026 season has been an almost unmitigated disaster. Widely expected to compete for the NL East crown, the Mets got off to a brief hot start. And by brief, I mean brief, as the season’s high point was knocking out Paul Skenes in the first inning on Opening Day against the Pirates. From there, the season unraveled like the finances of Mike Campbell from Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises: Gradually and then suddenly.

The Mets ambled around the .500 mark for another week or so, until a 12-game losing streak knocked them firmly into the league basement, where they have mostly stayed. By the time the calendar flipped to August, they had long come to terms with the idea that they would be sellers at the deadline. Recently, though, the Mets have gone on a tear, winning 11 of their 15 games since their deadline fire sale, giving some fans an excuse to dream on a miracle wild card run. That almost recently won’t happen, but their abysmal season doesn’t have to signify the start of a long rebuild. In fact, New York teams with massive payrolls aren’t generally extended much rope, with the hope being that the club will find its way back to contention quickly. Can the Mets do that in 2027?

Whether you call it a bounceback or a rebound or a dead-cat bounce or, as Bill James dubbed it, the Plexiglass principle, baseball has a rich history of teams having dreadful seasons despite lofty expectations, and then coming back to right the ship the following year.

Since I have a couple decades of preseason projections to stand in for expectations, courtesy of ZiPS, I whipped up a quick table on how these underperforming teams did the following season. The pool here is all teams that were projected to win at least 85 games in a season (or 32 games in 2020), but underperformed by at least 10 wins (four for the 2020 teams). Going back to 2005, there are 37 such teams.

As in most situations in life, there’s good news and bad news. The good news is that the teams that underperformed generally played better the following season, with 27 of the 37 teams getting some kind of positive bounce. The bad news is that after being projected collectively as 90-win teams and only winning an average of 74 games, the typical comeback season only got the teams back to a .500 record (.499, technically). On average, only a little less than half the typical underperformance was recovered the next year. If the Mets had a typical bounceback season compared to the group, they’d only gain back seven wins in 2027, which would be rather unsatisfying given that they’re playing at a 73-win pace right now.

Projections let us do better than generalities, though, and the Mets do have a lot of things going in their favor. In 2027, they’ll likely get a better season from Francisco Lindor and a healthier one from Juan Soto. After a rough start, Carson Benge has been quite solid, and now has a better seasonal wRC+ (112) than even the most optimistic preseason projection (ZiPS at 108). No horrible injuries have befallen the team’s ace, Nolan McLean, either. The Mets also compensated for disappointing minor league seasons from Jonah Tong and Jacob Reimer by acquiring their now top prospect, shortstop Jefferson Rojas (50 FV), along with right-hander Gary Gill Hill (45 FV) and the man who forced me to learn how to put an accent on a capital E (alt-0201), second baseman Émilien Pitre (40 FV).

So, where do the Mets stand? Let’s start by getting some projections for plausible roster additions in 2027. The Mets cleared out most of their free-agent eligibles, and with Bo Bichette very likely to pick up his two-year, $84 million option, Luis Robert Jr. is their only pending a free agent, after they presumably turn down their $20 million club option.

Though ZiPS no longer considers Brett Baty or Mark Vientos as viable starting options after 2026, it does see A.J. Ewing as a better one than it did in the preseason. That gives the Mets a decent six-man offensive core, with Soto and Lindor at its center. Not included in that core is Jorge Polanco. Even as ZiPS expects Polanco to bounce back some next season, attributing some of his woes this year to his various injuries, it views him as being in contract-eating territory. A Soto-Ewing-Benge outfield is solid, as is Francisco Alvarez behind the plate and the Lindor-Bichette left side of the infield. That leaves some unanswered questions at first base, second base, and DH. With the Mets almost certainly too far back to make a playoff run, there are worse ideas than to continue playing Marcus Semien and Baty to see if they can salvage enough of their individual 2026 campaigns to make them decent options for the 2027 Mets. My guess would be “maybe” on Baty, and no on Semien.

There are alternatives at these positions in free agency. Yandy Díaz projects as far better than any in-house option at first base, and there are several strong upgrades available at second base, including Brandon Lowe, Gleyber Torres, and Luis Arraez, among others. [Oops, I thought the Díaz option was a player one, not a club one. I need to get the hang of trusting my 48-year-old brain a lot less -DS]

There’s more work to do on the pitching side of things. McLean is obviously somewhere at the top of the rotation, with Christian Scott plopped down in the middle. ZiPS is a quick believer in Zac Thornton, and he has another six weeks or so to continue to make the case for 2027. After that, it becomes problematic, especially if the Mets intend to contend. They certainly hope for a better Tong season next year (and he’s been better lately), and for Tylor Megill to be back from Tommy John surgery, but they can’t count on either. ZiPS is really worried about Senga as a 2027 option, which particularly displeases me as I’m a forkball connoisseur.

Fortunately for the Mets, there are plenty of great frontline starters available in free agency that a big-spending team could afford, most notably Tarik Skubal, but also Kevin Gausman, Robbie Ray, Casey Mize, Trevor Rogers, and Clay Holmes, the last of whom they just traded to the Cubs for Rojas at the deadline. Other top starting pitchers who could be available, depending on their respective player or mutual options, include Sonny Gray, Michael King, and Dustin May.

As it stands, the Mets’ bullpen also looks rather thin, though ZiPS thinks Daniel Duarte and Nathan Lavender are solid options for 2027 leading up to closer Devin Williams. Unlike with starting pitchers, the pickings are thin at top of the market for relievers, with the exception of Adrian Morejon. The Mets may have to go for quantity more than quality here.

So, where do the Mets stand entering the offseason? Short of any major changes to the current projections over the rest of the season, ZiPS puts the Mets at 82-80 in a league in which everyone can only use their signed players. That’s a good starting point for a team that always has the willingness to spend.

The all-but-guaranteed lockout, unfortunately, complicates matters somewhat. If the brawl between MLB and the MLBPA ends with some flavor of salary cap, soft or otherwise, or additional luxury tax penalties, the Mets already have a lot of money committed to this 82-80 team, with our estimate of their 2027 luxury tax payroll landing right around $217 million. There’s at least a possibility that the Mets simply don’t have the option to spend heavily in free agency to fill these holes. In that case, president of baseball operations David Stearns, should he survive any postseason organizational purge, might have to be as creative at adding inexpensive talent to the Mets as he was with the Brewers. But the new CBA and its ramifications are issues for Future FanGraphs to worry about!

There’s not much for the Mets to take away from 2026, but their problems aren’t so significant that they’re fated to wander the wilderness next year. The Mets do still have the foundational pieces to quickly build a winning team, especially given the ample financial resources from which they can draw. But, as the historical record demonstrates, a comeback season won’t take care of itself, and the Mets will have to be active to write a better story in 2027. The team still needs another impact bat, some oomph in the rotation, and quite a bit of bullpen help. If the new CBA leaves team owner Steve Cohen free to attack the problem by splashing cash, meaningful October baseball should be within reach for the Amazin’s. If not, Stearns may have to prove that the Mets can get back there by taking the considerably harder way.