Talent: Swell; Performance: Less

At any given moment during the baseball season between Opening Day and August 31, there are 780 active players on major league rosters — 30 clubs, each with 26 players. Maybe a few more are scattered about if the 27th Man clause is invoked for a day-night doubleheader or neutral-site contest. On September 1, when rosters expand to 28, the total rises to 840+. Given the steady stream of personnel promotions and corresponding demotions over the course of a campaign, it seems certain that MLB never encompasses the same 780 or 840 players from one day to the next. For example, the team we root for used 63 different players across 162 games in its most recent season, and activated two others who never saw action.

Across the entire 2025 calendar, according to my best reading of Baseball-Reference, well over 1,400 different individuals played in at least one Major League Baseball game. It’s not a snap to suss out an exact figure that doesn’t double-count position players who pitched, or pitchers who might have drifted into the offense portion of box scores through late-inning batting order machinations (let alone whatever handful of pitchers actually did something other than pitch), or players who played for multiple teams. This is not to mention Shohei Ohtani, who is his own category. Without picking apart thirty sets of statistics, I’m confident in asserting there were somewhere between 1,400 and 1,500 ballplayers in the majors last year, probably closer to 1,500.

The exact number isn’t essential, but the point that every player who entered a game at the highest professional stratum of the sport has to be pretty damn good to have done so is. I hark back to Gary Cohen’s response at the press conference preceding his Mets Hall of Fame induction a couple of years ago when I asked what was different about the major league life than he might have imagined when he was aspiring to it.

“Going from being a fan to a broadcaster at the highest level in Major League Baseball, I think the thing that you learn very quickly is what extraordinary athletes these guys are. You know, it’s very easy for people to sit in the stands and watch major league baseball players fail, and it’s a game of failure, but even the last guy on a major league roster is an extraordinarily talented athlete, and just standing behind a batting cage and watching the hand-eye coordination involved, again with the lowliest of major leaguers, is so far beyond the ken of those of us who can’t do those things, I think it makes you appreciate just what this game is, and how difficult it is to play, and how monumentally talented all of these players are. To me, that was the most eye-opening piece.”

Gary said that in 2023, but it’s returned to my consciousness in the wake of 2025, particularly the part about “how monumentally talented all of these players are”. More than 1,400 players, and if they’re not all great, they each can be on this pitch or that swing. If it’s not a wholly level playing field from one team to the next, the difference between competing rosters from day to day is likely smaller than we imagine when we’re making our semi-informed preseason picks.

All of this, rather than what a splendid postseason the Mets had this past year, is in my head because one word kept coming up as the Mets’ chance to keep playing into October slipped away: talent. The Mets, the Mets themselves kept telling us, had too much talent to not make the playoffs. They were too talented to not suddenly rekindle their mysteriously disappeared winning ways. They were too talented to keep reeling off lethal losing streaks. The talent in their clubhouse was too substantial to not coalesce into desired results.

Except it wasn’t. Because everybody’s got talent. Some more than others. Some less than others. Some who it apparently doesn’t matter how much they have, because the talent can’t necessarily be converted to consistent success.

That last cohort includes us. It informs why Faith and Fear in Flushing’s Nikon Camera Player of the Year for 2025 — presented to the entity or concept that best symbolizes, illustrates, or transcends the year in Metsdom — is Talent’s Limitations. If the Mets didn’t have all the talent in the world, they claimed a copious share of it. And it got them nowhere, or at least not where they and we assumed they’d be once the regular season was over.

Why? Because, again, everybody’s got talent. Maybe not what we would have estimated as Met-level talent when the Mets’ talent was registering win after win as a rule, but enough to stay in a game and pull it out late, or take a lead early and maintain it to the end. The 79-83 Marlins could do that, and did it five out of seven times to the Mets in August and September. The 66-96 Nationals could do that, and did it four out of six times to the Mets in August and September. Seventy-nine times in 2025, somebody beat the Mets, leaving them a defeat too far from an opportunity to continue playing. It was counterintuitive to bet against this ballclub, but maybe that’s why some people yearn to build gambling facilities adjacent to ballparks.

Before the losses added up to one too many, the Mets kept reminding everybody, including themselves, that they were too awesome to fail.

“There’s a lot of belief in this group. There’s a lot of talent in this room.”
—Pete Alonso, June 26, 2025

“We’re not playing well. But [we have] too much talent. We’re going through a very tough time right now, but there’s a lot of good players there. We haven’t played well, but we’re still pretty much right in the thick of things. We gotta find a way.”
—Carlos Mendoza, August 14

“This is the most talented team I’ve ever played on. So I know exactly what we’re capable of. It’s just going out there and executing it every night.”
—Brandon Nimmo (remember him?), August 26

Funny, but nobody ever mentioned how much skill and aptitude had infiltrated the clubhouse.

If only the 2025 Mets could have thrown their reputations or self-regard out onto the field. Instead, it was the 2025 Mets themselves who had to take care of business, which they missed doing. Continual witnessing of their attempts to maintain a division lead, then a Wild Card edge, then a last gasp advised the attentive observer that this team would not reach any of the thresholds required to keep playing beyond Closing Day.

The 2025 Mets, talented as they were, lost seven games in a row in June; seven games in a row spanning late July and early August; and eight games in a row in the heart of September. They had pretty much inverted Val’s big number from A Chorus Line. For looks — on paper — they might have been a 10, yet when it came to performance between the white lines, particularly the dance down the stretch destined to determine their fate, they were more like a 3. I don’t think the second seven-game losing streak was complete before it occurred to me that an admirable aggregation of talent was swell, but not immune to fomenting disappointment in the long run. The talented team must think. The talented team must execute. It’s preferable that the talented team’s players vibe, but as long as they jibe in terms of winning games, cordial working relationships seem sufficient. When the Mets won, they’d all gather into a festive oval and offer a triumphant group kick. I’m not sure if anybody was delivering figurative kicks in the rear after losses. If they were, they weren’t effective.

In the 93 games the 2025 Mets played after they peaked at 45-24 on June 12, they went 38-55, a disqualifying enough mark. More damning? In the 71 games when the Mets weren’t going 0-22 amid their three signature skids, their cumulative post-June 12 record ran to a mere 38-33, indicating they weren’t doing so terrific during the bulk of the days when everything wasn’t skidding downhill. As a point of comparison, the 1999 Mets endured losing streaks of eight games at midseason and seven games in the second half of September, enough to smother an ordinary team’s postseason dreams. But Bobby V’s extraordinary troupe negated that 0-15 by posting a 96-51 record the rest of the time, enough to qualify them for the one-game play-in versus the Reds that ultimately earned them a playoff berth (back when each league offered one Wild Card rather than three). That Mets team’s Mojo was irrepressibly Risin’. This one’s sagged and stayed sagged.

Still, I bought into the talent notion as much as any fan.

• I heard myself tell a friend of mine during one of the games that followed the first seven-game losing streak, as we bandied about trade deadline possibilities, “I’m taking postseason as a given.”

• As chronically keeping an eye on the Phillies gave way to tracking the Reds’ trajectory, I couldn’t quite accept the need to redirect my scoreboard-watching, as if monitoring Cincinnati was, honestly, a little beneath us.

• In July, I reluctantly accepted a doctor’s appointment for late October, despite my concern I would be too consumed by what the Mets were likely to be doing to keep it.

• When Reed Garrett returned from the injured list and delivered a shaky September outing, I thought to myself, “I don’t know if he should be on the postseason roster,” as if a postseason roster was sure to be constructed.

• In the euphoria enveloping me in the final minutes of my alma mater’s college football conquest for the ages — USF 18 UF 16 via walkoff field goal on September 6 — I not only clicked away from the Mets-Reds game still in progress (something I rarely do during any Mets game, let alone one with playoff implications), but alerted the gods that if the Bulls can pull off this upset of the Gators in Gainesville, “I don’t even care if the Mets lose tonight”…which the Mets were en route to doing, anyway, at the instant I spoke my sacrilege aloud.

I was fully conscious in the moment that I was willing to give away a Mets game against a team they very much needed to defeat. I also caught onto my other multiple karmic faux pas as I said or thought them. The hardened fan in me knows you don’t assume in advance, in deference to what Felix Unger spelling out what it inevitably makes of you and me. Yet, like Alonso and Mendoza and Nimmo and the rest of those who spoke for the Mets, I deep down believed, nah, we can’t possibly blow this.

Lesson learned yet again.

Then it got blown, and it was somehow not a shock. Nor that much of a surprise. A year earlier, it took me a while to come around to the idea that the 2024 Mets were really good. It took me a little longer a year later to come around to the idea that the 2025 Mets might not be that great, but it did sink in. It didn’t quite make surface-sense that the Mets couldn’t flash their credentials and gain admission to the postseason, but their rotation did keep falling apart; and all those relievers who were supposed to provide relief in relief of their relievers who chronically fell short did fall even harder (here’s hoping the next one won’t); and third base did reinstall its ancient revolving door; and center field did prove an utter sinkhole; and slumps weren’t snapped in a timely fashion; and vapor locks occurred nightly; and other teams got on the field and didn’t care that the Mets had so much talent, unless it motivated those other teams to play a little harder.

I’m not sure if piss & vinegar sentiments akin to “so what if they’ve got Soto and Lindor and Alonso and Diaz and all those hyped guys, they ain’t no better than we are!” are actually expressed among the ranks of professional athletes, but watching the Nationals take four of six from the Mets, and the Marlins take five of seven from the Mets, when we were certain there was NO WAY that should have happened over the final six weeks of the season, maybe the alleged dregs of our division did dig a little deeper, while the Mets dug fairly shallow. As was, the Mets dug their own competitive graves while losing seven in a row, seven in a row again, and eight in a row (independent of those Marlins and Nationals debacles), and they jumped right in. The sub-.500 clubs from Washington and Miami, the ones that didn’t have many or maybe any hyped guys, were absolutely capable of kicking a little more dirt on what was left of the Mets’ hopes, and that they did.

The Mets had all that talent. What did it mean in the end? I don’t know. I doubt any of us does.

FAITH AND FEAR’S PREVIOUS NIKON CAMERA PLAYERS OF THE YEAR

1980: The Magic*
2005: The WFAN broadcast team of Gary Cohen and Howie Rose
2006: Shea Stadium
2007: Uncertainty
2008: The 162-Game Schedule
2009: Two Hands
2010: Realization
2011: Commitment
2012: No-Hitter Nomenclature
2013: Harvey Days
2014: The Dudafly Effect
2015: Precedent — Or The Lack Thereof
2016: The Home Run
2017: The Disabled List
2018: The Last Days of David Wright
2019: Our Kids
2020: Distance (Nikon Mini)
2021: Trajectories
2022: Something Short of Satisfaction
2023: The White Flag
2024: Suspension of Disbelief

*Manufacturers Hanover Trust Player of the Year