It’s a Citi of Strangers

A Mets fan walks into an Applebee’s. That’s not a setup to a quip. It actually happens once a year that I know of, with me as the Mets fan. Applebee’s menu tends to shake out a bit on the salty side for my tastes, but salty is something I’ll never be if somebody is kind enough to take or, more accurately, send me there on the house every January.

My wife’s birthday, you see, was last week, and when my wife’s birthday is nigh, my sister and her husband never fail to send us a generous gift card for Applebee’s, a national chain restaurant conveniently located to where we live. Its proximity is its primary appeal to us. Barely having to drive and not having to pay equals eating good in the neighborhood. More partial to bringing in than dining out, we don’t usually take advantage of the hospitality on-premise, but this January we made an exception. We went to our town’s Applebee’s for lunch last Wednesday. It was the same afternoon the Mets introduced Bo Bichette to the press; the day after the Mets acquired Luis Robert, Jr.; a few hours before the Mets traded for Freddy Peralta. This is how a Mets fan who walks into an Applebee’s has come to mark time this January.

And who should greet Stephanie and me practically inside the door at Applebee’s but Pete Alonso? Specifically, a substantial color photo of the Polar Bear that graced the bulk of a wall adjacent to the hostess station. With each index finger raised in the direction of the crowd, Pete appeared to be celebrating one of his franchise-record 264 home runs. The image must have gone up since last January, the last time I was in there to pick up our gift card’s worth, because had it been up the year before, I would have noticed it. And had this visit been before December of 2025, I would have kvelled without qualification that a name-brand casual dining establishment — or any establishment, really — was devoting a place of prominence to the longtime signature star of the Mets.

Well, this is awkward.

Now, in January of 2026, Big Pete was just another piece of flare that a joint like Applebee’s mandates to imply one of its outlets is suitably sporty and righteously regional. They also have lots of pictures of area Little League and high school athletes up as well. I didn’t check to see who among them has since graduated. I do know Alonso works in Baltimore these days.

Pete will always be a Met icon. A decade from now, that picture, if corporate hasn’t mandated its removal, will stand as a pleasant reminder of a player who did great things for the nearby team and was well-loved while doing it. A sizable portrait of Pete Alonso by then will hit like a sizable portrait of, say, Cleon Jones now. If Cleon was the de facto face of our Applebee’s, you think I’d ask to speak to the manager and request we not be shown somebody who finished his career on the South Side of Chicago, nowhere near our local Applebee’s? Yet stepping right up to greet Pete was not what I was planning on doing last week. I was having a hard enough time getting to know who’s actually on the Mets at the moment.

I wasn’t planning on this, either, but I now root for a team that features Bo Bichette, Luis Robert, Jr., Freddy Peralta, and, if his minor league deal amounts to anything, Craig Kimbrel. Fine. Great. Maybe wonderful. But I wasn’t planning on it. I’ve certainly known their names and something about their games. I didn’t know they were Mets. They weren’t until very recently. Nevertheless, here they come into my life and your life, along with some other fairly familiar ballplayers who played elsewhere in years past. To some extent, that’s every winter on the verge of Spring. Some winters it feels organic. Some winters it feels transformative in a welcome way. This winter it feels almost random. If Leonard Nimoy were still hosting his syndicated program, he’d be in search of context for these Mets.

The Mets as we knew them — the Mets with whom we lost patience on the road from 45-24 to 38-55 — ceased to exist in the segment of the offseason that bridged 2025 and 2026. Then there were a few weeks when there didn’t seem to be much to the Mets at all. A lot of deletion. Sporadic addition. Tempting as it was to lose patience with the lack of progression, that was OK. It was late December and early January. There was no baseball yet. Somebody would be playing as Mets by the end of March.

The Mets as we know them at present, at least the Mets to whom we are being introduced these days? I don’t know. I really don’t. I guess that’s OK, too. Even it isn’t, it’s going to be.

It’s a Citi of strangers, Stephen Sondheim might suggest. They’ve all come to work, come to play. Bo Bichette, a late recast for Kyle Tucker (and owner of our most soap operatic name since Blade Tidwell), evinced believable enthusiasm for becoming a Met as he chatted with the media ahead of us going to Applebee’s. He accepted a large sum in order to express his enthusiasm. He worked in a couple of opt-outs in case being a Met isn’t as awesome as he thought it could be. Shortly after his signing was reported, I got around to watching an MLB Network special dissecting Game Seven from last year’s World Series. I saw through newly opened eyes Bichette belt a three-run homer to put Toronto up early. “Hey,” I thought, “we just got the guy who did that!” Bo wasn’t playing third base for the Blue Jays then or ever; he will be for us. What’s a new season without a sense of defensive adventure?

Luis Robert, Jr., is considered a heckuva center fielder and can count a fabulous season in his not too distant past. I’ll try to forget that also described Cedric Mullins last summer. Robert doesn’t necessarily have to follow directly in the footsteps of White Sox-turned-Mets stars like Tommie Agee and Lance Johnson to succeed in center. By dint of not being a Metsian Mullin, he pencils in as an automatic upgrade. Yet I am genuinely sorry we gave up Luisangel Acuña to nab him from the pale hose, though I’m sure some of that is my pinch-running obsession talking. In 2025, Luisangel Acuña pinch-ran more than any Met but three ever had in a single season? He was inserted 23 times for PR purposes, tying him with Hot Rod Kanehl (1963), Leon “Motor” Brown (1976), and Tim “Bogie” Bogar (1996) for frequency, and he did it without a widely disseminated nickname. Six stolen bases as a pinch-runner, eleven runs scored. Promising enough as an everyday player that during the one month when he received regular reps, mostly at second, he was named April’s National League Rookie of the Month.

Center fielders who used to be White Sox have been known to become Mets stars.

The promise more than the pinch-running record was what made dismissing Acuña sting. When we traded for Luisangel at the 2023 deadline, it was deemed a coup of sorts. He showed up a little ahead of schedule in September 2024 and made himself extremely useful in spurts. Then he got a little lost in a middle infield logjam, and the front office guy who replaced the front office guy who acquired him saw him as no less expendable than Joe McIlvaine judged Tim Bogar. Acuña appeared on our depth chart in the same ad hoc makeover that brought us Drew Gilbert, and Gilbert’s been gone for months, becoming the next center fielder for somebody else instead of us. Yet when the world was slightly younger, Gilbert the outfielder and Acuña the infielder were joining our top draft pick from 2022, Jett Williams, who it was said could play infield and outfield, in making our minor leagues formidable. I saw Williams up close in the Citi Field press conference room when the Mets were presenting their organizational awards at the end of 2023. My private pet name for him immediately emerged: Diamond Stud, inspired by the sparkling earring he modeled. That was a blah season, but soon, I could tell myself, we’d have the Diamond Stud carving out a spot on our diamond, maybe in the same lineup with Acuña and Gilbert.

Here’s looking at kids who pinch-ran a lot.

They’re all elsewhere now, with two of them never having ascended to the Mets. In my adolescence, I liked leafing to the back of the Official Yearbook to get a gander at our Future Stars, even if they tended to be Butch Benton and Luis Rosado. Anticipation is a baseball fan’s core competency. I had no idea how any of the crop lately blossoming down on the farm were going to actually fit into our big league plans, but I liked knowing they were on their way up. Gilbert went to San Francisco to obtain Tyler Rogers, one of the myriad relievers who couldn’t stem 2025’s tide of futility. Williams went to Milwaukee alongside Brandon Sproat for Freddy Peralta. I’ll no doubt applaud the first strike Peralta throws as the Mets’ 2026 titular ace, probably when he appears on NBC come Opening Day, just as I’ll put my hands together for the first fly ball Robert reels in behind him.

Fare thee well, potential Diamond Stud.

Regardless of how well our veteran newcomers mesh with the likes of Lindor and Soto, I’m going to miss the budding future I was anticipating. Williams was a bejeweled anecdote to me. I hoped there’d be more to him. Sproat was already a little something. Four starts of varying return last September, but it was a beginning. I nestled Sproat between Nolan McLean and Jonah Tong to form my ideal youthful pitching core for 2026 and beyond — I dubbed them Generation MST3K as I looked forward to them coming of age and me nurturing their narrative. I was taking on the Gen-K ghost of Izzy, Pulse, and Paul from thirty years before. No, that crew never really set sail, but I had time on my side this time. Or so I dared assume. Oh well, M and T are still here. I suppose Christian Scott can be subbed in as the “S,” but it won’t be quite what I envisioned.

I’m all for improving the present product with relatively proven commodities. As of March 26, I plan to open my arms to Bichette, Robert, Peralta, Marcus Semien, Luis Polanco, Devin Williams, Luke Weaver, Luis Garcia, Tobias Myers, Grae Kessinger, whoever. I get an extra kick out of Kimbrel being here if only because he’s been around so long that I can remember it being a big deal that David Wright whacked a late-inning dinger off him in Atlanta. I know these new guys without really knowing these new guys. No matter their experience, they’re new as Mets. I’ll get to know them. At the moment they’re mostly whoever. Alonso & Co. were us. Some of Pete’s peers are still on hand. Some of the kids from the proverbial back of the yearbook remain; a few have crept toward the middle and front sections since they were freshmen. Not everybody slated to inhabit Citi soon is a stranger.

Nonetheless, this Met winter has left me feeling a chill on the cusp of Spring. Then again, so did winter twenty years ago. Carlos Delgado was precisely the kind of slugger we prized perennially. Paul Lo Duca figured as the best possible Mike Piazza successor. Billy Wagner was exactly what we needed to caulk all those Looperesque leaks. At Shea in 2006, however, they loomed as strangers, as did the spare parts we seemed intent on amassing post-2005. Endy Chavez? Jose Valentin? Xavier Nady? Duaner Sanchez? Jorge Julio? Darren Oliver? Chad Bradford from Moneyball? Julio Franco from the 1982 Phillies? Some had reputations. Some you’d have labeled lesser-known. They were all bound at some point for Port St. Lucie, itself diluted by something called the World Baseball Classic. On paper, which was something I was in the twilight of buying daily, it looked all right. In my soul, the surroundings were disturbingly unfamiliar. I felt almost isolated from my team. Seriously, who were these guys and how did they get to call themselves Mets?

Then the season started, and most of the aforementioned made great impressions, and the new Mets coalesced with the core Mets from 2005, and the 2006 Mets morphed into a division champion I cherish to this day. Four eventual Hall of Famers played for those Mets, none more brilliantly than the most recently anointed of them, Carlos Beltran, elected to Cooperstown somewhere amid Bichette, Robert, and Peralta alighting in our midst. I hope his plaque portrays him as a Met, but even if it doesn’t, Beltran wore our cap in 2006, which turned out to be quite a year for the collection of players — and fans — who did just that.

Maybe we’ll someday say something of that nature for the Mets who are currently comprised largely of accomplished whoevers. Or we’ll wonder what the hell went wrong the way we have in the wake of strangers looking better in theory than they did on the field. Either way, they’ll have our attention; then our familiarity; then some combination of our esteem and disdain. You know, like Mets every year.