Leap of Faith

“You remind me of Tug McGraw,” Gil Hodges told Ron Santo, regarding Santo’s heel-clicking routine that rubbed opponents the wrong way in 1969. “When he was young and immature and nervous, he used to jump up and down, too. He doesn’t do it anymore.” I’ve always loved that anecdote, recounted in The Year the Mets Lost Last Place, primarily because Santo was a Cub, and therefore anything he did to celebrate his team in view of our team was automatically offensive to me, even when I read about it after the fact. I loved Hodges stoically putting Santo in his place (which would eventually be second), because Hodges was our manager, and if there was a protocol Hodges preached, it was surely the correct one. Between you and me, had I been born somewhere near the North Side of Chicago, I might have come of rooting age convinced Santo was an avatar of affirmation and Hodges was an old stick in the mud. But I was born in Brooklyn, raised on Long Island, and my Channel 9 was WOR, not WGN. Gil’s dismissal of Santo’s antics will forever suit my tastes to a tee.

I don’t know what Gil Hodges from Princeton, Indiana, would make of Jefry Yan from San Rafael del Yuma in the Dominican Republic. Gil Hodges and Jefry Yan are from different eras, different worlds. But they have the Mets in common, specifically helping the Mets win when there had been little reason to invest faith in them previously. At the instant of his dig at Santo, mid-July 1969, Gil was managing a Mets club well above .500 for the first time in its history, tailing just one team rather than an entire league in the standings per usual. Yan isn’t nearly so accomplished, though it’s not like he hasn’t devoted his life to getting where he’s gotten thus far.

Jefry Yan was first signed to a professional baseball contract in 2013. The lefty made his major league debut on Wednesday night in this the year of our season 2026. You can already infer it’s been a long journey. His minor league log tells only some of the story. Two years in the Dominican Summer League, summers so far back that the Mets bullpen contemporaneously included Bobby Parnell and Jenrry Mejia. Jefry was in the Angels organization. It was under the auspices of the Angels that he went in for Tommy John surgery. Some pitchers emerge ready to go from the recovery and rehab process. Yan wasn’t one of those pitchers. He was released by the Angels and wound up out of baseball for a few years, working not innings but regular jobs. Per Tim Britton in the Athletic, “He enjoyed roofing…but not carrying refrigerators and other large appliances.”

A kid from the Dominican like Jefry Yan becomes a baseball player to become a baseball player, and not just for a cup of Rookie League coffee. Somebody turned off the spigot on him when he sought a refill, yet the kid never stopped pursuing his dream. He kept in shape and signed with the Marlins, pitching from 2021 to 2023 for their affiliates, making it as high as Triple-A Jacksonville. He pitched in the Arizona Fall League. He pitched in the Dominican Winter League. In 2024, Yan signed with the Seibu Lions of the Japan Pacific League. He didn’t pitch great, but stayed at it. He did better at a lower level in Japan. He got a contract from Colorado for 2025. You might think signing with the Rockies, last year the worst team in baseball, would represent an expressway to the big leagues. Yan got stuck on the on-ramp, generating a dizzying ERA in the hitter-first Pacific Coast League. The Rockies let him go.

The Mets saw something they liked in his stuff and signed him last July. The next time he pitched was not for a Met farm club, but back in the Dominican for two different teams, one of which, Leones del Escogido, won the Caribbean Series. Yan’s pitching began to gather momentum and attention. There were strikeouts and there were punctuations thereof. Video circulated of a man clearly enjoying his craft. He’d get strike three and he’d get vertical. Leaps into the air. Emphatic landings. Pumps of the fist. We of a certain demographic have been conditioned to raise an eyebrow at any pitcher who raises more than a glove, waiting for it to be tapped by his catcher. We also grew up watching Tug McGraw not always curbing his enthusiasm as much as Gil Hodges would have preferred.

Yan began pitching for the Binghamton Rumble Ponies in 2026. If you can’t express a little joie de vivre while calling yourself a Binghamton Rumble Pony, what’s the point of playing baseball? It’s playing baseball, not working baseball. Yan had already worked delivery and construction. This wasn’t that. This was a game, and Jefry was succeeding at it. Enough to be promoted to Syracuse. Enough to be promoted to New York after the trade deadline emptied out the experienced half of the Mets’ bullpen. Enough to be summoned by Andy Green to follow Christian Scott when Scott’s five innings of three-run ball proved a little too arduous to permit him to throw a sixth. Enough to face the playoff-contending Cleveland Guardians at Progressive Field on Wednesday night, marking Jefry Yan’s first time in a major league game.

He struck out his first batter, Angel Martinez. Conscious of his surroundings and aware of decorum, Yan calmly accepted a new ball from Francisco Alvarez and went about facing the next hitter with no show of outward emotion in your dreams. This was Jefry’s dream coming to fruition. Jefry Yan reacted pretty much as everybody who had seen the videos figured he would. He leapt. He landed. He pumped, both his fist and the demeanors of those pulling for his team. That cohort included his teammates, the hastily assembled ragtag band of also-rans who appear this week to be enjoying themselves more than they have in the totality of all the weeks that preceded this one in 2026.

And feel Yan’s touch.

There’s Yan, topping 101 MPH, throwing a scoreless inning and perceived prudence to the wind. There, the night before, was Nate Lavender, whose family, like him, had to travel an arduous path to arrive in Cleveland. Lavender was so happy talking to reporters that he was shaking their hands and thanking them for asking him questions. Yan outdid him for ebullience in the wake of what became a 6-5 ten-inning Mets win. His words en Español required a translator for American listeners to understand. His grin shouted the universal language of ecstasy. Whatever flair he brought to the mound, the kind a Hodges would have fined him for when managers could do that, wasn’t about showing up an opponent, he swore. It was all joy, all the time. Thirteen years to get to that mound and put up a zero while on it. You’d be crazy not to jump up and down.

These 2026 Mets are now the Mets of Yan and Lavender, along with assorted parts like another new reliever, Chayce McDermott, the 1,317th Met in franchise history and the first Chayce I’ve ever heard of. Chayce kept the Guardians off the board for two innings Wednesday. One of Chayce’s outfielders was Cristian Pache, Met No. 1,316. Cristian was hit two fly balls. He caught one of them. The fielding percentage isn’t great, but no runs were allowed while he was on patrol. Dedniel Nuñez returned from a long injury absence, and he wasn’t lucky enough to escape the effect of loose fielding, but just having Nuñez back was another boost. Jorge Polanco — the one the Mets signed in the offseason, not the one who’s been dragging around an ohfer the size of the state of Ohio — also materialized as if out of the blue. He homered and doubled, which was appropriate. Polanco had waited about as long to collect two hits in one game as a Met roughly as long as Yan, 29, had waited to be a big leaguer.

It was a back-and-forth game whose innate kookiness left its viewer willing to take any result that transpired. Chayce McDermott grounded out Chase DeLauter. Jefry Yan walked Steven Kwan. Balls were banged hard. Balls flew over fences. Hits were robbed. Hits fell in. A Guardians callup named Angel Genao (pronounced “hey now,” à la Hank Kingsley’s Larry Sanders Show catchphrase) collected four hits in his very first four at-bats. Jared Young produced a double and a triple. Leading off the ninth, facing his fellow British Columbian Cade Smith, he walked. Cade Smith sounds so much like Kate Smith, I’m tempted to start humming “God Bless America”. When Young came around to score the tying run, well, God Bless Our Canadian. In the tenth, a former Toronto employee named Bo Bichette recaptured the lead the Mets had let get away earlier by driving in slumping Francisco Lindor. Lindor couldn’t get a hit all night, but he did have the presence of mind to make the last out of the ninth, therefore guaranteeing he’d start the tenth on second base. On to protect our newfound advantage came our closer du nuit, Daniel Duarte. Devin Williams felt a bit of arm fatigue, so Andy Green used whoever he had. Duarte, who you’d call a 29-year-old journeyman if Yan didn’t already embody the nutshell, escaped both synthetic (ghost runner) and manufactured (a walk to DeLauter) trouble to nail down the save, his first as a Met.

I loved this Mets game as I’ve loved almost no Mets game this season. There’s not been much to love this season. The infatuation might be temporary, but a little life goes a long way. Yan might encounter enough naysaying to temper his huzzahs. Gary Apple and Todd Zeile analyzing Yan’s every giddy move during the postgame show might as well have been Marlin Perkins and Jim Fowler straining to make sense of the behavior exhibited by an exotic creature they’d stumbled upon on Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom. The Guardians, whose ranks include Chase Utley’s spiritual godson Rhys Hoskins, appeared perturbed that somebody in another uniform — in a Mets uniform — dare exude exuberance midgame. The Mets seem to have stowed the Spider-Man mask wherever they stashed the hard hat and vest. When Polanco, Brett Baty, and Carson Benge each homered, there were no physical props evident, just the kind of props teammates give each other naturally. When Yan came into the dugout with his first inning put in the books, he was welcomed as what he had striven so strenuously to be — a member of the Major League Baseball fraternity — and what destiny perhaps made him wait to be — a true New York Met.