Three days after the Orioles agreed to a five-year deal with Pete Alonso last December, the Mets signed Jorge Polanco to a two-year, $40 million contract. At the time, the Mets’ front office clearly thought that the switch-hitting veteran would give them good production at the plate, and in the team’s press release about the signing included a comment from David Stearns that the expectation was that he’d spend time at first base and designated hitter while “bouncing around to other positions as needed.”
None of that happened. After a slow ramp-up in spring training that was designed to ease him into the long season because of past injury issues with his legs, Polanco played first base just two times: in the first and second games of the Mets’ season. He started having issues with his lower legs, as his Achilles tendon and heel were mentioned in injury reports in early April, and he spent the rest of the season as a DH.
A variety of injuries kept Polanco sidelined for several long stretches of the season, too, and when he did play, he was historically bad. In just 145 plate appearances over the course of 37 games, Polanco hit .148/.201/.230 with a 20 wRC+. He was worth -1.4 fWAR, which was tied with Noelvi Marte of the Reds for the worst mark in all of baseball. And while that wasn’t the worst single season in Mets history, it’s the only one of the ten worst seasons by fWAR to have happened this century. The last time a Met was that far below replacement level was in fifteen years ago, back when Ronny Paulino put up a -1.2 fWAR season for a very bad Mets team, thought it’s worth noting that Mark Vientos nearly tied Paulino with a -1.1 fWAR of his own this year.
So what went wrong? Having struggled in his first season with the Mariners in 2024, Polanco thrived at the plate as he got the team shifted the vast majority of his playing time to the DH role in 2025. Yes, he had played shortstop, second base, and third base in the past, but the Twins began moving him off short in 2021 and had fully moved him off the position in 2022 with the exception of 30.0 innings that he played there that season. Primarily a second baseman from that season through 2024, he occasionally played third base, too.
That track record, combined with what the Mariners got out of Polanco when they reduced his playing time in the field even further, seemed to suggest that Polanco was moving toward a full-time DH role sooner rather than later. Sure, the Mets might’ve been able to have him cover other infield positions in a pinch, but it would’ve been surprising to see him get significant playing time around the infield. If his legs hadn’t been such a mess on the injury front, maybe he’d have been able to play about as often at first base this year as he played second base for the Mariners last year, but even that would’ve given the Mets a whole lot of innings and games to cover at first.
Even for those of us who were concerned about the Mets’ apparent plan to play Polanco in the field regularly, though, what wound up happening was far worse than what had seemed like the worst-case scenario back on Opening Day. Leg injuries forcing him to move to DH even more than he had last year in Seattle, well, that seemed fairly predictable. You wouldn’t have expected him to fall off a cliff at the plate, though, and you wouldn’t have expected him to last just two games in the infield before he was too hurt to play defense again.
Entering his age-33 season, Polanco presents a massive question mark for the Mets, assuming the team doesn’t decide to part ways with him as it manages its 40-man roster this winter. If he sticks around, a best case scenario would be an injury-free spring training spent exclusively as a DH and something resembling a return to form in that role once the regular season gets underway. The underlying metrics as measured by Statcast don’t paint any more of an optimistic picture than his 2026 stats do, though, and it would a major shock if he were to rebound significantly enough to avoid joining Jed Lowrie and Frankie Montas as one of the Mets’ most infamous signings of all time.
