With the future status of one of their biggest sluggers uncertain, the New York Mets are expectedly doing their due diligence elsewhere, particularly with Kyle Schwarber.
ESPN’s Jeff Passan reports that the Mets are “in the mix” for the free-agent slugger, who has spent the last four years terrorizing them with the NL East-rival Philadelphia Phillies. The Boston Red Sox, with whom Schwarber spent part of the 2021 season, and the Phillies are also major players in the sweepstakes.
The 32-year-old designated hitter is coming off his best season yet, launching an NL-best 56 home runs with 132 RBI, which was good enough for second in MVP voting behind Shohei Ohtani.
Depending on how this winter pans out, the Mets could be in need of one more major bopper in the middle of their lineup to support Francisco Lindor and Juan Soto. They dealt Brandon Nimmo’s career-high 25 home runs from last season to the Texas Rangers for veteran second baseman Marcus Semien, and Pete Alonso’s landing spot is still very much unknown.
The franchise home run king is coming off a 38-home-run campaign in 2025, but did not even wait an hour until after the Mets’ season ended in spectacularly disastrous style on the final day of the regular season to announce that he was opting out of the final year of his two-year, $54 million bridge deal that temporarily smoothed over a winter of discontent last season.
Alonso is still very much looking for that long-term, big-money deal, which is something that president of baseball operations David Stearns appears unwilling to pursue — at least the five-to-seven-year aspect of hypothetical negotiations for a first baseman with declining defense and an apparent unwillingness to take on a larger workload as a DH.
If a team does emerge willing to meet both of those needs, the Mets are going to be without the National League’s top home-run hitter since his debut campaign in 2019.
But if the Mets were to swing a deal for Schwarber before an Alonso resolution is reached, it would all but eliminate any notion of the Polar Bear returning. Schwarber has played just 14 games in the field over the last two seasons, and suddenly making him a first baseman would be the antithesis of Stearns’ priority of improving team defense this offseason.
