His Name is Jonah*

Hello hello hello. Happy St. Patrick’s Day and Free Monday here at The Mets Newsletter. Subscribe for free editions every Monday and Thursday, or for a few bones a lot of words about the Mets every damn day, including weekends. I’m a sicko like that.

I very much understand the appeal of the Spring Breakout to fans. In its second year, the annual event pits one organization’s group of top prospects against another’s. There’s already talk of turning it into a March Madness tournament, with the winning team getting a top 1st round draft pick out of the deal, but it’s currently cool just the way it is. 

If your team wins, wow, how exciting the future is for the franchise and for your mental health, right? And if your team loses? Well that’s okay, there’s always a few bright spots in a loss you can spin into positives. 

Late yesterday afternoon the Baby Mets faced the Baby Nats, and for Mets fans, it was the absolutely best outcome. Not only did the Met kids win by a score of 5-1, they beat the Nationals kiddos. You’d think the Nationals would have the more impressive farm system, considering how they’ve been producing worse records than the Mets the last few years, and therefore consistently getting higher draft picks. And they still might. But for at least one day, the opposite was so. 

And thanks to the beat writers and the SNY personalities covering the contest, we learned a lot of cool things about the players we might one day be obsessing over. 

Where to begin? Let’s go with the starting pitcher for the Mets in the Spring Breakout game, Jonah Tong. His full name, we found out courtesy of Tim Healey of Newsday, is Jonah Reid Tin Chee Matthew Tong. He got the name Jonah from his mother Karen, who has had a thing for quarterback Joe Montana since 1979. Because she already named a daughter Montana, Tong’s father nixed naming their next child “Joe”, so she suggested “Jonah.”

“It’s not that we couldn’t name him Joseph, but I knew my husband kind of gave me side-eye when I mentioned it,” Karen said with a laugh in a phone interview. “I thought, OK, we won’t name him Joe at all. We won’t. We’ll name him Jonah. Is that OK?

“He was about 3 months old when my sister said, “So how is Jo-Jo doing today?’ And my husband looked at me and said, ‘How did I miss that?’ ”

Karen snuck it through.

“My mom calls me Joe every once in a while,” Jonah said with the tone of a recent former teenager. “I’m like, OK.”

Hilarious and gross, I love it. Seeing him for the first time, it turns out that Tong throws like former Met Tyler Clippard. CLIPPARDBOT pitched for a long time so I’m cool with it.

In one of his strikeouts, Tong’s leg kick actually obscured the baseball reaching the catcher’s mitt for the third strike. I don’t think I had ever seen that before.

Not Joe went 2 IP, 1 H, 0 R, 2 BB, 3 K in 29 pitches. His fastball reportedly went up to 97. 

Third baseman Boston Baro, who is compared to both Jeff McNeil and Brandon Nimmo, but needs to build muscle for the latter to become more of a possible reality, impressively homered opposite field off of fellow left-hander Alex Clemmey, who allowed exactly zero home runs to lefties last season. BB also singled in the 4th and started a 5-4-3 DP in the 5th.

Right fielder Carson Benge recently decided to stop pitching and focus full-time as a position player (he said it was a mutual decision between himself and the Mets). He’s also a southpaw who also got an extra base hit off of Clemmey, a double down the left field line.

After Jim Duquette and Joe DeMayo talked about his elite plate discipline back in the New York City studios, shortstop Jet(t!) Williams came back from 0-2 to work the count full before reaching on an error, then promptly stealing second base, off of a lefty. 

First baseman Ryan Clifford, who along with Drew Gilbert was acquired from the Astros in the Justin Verlander trade where the Mets paid down most of Verlander’s big salary just so they can get top prospects out of the deal, went 1 for 4, but oh my goodness that one hit was a 449 foot bob-omb to straight away center field. He’ll be starting the year in Double-A Binghamton. On days like these it isn’t insane to consider that the Mets might swap out a Polar Bear for a Big Red Dog at first base in 2026.

The sound made when the ball met Clifford’s bat should be studied.

It says something about Nick Morantino that he was the leadoff hitter and center fielder when Jet(t!) Williams and Carson Benge are also on the squad, and that something is Nick Morantino is one fast son of a gun. He swiped a base yesterday, natch.

27-year-old Jonathan Pintaro came in to pitch after Tong. This guy’s story is straight from a movie. He was pitching last year for the independent Glacier Range Riders in Kalispell, Montana. Two innings into his third start with the team, he saw his manager calling the bullpen. Annoyed, Pintaro demanded to know what the deal was. Then his manager informed him he was done for the day - the New York Mets just purchased his contract. Fair enough! Pintaro threw two scoreless innings yesterday. 

2024 8th-round-pick Ryan Lambert is a character. The 23-year-old threw 102 in a game for the University of Oklahoma last season against Wichita State and thinks he can top it. “Get me in a game, and cool things will happen,” he was also quoted as saying yesterday. Joe DeMayo on SNY relayed the story that Lambert drank 30 raw eggs every day for a month to try and bulk up. His only problem is pitch control. He averaged 7.3 walks per nine in his final year of college and he gave up the only run the Nationals would score. But man, it’s exciting to have a Ricky Vaughn waiting in the wings. 

The Spring Breakout game was abruptly stopped before the bottom of the eighth could begin, presumably due to the tiniest bit of rain. (Tarp appeared in the outfield but no precipitation appeared on the screen. Weird!)

Earlier in the day at Clover Park in Port St. Lucie, the Mets were shut out by the Houston Astros 5-0. The Mets currently have the lowest ERA out of any team in MLB this spring. They also have the lowest OPS in all of baseball. I suppose it’s better than the alternative: if the Mets had the highest ERA with all of their pitching concerns, I’d be really worried about it. Instead, maybe the pitching lab deserves a Nobel Peace Prize or something, and you can wave away the offensive troubles by assuming a lineup with Juan Soto in it virtually every day should be just fine. That’s the beauty and pain of spring training. 

Hayden Senger was the star of the game. He had the only extra base hit for New York all game, a stand-up double to left. He also picked off runner Zach Dezenzo at first base. Seemingly out of nowhere within the last 48 hours, Senger is the obvious guy to win the backup catcher gig and break camp with the team in 10 days.

Tylor Megill did everything right except give up four runs in five innings. Basically it was the opposite of Paul Blackburn’s “perfect” outing from last week. Megill struck out six and walked nary a soul. Like Jonah Tong, he topped 97 on the radar gun. 50 of his 74 pitches were strikes. He got 10 swings and misses off of four different pitches, and it might have been five - Megill claimed what Statcast calls “sinkers” were sometimes really “changeups.”  It’s just, you know, he gave up a home run and five other hits. “All the pitches were working,” Megill said afterwards. “Obviously, the results, a little different." If it wasn’t for the pesky minor league option that he has that his competitors don’t, I’d think Megill and his spring ERA of 3.86 was a lock for one of the five slots in the rotation to start the year. 

Tyler Zuber got hit by a batted ball right on his pitching elbow. He left the game but he’s supposedly fine. He got a litle massage from Francisco Lindor out of it so all is well.

Brett Baty was 3 for 3 in fielding batted balls at second base. He went 0 for 3 however at hitting the ball, lowering his spring batting average to .343. Luisangel Acuña, Donovan Walton, and Luis De Los Santos all had the day off. Considering today is split-squad action, all four will probably be busy soon enough.

Would Baty sign a minion toy? You bet your ass he would.

After Mark Vientos inadvertently threw his bat into the Mets dugout, old chum Luis Guillorme, playing shortstop for the Astros, raised his arms as if to say “Come on guys, nobody is gonna try to catch that?” Guillorme later made a fantastic play on the field to boot.

Carlos Mendoza offered up Wednesday as a possible return to seeing Starling Marte play the outfield. Up until now he’s strictly been DH’ing.

When A.J. Minter’s velo started to go down in 2023, he turned to former teammate Jesse Chavez on how to be effective despite throwing junk (88-89 mph). Thanks Jesse!

Both Mendoza and Jesse Winker congratulated St. John’s University’s men’s basketball team on their Big East Championship and for positively representing Queens.

Art Shamsky threw out the first pitch and just came out with a new book. He looks and sounds great for an 83-year-old. Put him in the Spring Breakout game!

We knew Francisco Lindor and Edwin Díaz’s “Team Puerto Rico” won the Mets’ fantasy football league last year, but Michelle Margaux on PIX11 filled us in on the fact that they were the only fantasy football owners in the league to not make any of the personnel decisions - they hired the strength trainer and physical therapist to be the GMs. Lindor sounded defensive in Margaux’s telling, saying he has ever right to celebrate the victory anyway. 

Todd Zeile made some awkward comment about storks and a lot of the Mets wives being pregnant. 

All things considered, former center fielder Anthony Gose has been successful in converting to a pitcher, seeing as major league teams have employed him as a lefty out of their bullpens before. Gose said the Mets were the only team this offseason to offer a contract, and it was of the minor league variety. His spring ERA is 1.50 in six games, but he’ll probably at least begin the year in Triple-A Syracuse. “I’ll go wherever they want, as long as I have a uniform on,” he said.

Only the Dodgers have more games on national television this season than the New York Metsies.

Francisco Alvarez has been notably upbeat the last few days despite wearing a cast on his left hand, and he got a new tattoo on his upper left arm of the MLB logo, his last name, and his uniform number. “I had a couple days I couldn’t sweat,” Alvarez told Newsday. “So let’s do a tattoo.” 

The Intelligencer reported on how Washington Heights with their over one million Dominican residents just might be Met country now: 

At Peligro, a local baseball institution known for catering to both MLB and Dominican Professional Baseball League diehards, Yankees gear outsold Mets paraphernalia last season at an 80-20 clip, said Freddy Peña, a longtime store manager. Since Soto’s signing, it has flipped to 70-30 Mets. “It was like a complete stop from, Oh, we were selling Yankees gear, and now it’s Mets, Mets, Mets,” Peña said.

During the Spring Breakout broadcast, Jim Duquette claimed he was witness to a presentation  that found the most Tommy John injuries occur in February and March due to over-conditioning during the offseason. My two cents: 1)I guess that makes sense and, 2) of course the players are to blame, not the teams.

Brandon Nimmo hit in a minor-league scrimmage and will DH today against the Rays. No percentages were offered.

The saddest news from yesterday was the announcement from Carlos Mendoza that Ronny Mauricio will not see any game action this spring. In some dimensions, the soon-to-be 24-year-old Mauricio is already the Mets’ All-Star second baseman, but in this crummy one, he tore his ACL playing winter ball after the 2023 season, then had a setback last August from that. Mike Puma tweeted that Mendoza claimed he “misspoke” when he initially said Mauricio would be playing by mid-March, but Mendoza insisted Mauricio has been progressing fine. Mauricio the last few weeks has been working on fielding ground balls and moving laterally. He referred to the current status of his knee as “perfect, honestly.” I’d like to think there isn’t anything nefarious going on here, and like Kodai Senga, the Mets are just being super duper careful in a situation where they can more or less afford to be. I still think Mauricio has a decent shot at starting an infield position by the end of 2025. Because ya gotta believe, that’s why.

16 years ago today, David Wright hit a walk-off two-run single to beat Puerto Rico 6-5 in the WBC. Exactly 20 years before that, Juan Lagares was born.

Today some Mets will play the Rays in Port St. Lucie while some others are travelling to Jupiter, Florida to take on the Marlins. The Rays game will be on SNY while the Marlins one will be on Marlins TV. Griffin Canning, Huascar Brazobán, Anthony Gose, Dedniel Nuñez in his Grapefruit League debut of 2025, and Sean Reid-Foley are all scheduled to pitch for the Mets against Tampa Bay. Interestingly enough, Mike Vasil, a Mets 2021 draft pick, will start for the Rays. Eric Orze, the guy the Mets traded away for Jose Siri, will also pitch for Tampa. It’ll be interesting to see which game Siri starts…Paul Blackburn and Justin Hagerman will take the bus over to Jupiter.