The Amazins’ Must Love The Truly Amazing Mitch Voit
METS BEAT CLEVELAND, 6-2. 3 homers, Manaea throwing 95.
Nate Lavender had a great debut. Torrens crushed it!
Break them up!
The Mets’ top 30 list (linked below) had changed dramatically since pre-season, as I write this on Friday AM of the last day in July.
But since then, it is already greatly updated again for new acquisitions.
With recent draft picks, and the many prospects currently coming in trades, like the trade for Benny Agbayani’s son, huge shifts to this TOP 30 have come. Jefferson Rojas is deservedly the new # 1, and Sammy Stafura of the booming power bat is # 11.
Roughly 10 or more new guys in, and 10 or more others removed, from the Top 30. You don’t see THAT every day.
Back to what was the pre-trades existing list:
One prospect’s ranking, and one’s non-ranking, I just cannot understand - maybe you the reader can help me:
Player # 1 in the last two months in High A/AA was .305/.430/.485 with 0.95 Ks per game. Killing it.
Player # 2 in the last two months in AAA was .130/.250/.220, with 1.65 Ks per game. Gosh-awful.
Player #1, Corey Collins, is not even in the top 30.
Player # 2, Ryan Clifford, is grossly overrated at 7th (now 8th, post-trades). (He was 3rd pre-season).
My advice?
Have them switch places.
Is Ryan Clifford really a top 30 prospect?
Come on, be honest. This is a time for objective honesty.
The answer is No. Not really.
He cannot even shine super dud Jarred Kelenic’s shoes.
He had 16 HRs in 406 plate appearances, this season. The other 390 PAs (96%) have collectively been dismal.
A complete change in approach seems to be a strategy to consider.
Jake deGrom frankly was a better hitter.
And had McLean just hit, and not pitched so well, Nolan McLean would be a better hitter by now, too.
McLean hit .185/.281/.432 in 2025, despite facing much better pitchers than he was ready for at the time, because his superior pitching shot him up the chain.
McLean was hitting against HIGH A and AA pitching in his first real pro season, which no prospect hitter does besides Benge and Voit.
If McLean had started out hitting in St Lucie in that first year, with a late season bump to High A, instead, his slash line would probably have been 50 points higher, at .235/.331/.482.
And he’d have been ranked in the Mets’ top 20. As a hitter.
I’ll remind people that in college, he hit a 472 ft. HR. To the opposite field.
Or 1B/3B Nick Lorusso could switch places with Clifford. Lorusso, despite a slow April and May, has been hot the last 10 weeks, and now has 20 HRs and 57 RBIs in 317 at bats, and just got bumped to AAA, where he homered.
Moving on:
Zac Thornton, who everyone now 💕LOVES💕, was still ranked 6th.
Two less-loved hurlers, Jonah Tong Terrific and Jonathan Superb Santucci, however, were ranked higher, # 1 and # 2.
Love Zac all you want, but love those guys, too. I still think both are great.
Maybe, just maybe, they will be better than Zac in the long run.
Eli Serrano was still ranked 13th, now down to 15th, despite hitting .193 in 54 Binghamton games when he was not injured. And a career .214 hitter in the minors. Joe Biden saw that and said COME ON, MAN.
Why is he even in the top 30?
Jack Reimer shouldn’t be 4th (now 5th after deadline deals), either.
His 2025 season was strong, but his 2024 and 2026 seasons are both poor and injury-filled. The ability to stay healthy is not sufficiently considered, I imagine that Jorge Polanco might be thinking.
Honestly, how they have him ahead of Mitch Voit, I do not know. But, more on Voit later.
Two guys who have slipped badly since the pre-season top 30 are walk-one-per-inning Dylan Ross and Ryan Lambert, to # 29 and # 30.
After new prospects acquired in trades are factored in, both dropped entirely out of the top 30. How disappointing.
“They’d both be great if the strike zone was 50% larger, since that really helped me”, HOF Tom Glavine must be thinking.
Guys in the top 30 in late July I expected to drop out of it besides Ross and Lambert are Nathan Hall (24th), Antonio Jimenez (25th), Marco Vargas (29th), RJ Gordon (30th). And yes, all are OUT.
I thought Trey Snyder would push his way in. But he didn’t, at least yet, what with all of the newly acquired prospects. Trey is hitting .302, and .358 with RISP in 189 at bats after returning from injury.
Serrano IMHO should still be in the top 30, but as close to # 30 as humanly possible. OK, I’ll concede, top 35.
Thornton is about to graduate out for good, freeing up one slot.
I know I am a broken record here when I wish Clifford would join his buddy in KRIME, Colin Houck, outside the top 30. Both belong between # 40 and # 50 IMO due to prodigious levels of Ks. Before his fine last 3 games of July (6 for 12, with one K), Houck in July had gone 6 for 51 with 28 Ks. Amazing. But he was just put on the Development List after the trade deadline explosion.
I’d immediately demote Houck to I Love Lucy Land, even though he’s been in Brooklyn for 137 games in 2025-26 (.203, 213 Ks) and tell him to cut his Ks in half, by any means possible. Or just cut him.
He is now WAY DOWN on the team’s position player prospects listing.
He’ll never make it. Sorry, but I am not the one fanning 40% of the time.
My last thoughts?
Elian Peña is ranked 3rd, Mitch Voit 5th. (Now 4th and 6th, post-trades).
Now THAT positioning should make for an interesting debate.
Me?
I think next February, they will both be ranked in the top 3.
It is probable that Tong graduates out of the Top 30 due to innings before the end of 2025, as Will Thornton and perhaps Wenninger. Santucci possibly. Pintaro possibly. It will be a Top 30 Hitters’ Haven next spring, unless a bunch are traded away.
The new slugger Jefferson Rojas may prove to be better and stay at # 1.
You rank them.
Which of these 3 prospects do you like better in the long run?
I do know that thru Sunday, Voit had gotten on base a million times in AA in his first 6 AA games, going .500/.593/.909. Then, in game 7, a single, 2 doubles, and a line out!
Strikeout rate excellent. Good power. Fast as the wind. Great fielder.
He is my NUMBER ONE. Right now.
Keep THAT in mind when choosing between Rojas and the excellent Pena and Voit.
I will leave you with this:
For the first time, I am thinking that Mitch Voit could be on the Mets opening day roster in 2027. I think he is that good. His career has rocket thrusters.
And these Top 30 prospects are the deepest for the Mets in hitting that I have ever seen. 20 of the 30 are hitters.
Total team salary dropped…but I think is still the highest…
….and here is an angle you may not have considered:
If there is an extended MLB strike in 2027, non-40 man roster players CAN PLAY in the minors in 2027, closing the gap talent-wise between them and their Mets counterparts. If the strike lasts two months, those prospects are all two months closer to replacing high-cost veterans.
14 comments:
Tom, I have some stuff you may be interested in:
https://sny.tv/articles/mets-midseason-top-30-prospects-2026
And this snippet from an article The Baseball Nerd wrote on Substack:
“ Every fan conversation about the next labor fight starts from the same dread: that because 1994 happened, because the World Series got canceled once before, it can happen again. That fear is understandable. It’s also, if you actually look at the record, the wrong thing to be afraid of.
Baseball has had nine labor stoppages since 1972, and the mechanism this next one is expected to use, an owner-initiated lockout, has never once cost a regular season game. Stack that history next to a financial picture that gives ownership every reason to protect the thing they’ve built, and the honest read isn’t “here we go again.” It’s that the people running this sport, whatever else you think of them, have too much of their own money riding on Opening Day actually happening to let this be 1994 twice.
That’s the case this piece makes, in great detail, pulling from the sport’s entire labor history and from the financial documents that don’t usually make it into the conversation about a lockout. The short version, so you can hold onto it through the ugly winter ahead: the owners pushing hardest for a salary cap are not the same as the owners who’ll actually let the games stop. Those are two very different appetites, and the second one is the one that matters for whether we get to watch baseball in April 2027.
MLB owners are pushing for a salary cap for the first time since 1990. They are framing it the same way they framed it then, as a cost problem. Too many teams spending too much, an illusion of competitive imbalance; the usual language. Ironically, four months before that proposal hit the table, those same owners quietly increased their own borrowing capacity against the league’s national media revenue. Buried in the media contracts themselves is a clause that punishes ownership, both specifically and financially, for letting a work stoppage bleed into the regular season. If we put those two facts together, the cap fight stops looking like a fight about money the owners don’t have and starts looking like a fight about money they very much intend to keep, and keeping it requires the games actually being played.
What actually happened in April
In June 2026, Fitch Ratings affirmed MLB’s debt at ‘A’ and ‘A-’ across two structures most fans have never heard of: the MLB Trust and the MLB Facility Fund. Both are bankruptcy-remote securitizations, meaning the debt is walled off from any individual team’s financial trouble and repaid instead from a pool of national revenue, national broadcast contracts, MLB Advanced Media distributions, and other central baseball money that gets paid out before it ever reaches the 30 clubs.
The Trust’s per-club borrowing limit went from $125 million to $150 million in April 2026. That’s roughly $750 million in new aggregate borrowing capacity across the league, opened up against the same national media pool that a prolonged lockout would disrupt. The Facility Fund, the pool actually earmarked for stadium and ballpark capital projects, stayed flat at $100 million per club. It was Trust money, tied to the media revenue that funds the entire operating structure of the sport.
Four months later, MLB formally proposed a salary cap of $245.3 million and a floor of $171.2 million, a framework the MLBPA has rejected in every negotiation for the last three decades and shows no sign of accepting now.
I don’t think the timing is a smoking gun on its own. But it tells you something about how confident ownership was, in April, that this fight wasn’t going to cost them the thing the debt depends on.”
It goes on more from there comparing the different stoppages. Great stuff.
Who would have thought the Mets would wind up with a new number one prospect
From the Baseball Nerd on Substack:
“ Every fan conversation about the next labor fight starts from the same dread: that because 1994 happened, because the World Series got canceled once before, it can happen again. That fear is understandable. It’s also, if you actually look at the record, the wrong thing to be afraid of.
Baseball has had nine labor stoppages since 1972, and the mechanism this next one is expected to use, an owner-initiated lockout, has never once cost a regular season game. Stack that history next to a financial picture that gives ownership every reason to protect the thing they’ve built, and the honest read isn’t “here we go again.” It’s that the people running this sport, whatever else you think of them, have too much of their own money riding on Opening Day actually happening to let this be 1994 twice.
That’s the case this piece makes, in great detail, pulling from the sport’s entire labor history and from the financial documents that don’t usually make it into the conversation about a lockout. The short version, so you can hold onto it through the ugly winter ahead: the owners pushing hardest for a salary cap are not the same as the owners who’ll actually let the games stop. Those are two very different appetites, and the second one is the one that matters for whether we get to watch baseball in April 2027.
MLB owners are pushing for a salary cap for the first time since 1990. They are framing it the same way they framed it then, as a cost problem. Too many teams spending too much, an illusion of competitive imbalance; the usual language. Ironically, four months before that proposal hit the table, those same owners quietly increased their own borrowing capacity against the league’s national media revenue. Buried in the media contracts themselves is a clause that punishes ownership, both specifically and financially, for letting a work stoppage bleed into the regular season. If we put those two facts together, the cap fight stops looking like a fight about money the owners don’t have and starts looking like a fight about money they very much intend to keep, and keeping it requires the games actually being played.
What actually happened in April
In June 2026, Fitch Ratings affirmed MLB’s debt at ‘A’ and ‘A-’ across two structures most fans have never heard of: the MLB Trust and the MLB Facility Fund. Both are bankruptcy-remote securitizations, meaning the debt is walled off from any individual team’s financial trouble and repaid instead from a pool of national revenue, national broadcast contracts, MLB Advanced Media distributions, and other central baseball money that gets paid out before it ever reaches the 30 clubs.
The Trust’s per-club borrowing limit went from $125 million to $150 million in April 2026. That’s roughly $750 million in new aggregate borrowing capacity across the league, opened up against the same national media pool that a prolonged lockout would disrupt. The Facility Fund, the pool actually earmarked for stadium and ballpark capital projects, stayed flat at $100 million per club. It was Trust money, tied to the media revenue that funds the entire operating structure of the sport.
Four months later, MLB formally proposed a salary cap of $245.3 million and a floor of $171.2 million, a framework the MLBPA has rejected in every negotiation for the last three decades and shows no sign of accepting now.
I don’t think the timing is a smoking gun on its own. But it tells you something about how confident ownership was, in April, that this fight wasn’t going to cost them the thing the debt depends on.”
Sorry about the second one. Google was telling me they weren’t posting it.
As Tom points out, the top 30 rankings are a subjective list and often the judgement of the creator is not the same as ours. If you are in the top 30, you probably deserve to be, but positioning within counts for much less than on-field performance. So I take our new rankings with a grain of salt. Maybe Rojas is now our best prospect, maybe not. It will be fun to watch him on the field to see.
Gus, when money is the driver, incentives and disincentives to settle arise. Time will tell.
My sense is Voit is better, but he and Rojas are the next Benge/Ewing.
Is anyone else having Google keep making them type out a word to prove they’re not a computer? That happened to me at least 10 to 15 times today, having sometimes needing to do it 3 to 4 times in one instance.
You are a Russian bot
Hi Tom, great piece. My Top 5 would include Voit, Rojas, Santucci, Stafura, and Tong in some order close to that.
Next 5 would be Thornton, Peña, Asigen, Reimer, and Pitre (who I think is closer to the bigs than a lot of these guys).
Of others on the list, I think that Aiden Smith, Cole Mathis, and Corey Collins (along with any pitchers who suddenly start throwing strikes) have a chance to be fast risers. I don’t see Ryan Clifford as top 30 at all. Billy Amick has the same profile with more game power demonstrated and is a better hitter overall.
I have questioned for some time why Ryan Clifford is rated so high among the Mets tip prospects. He has power,that is the only thing he brings to the table. Now tthat we have added several new prospects from other organizations ,I would drop him from even the top 30.
Adam, you should post a top 30. Would be good.
Les Elkins. I agree. Last year, Clifford hit better but still was high in walks and Ks. And average. I said last year that he needed to lower walks and Ks and put more numbers in that batting average. He failed.
The underlying bargaining structure of the CBA negotiations is complex in that the surface level of the negotiations is misleading as in 'owners' v 'players.' The real structural issues arise at the level of 'owners' v 'owners'. and 'players' v. 'players'. because it is at that level that differences matter. And the overall CBA negotiations success depends on resolving these 'internal' bargaining problems first. I have written a fair amount about this issue in its most pervasive form which is what I called a 'bargaining problem' nested in a 'prisoner's dilemma'.
I can give a simple example: What we call a 'competitive' market for any good or service can also be understood in another way, namely, as a failure to solve a bargaining problem that has nothing to do with the two sides of a market -- the sellers and the buyers'.
Instead, it has everything to do with a bargaining problem among the sellers. After all, the sellers would prefer not to compete with one another because that merely drives their potential revenues down: that's the entire underpinning of the idea that competition is good because it drives prices to buyers down.
If the sellers could form a cooperative monopoly they could keep prices up and share the additional profits among themselves. But to form that monopoly they have to solve two problems among themselves: the bargaining problem (who gets what share of the additional profits) and a prisoner's dilemma problem (keeping everyone incentivized to cooperate with the terms reached rather than to free ride or take advantage in one way or another of others complying with them not having to).
All the mechanisms referred to in the piece Gus refers to, especially media contracts and their terms are designed to solve the internal problems I just mentioned that the owners as a group face vis a vis one another. And that is the pain points that need always to be resolved while everyone else who is thinking about the CBA and a lockout are thinking in terms of the negotiations between the players organization (their collective bargaining unit) and the owners. They are missing the structurally most important issues which are internal to each group not to the two parties who represent those groups. It's the collective action problems internal to each that is the real issue that needs to be resolved. That is always the case, and always why the place to look is not at the surface level, but at the structural disparity of incentives internal to each group.
I hope this is helpful. If it is It makes me feel that at least one area of my research career has had practical value in helping people see deeper into the problems we face in organizing institutions and working cooperatively with one another in ways that work to everyone's potential advantage.
Structure of an issue is always the first place to look for insight about how to solve a problem.
Post a Comment