Can it really be 30-some years since I had a part-time job with STATS Inc. as a ballpark reporter?
It was such a cool gig. I got to go to Shea Stadium, sit in a special spot in the press box, plug in my 10-pound laptop, connect it to a modem (kids, ask your parents), and input every pitch of the game. I had the opportunity to meet some of the writers and broadcast media folks, but I was too shy to really mingle (plus I needed every synapse to concentrate on the action, lest I miss a pitch, hit location, and everything else). One time the official scorer asked me what I thought of a play he needed to call.
But one of the nicest perks was that since I was considered a member of the press, I got all the materials to which they were entitled, including media guides. In those days, these publications were only available to the actual media. Now, perhaps looking for another revenue stream, the guides are available to the public. But if you look, you can find them online for free, like the 2026 Mets Media Guide I found on archive.org.
Weighing in at an amazin’ 511 pages, it has all the info you might expect, such as profiles of all the players in the organization, including the minors, as well as tons of stats for the regular and off-seasons; all-time records; and much more than I care to list here.
First impression: the cover. Most media guides will go with a picture of players or iconic events. This is is pretty but also pretty bland.
Perhaps in an effort to show that the team is community-oriented above all else, the Guide begins with eight pages of Mets Foundation work. Very nice.
One of the things that struck me — and kudos to the Mets — was the amount of space (ten pages of small type) given to the people behind the scenes. The club directory includes departments that didn’t exist when I was going to the games for STATS, such as “Mental Health and Mental Performance”; “Performance Technology and Baseball Systems”; “Baseball Technology & Video” (as opposed to the stand-alone department for plain old “Technology”); and, of course, “Baseball Analytics” (as opposed to “Strategy & Analytics.” FYI, there are 25 names listed under “Baseball Analytics.”).
When I was a kid, there were only three or four coaches. The 2026 Mets have 11 (!), including someone with the title “quality assurance coach.”
The players section is standard when it comes to numbers and season-by-season breakdowns. I found it a bit quaint that there are highlighted columns with old school stats like home runs, RBI, and batting average or wins, strikeouts, and ERA.
Then it starts to get a bit haphazard. Most player pages begin with a “Meet the Met” paragraph with the kind of stuff you might find on the back of a baseball card, you know, bits of trivia like hobbies. One can picture the players filling out questionnaires, which might account for the vastly diverse data.
Some are pretty funny, if unintentionally so. For example, this for catcher Francisco Alvarez: “Practiced his English during the 2022-23 off-season by listening to songs with English lyrics and watching Spanish Netflix shows dubbed in English…Also watched ‘Peaky Blinders’ to continue working on his second language.” It just so happens that I’m watching that show now and I can can you I’m having trouble understanding what they’re saying, between the British accents and the slang.
A few other examples:
- Brett Baty: “Proposed to his fiance, Anna, on July 15, 2025 on a beach in Cape May, New Jersey.”
- Bo Bichette: “Loves tennis, played when he is a kid…Still enjoys watching…His favorite player was Rafael Nadal and now enjoys watching Carlos Alcaraz…Has said that playing tennis has helped him train his mind…Compared it to being alone in the batters box.”
- Ryan Lambert: “In 2024, Lambert found an internet video citing the benefits of eating raw eggs…Wanting to build muscle and increase his recovery rate, he decided to eat 30 raw eggs per day for a month…Since then he has become passionate about nutrition, encouraging his teammates to eat well.”
Can’t you just see Lambert looking for tik-tok challenges?
But these are inconsistent. On some pages, this info is listed under a “Background” heading.
Because the player pages can vary greatly in length, you have to have fill out the rest with, well, “fillers” like “Biggest blown leads,” “1-0 wins decided by a home run,” and “Home run in first at-bat,” which has the redundant introductory line, “The following is a complete list of players who have hit home runs in their first at-bat with the Mets.” As a professional writer, it almost seems like they were pressed to even out the pages with an approaching deadline and no one looked at the final copy before it went to press.
Am I being picayune? Perhaps. But in the words of that immortal philosopher, Popeye, “I yam what I yam.”
Despite all these little flaws, any die-hard fan would love to have a copy of the Media Guide in their baseball library.