Mets Ranked A Not-Surprisingly Last In Net Value In 2026

Everybody wants to get what they pay for, but in the case of the 2026 New York Mets, while they might have thought they were purchasing a tricked-out Lamborghini, they actually ended up with a broken-down, rusted-out Yugo.

That's an easy distinction to make when a team enters a season with high expectations and a payroll north of $350 million, an MLB record, and exits it with a 74-88 record good for a last-place finish in the NL East and 14 games behind the final wild-card playoff position.

But knowing that and actually knowing how and why it happened are two different things.

On Thursday, Joel Reuter of Bleacher Report took a look under the hood of that decrepit Yugo and attempted to quantify the depth of the Mets' misery through the release of his "2026 Moneyball Rankings," which strives to determine which teams got the most bang for their buck in 2026 when balancing the amount of WAR an individual player created during the season against the salary they were paid.

Specifically, Reuter's formula assigns a value of $8 million for every one WAR, per the FanGraphs value metric, with the player's actual WAR multiplied by eight to determine the player's 2026 value in millions of dollars. The player's 2026 salary is then subtracted from the value, giving us the player's 2026 net value. Obviously, positive net values are good and negative net values are bad.

For example, if a player produced 3.5 WAR and earned $10 million, the net value would be $18 million, which would be a very solid return.

So, using this formula for all 71 of the players who played in at least one game for the Mets in 2026, you find that they produced - and you might want to be sitting down for this - a total net value of -$90.1 million in 2026, worst in the game and $45.3 million worse than the No. 29 Toronto Blue Jays (-$44.8 million) and $60.9 million worse than the No. 28 San Francisco Giants (-$29.2 million), who were the only other teams to have a negative net value.

It's easy to identify the culprits as shortstop Francisco Lindor, pitcher Sean Manaea, closer Devin Williams, second baseman Marcus Semien, outfielder Juan Soto, pitcher Kodai Senga, first baseman/DH Jorge Polanco and third baseman Bo Bichette, were all paid between $14 million (Senga) and $46.9 million (Soto) this year, but the "best" net value among them was Lindor's $-12.6 million with Bichette in the caboose at -$36.4 million.

Of course, as a player's salary becomes stratospherically high, it becomes harder to produce net value, but isn't that why they are paid that way in the first place, because of their past ability to produce high net values?

A 5.0-WAR season is a very solid one, falling maybe a little short of All-Star level, but the highest 2026 WAR produced by the eight players mentioned above was Soto's 3.0, which left him with a -$23-million net value, with Lindor next at 1.8 WAR (-$12.6-million net value). All of Manaea, Williams, Senga and Polanco had a negative WAR in 2026.

When big-money players fall short in their production, teams can only win if lesser-compensated ones pick up the slack, a phenomenon highlighted by the season of Pete Crow-Armstrong of the Chicago Cubs, who, ironically, was dealt from the Mets to Chicago at the 2021 trade deadline for two months of Javier Baez.

In 2026, Crow-Armstrong was paid $5.9 million for an MVP-level 9.8-WAR season, which gave him an astronomical net value of $72.5 million, which was 63% of the Cubs' $115.5-million total net value, placing them 12th overall according to B/R's rankings.

In that vein, there were some bright spots for the Mets as five of their top six in net value were rookies in 2026, led by NL Rookie of the Year finalist Carson Benge, who produced 4.3 WAR on a salary of $780,000, giving his play a net value of $33.6 million this season.

Following Benge were outfielder A.J. Ewing at No. 2 (3.1 WAR, $24.2 million net value), No. 3 starting pitcher Nolan McLean (3.0, $23.2 million), No. 5 starting pitcher Zac Thornton (1.7, $13.2 million) and No. 6 starting pitcher Christian Scott (1.7, $12.9 million).

The performance of New York's young players does provide hope for 2027 if they continue to improve while several highly compensated veterans have bounce-back years and the front office is a little more successful in identifying and signing free agents that will actually contribute on the field and not just cash bloated paychecks for underperformance.