Jeff McNeil heading to Sacramento as Metsodus continues

Another day, another Out the door. Jeff McNeilwho had thus far spent his entire 13-year professional career in the Mets organization, is now an athlete. The 33-year-old second baseman and outfielder is headed to Sacramento (or, to use the Athletics’ official brand, Parts Unknown) in exchange for a 17-year-old pitching prospect. Jordan Rodriguez. The Mets will pay off $5.75 million of the $15.75 million owed by McNeil in 2026, and if the A’s decline McNeil’s club option for 2027, Steve Cohen will cover the $2 million buyout.

At the time of the trade, McNeil was the Mets’ active leader in games played, at bats and hits. If you want to get an idea of ​​how the Mets’ offseason is going, here’s a fun fact. In the last 30 days, the franchise has had four active leaders in these categories: Brandon Nimmowho was traded to Texas just before Thanksgiving; Than Pete Alonsowho signed with the Orioles during Winter Meetings; then McNeil; and now Francisco Lindor. All that restlessness without playing a single game.

All told, 16 of the 63 players who suited up for the Mets in 2025 have left since the season ended. Come February, “Meet the Mets” might be more than a song. They will have to wear name tags and make ice breakers during the first week of camp.

Not all those sixteen players were as important as Alonso, or McNeil, or Edwin Diaz. There are some rentals, some relievers and some depth guys. I admit I forgot that Frankie Montas was on the Mets. Mets fans would certainly like to forget their team was ever in service Carlo Mullins.

But as much as those same fans will miss McNeil — a 12th-round pick who blossomed into one of the best contact hitters in the league — it has been clear for some time that his time in New York was coming to an end. The former Long Beach State star is now three seasons removed from his last truly outstanding campaign; since 2023, he has hit .253/.326/.389, which is a wRC+ of 102, and averaged within a rounding error of 2.0 WAR per season.

That’s still a very useful player – a team as consistently stingy as the athletic club wouldn’t otherwise spend $10 million on him – but no longer an indispensable part of a team with championship aspirations. The Mets are spending $26 million on it Marcus Semien this year, leaving McNeil out of the second base picture. And while McNeil’s bat is still useful, it’s not ideal for left field or DH. (For what it’s worth, McNeil’s defensive numbers were fine at second in 2025.)

The Mets’ loss is the Athletics’ gain. McNeil is a great bat-to-ball hitter, usually one of the toughest guys in the league to hit out. In McNeil’s best seasons, he posted OBPs in the .380s. With one exception, he has never hit much power and has never been a stolen base threat. Peak McNeil was something of a poor man’s millennial Wade Boggs. He simply sprayed soft line drive singles all over the field, stood first and waited for Alonso to swing a ball over the fence so they could both jog home. At the best of times he was good at scoring around 80 runs a year.

If McNeil wants to keep doing that — getting on base any way he can and waiting to be driven in by a huge guy with more power — West Sacramento is one of the best places to be in the league.

The A’s have, somewhat surreptitiously, built a lineup with tons of power: Nick Kurtz And Brent Rookerespecially, but also Laurens Butler, Shea LangeliersAnd Tyler Soderstrom. They have that too Jacob Wilsonwho is one of the few hitters in the league who is harder to strike out than McNeil. Is it controversial to say that I would choose this lineup over the Mets lineup as it is currently constructed? Because I would.

As McNeil grew older, he evolved as a hitter. Daniel Murphy is now a better historical comparison than Boggs, because McNeil has learned to lift and pull over the past three seasons.

In 2023, the first season for which Baseball Savant has bat-tracking data, McNeil had an average swing speed of 108.1 mph and a fast-swing rate (bat speed of 75 mph or more) of 2.6%. For context, that’s eighth percentile bat speed. In each of the last two years, his swing has gotten longer and more powerful, and he’s letting him eat a larger percentage of his swings. In 2025, McNeil’s average swing speed increased to 71.7 mph (still only 27th percentile, but faster than before), with a fast swing speed of 10.2%.

The effects of this change were about what you would expect. McNeil has slightly increased his contact rate inside the zone, and while he is sniffing more outside the zone, who cares? That’s not where he’s going to do damage anyway. He generally swings less and walks more. In 2025, McNeil recorded the first double-digit walk percentage of his Major League career.

He also pulls the ball more, especially in the air, where hard contact turns into extra base hits. In 2021, 13.1% of McNeil’s batted balls were pulled into the air, which was 183rd out of 232 batters to qualify for Baseball Savant’s rankings. This season, his aerial pull was 26.9%, which was 13th out of 251.

This didn’t exactly cause a power surge…well, maybe it did, by McNeil’s standards. In 2019, when McNeil was in his prime and the baseballs were filled with Flubber, he hit 23 home runs. Until 2023, that was the only double-digit home run total of his career. Now, McNeil has hit twelve home runs in consecutive seasons.

All that power comes to the pull side. McNeil hasn’t hit an opposite-field home run since August 5, 2022. Since that date, all 30 of his Major League dingers have come from right of center.

Will more power come with a change of home stadium? Maybe. Sutter Health Park was the second most hitter-friendly stadium in the league in 2025, behind only Coors Field. Citi Field usually plays around neutral. But for left-handed hitters alone, Citi Field was actually a pretty productive venue in 2025; it ranked fifth, just two spots behind Sutter Health Park, although the track and field stadium remained more homer-friendly. McNeil might be able to hit an extra home run or two in the ballpark, but I’d be shocked if he suddenly discovered the power of 25 home runs.

If he did, it would be the bargain of a lifetime for the A’s. As it stands now, they got a solid, reliable second baseman, for not that much money, in exchange for a teenager no one had heard of 12 months ago.

Rodriguez signed with the Athletics for $400,000 in January, just before his 17th birthday. (Yes, that means I’m writing to a player born in 2008. I’m asking for a casket for Christmas.) And it was a good first year in the pros for the Cuban teenager. At 6-foot-1 and 190 pounds, he is athletic and projectable and should develop as a starter in the near future.

That’s backed up by his stuff: His fastball sits at 91 to 95 mph and hit 96. But the best thing Rodriguez has going for him is the slider.

Rodriguez’s breaker is in the low 80s, with ridiculous depth. Eric Longenhagen told me that this pitch has so much curve that the automatic pitch-tagging system quite often calls it a curveball. It’s a real weapon, and hitters in the Dominican Summer League didn’t know what to do with it.

As exciting as that is, Rodriguez is nowhere near a top 100 type; Eric gave him a grade of 35+. As a rule, skipping is not a good idea for a teenage pitcher who has played eight professional games at some point, all in the DSL. Even if Rodriguez becomes a top player – and he could – it will be many years before he can help the Mets.

Rodriguez is a good player in a salary dump trade, but make no mistake, that’s what this is. That makes it difficult to evaluate because every time a team loses payroll, we have to wait to see what they spend that money on.

Getting rid of those 16 players has, by my calculations, saved the Mets somewhere in the neighborhood of $130 million, after taking into account the money they ate cutting Montas and oiling the skids to jettison Nimmo and McNeil. Between Semien, Devin Williams, Lucas WeaverAnd Jorge Polancothey have used up only a little more than half of that savings.

So Mets president of baseball operations David Stearns has quite a bit of money to spend, even before he asks Cohen to reach into his pockets for more. Does losing McNeil make it easier for the Mets to go after them? Cody Bellingeror Alex Bregmanor Framber Valdez? Maybe more than one of them? If so, you’d have to say this step was worth it.

To Cohen’s credit, the Mets are one of the few clubs that I would venture to guess will reinvest the money they just saved. But while we now know that the A’s have done good business here, we’ll have to wait and see how the Mets will do.