Mets Fans Roast Team’s Farewell to Freddy Peralta After Trade to Rays: Thank You for What?
The New York Mets tried to say a nice goodbye to Freddy Peralta after trading him to the Tampa Bay Rays. Mets fans were not having it.
New York posted a “Thank you, Freddy” graphic on Saturday after shipping the 30-year-old right-hander to Tampa Bay for three minor leaguers. Peralta had come over from Milwaukee in a January trade that cost the Mets Jett Williams, Brandon Sproat, and gave them Tobias Myers on top. He was supposed to be the addition that stabilized the rotation. He posted a 4.99 ERA and an 83 OPS+ across 22 starts. That is not stabilizing anything.
The replies on the farewell post were savage.
“For what exactly? Being trash? Having the second highest ERA in baseball?” one fan wrote. “For what?” the 7 Line account asked. Multiple accounts posted memes suggesting the Mets should be thanking Peralta for leaving, not for arriving.
Mets fans have every right to be frustrated. Peralta had led the National League in wins the year before with 17. He was fresh off a season where he looked like a legitimate second starter behind Kodai Senga. Then he came to Queens and pitched like a fringe fifth starter for four months. That is a franchise-altering swing in the wrong direction, and it happened while the Mets were also losing games they should have won.
The larger picture is worse. The Mets are 47-66 and sitting 20.5 games behind the Braves in the NL East. They are wasting another year of Juan Soto’s prime and burning through the goodwill Steve Cohen built with his early spending. There is a version of this franchise that was supposed to be a championship contender by now. Instead they are trading All-Star names for prospects and reading the comments.
Peralta gets the last laugh, at least in the short term. The Rays are 65-46 and leading the American League. He is walking into a rotation where the front office knows how to fix pitchers, into a division race that will get his name on the postseason ledger, and into a culture that has consistently gotten more out of imported arms than New York has.
He might actually re-find himself in Tampa. That would make the trade sting even more for Mets fans, because David Stearns will have paid for a pitcher, watched him regress in New York, and then watched Tampa Bay make him look like an All-Star again.
None of this is Peralta’s fault. He did not ask to be traded to a losing team, and he did not choose to underperform in New York. But when the Mets try to hand out a warm farewell after a season like this, the fans are going to remember who paid for it.
Delete the tweet and hope for better next time.
A longtime sports reporter, Carlos Garcia has written about some of the biggest and most notable athletic events of the last 5 years. He has been credentialed to cover MLS, NBA and MLB games all over the United States. His work has been published on Fox Sports, Bleacher Report, AOL and the Washington Post.
