Mets Are Already Seeing The Jorge Polanco Problem Mariners Could Not Escape

Former Mariner Jorge Polanco’s Latest IL Stint Revives A Familiar Seattle Conversation

Polanco was productive here. He helped the Mariners get where they wanted to go and earned a lot of respect. But health was never a side note to the experience. It was the backdrop to the whole thing.

The Mets are experiencing that right now. Polanco tried to play through stuff in Seattle too, and to his credit, that toughness is part of why teammates and fan bases love him. He is not a guy who looks for an exit ramp. He’s usually trying to grind through it. But that trait comes with a catch. Eventually the conversation stops being about whether he is available tonight and starts becoming about whether he is ever really all the way right. That was a huge part of his 2024 Mariners season, when knee trouble and a later hamstring issue dragged him into a career-worst year before he underwent knee surgery after the season.  

This made Polanco a tricky conversation in Seattle. Nobody questioned the talent. The problem was that every stretch of momentum felt like it came with an asterisk about how much his body was letting him do. Even last year, during the good version of Polanco, there was still that familiar balancing act. Seattle still got the production, but not without living in that low-level tension of whether another physical issue was around the corner.

Health is probably the only thing that makes Polanco a little frustrating. He is good enough to tempt you into believing the next stretch will be the stable one. Tough enough to stay on the field longer than a lot of guys would. Productive enough to make the gamble feel worth it. But eventually, the body usually asks for a pause anyway.

The Mariners could not quite escape that reality with him. And now, a couple weeks into his Mets tenure, New York is already finding out how hard that can be to escape too.