I'm a Puerto Rican American who learned the English language the same way I learned heartbreak: listening to Mets games on the radio and watching Shea Stadium swallow October dreams whole. Before politics ever found me, baseball did. Before I knew what a party platform was, I knew what a box score meant. The Mets were never about ideology. They were about patience, failure, loyalty, and the stubborn belief that next year might finally be the year. In other words, baseball taught me how to be American long before cable news tried to tell me what kind of American I was allowed to be.
That's why the rumors swirling around the Mets clubhouse hit like a fastball to the ribs. According to Mike Francesa's sources, a reported ideological rift between two star players, one allegedly a Trump supporter, the other allegedly anti-MAGA, is being whispered about as a contributing factor in the shocking Brandon Nimmo trade. To be clear, these are rumors, locker-room whispers in a media ecosystem that thrives on friction. But even as rumors, they matter. Because the perception alone is radioactive.
If players are now being sorted not by batting average or WAR but by voting history, the message to the rest of the league is unmistakable. This isn't just about Brandon Nimmo or Francisco Lindor or who believes what. It's about whether the New York Mets are becoming something other than a baseball team. Whether they are morphing into an ideological sorting hat, where players are judged not on hustle but on hashtags.
And if that's the perception, good luck attracting free agents who don't want politics stapled to their locker. Particularly conservative players, and dare I say white players, especially on the heels of turning over not only Nimmo, but Pete Alonso and Jeff McNeil, who had a documented run-in with Lindor already.
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No one wants to walk into a clubhouse wondering whether silence will be interpreted as heresy. You can scoff at that reality all you want, but free agency is about comfort as much as cash. Players talk. Agents whisper. And the last thing a veteran slugger wants is to feel like he's signing up to play in some politicized, activist rebrand of "Los Mets," where the dugout doubles as a seminar and dissent is treated like sabotage.
This isn't about Lindor's wife or who she works with or which transition team she may or may not be advising. In America, everyone gets to believe what they believe. That's the point. The problem starts when those beliefs appear, rightly or wrongly, to bleed into roster decisions. Because baseball is not a think tank. A clubhouse is not a campaign office. And a publicly beloved franchise is not supposed to feel like an ideological pressure cooker.
That distinction matters even more when you remember that these teams don't exist in a vacuum. Steve Cohen is pouring billions into the Mets and the surrounding area, massive redevelopment projects that, like so many stadium-adjacent boondoggles across this country, often lean on public money, public land, and public approvals. Taxpayers, of every political stripe, have skin in the game whether they like it or not. When politics starts to look like a tool of retribution inside a product partially subsidized by the public, fans are right to ask uncomfortable questions.
What exactly are we paying for? Wins, or virtue signaling? Pennants, or political purification?
I grew up watching the Mets with people who didn't agree on anything except that Keith Hernandez had "good fundies" and that the Phillies were the enemy. That was the magic. The national pastime worked precisely because it didn't demand ideological alignment. It gave you three hours where none of that mattered, where a Puerto Rican kid from Paterson and an Irish guy from Staten Island could scream at the same umpire for the same blown call and feel, for once, like they were on the same side of something.
We are in an era addicted to contamination, where everything pure must be politicized, where even joy is filtered through grievance. But baseball should resist that impulse harder than anything else we have left. For the kids in the cheap seats. For the ones keeping score by hand. For the little hearts that don't need to know who voted for whom to tell that a walk-off homer feels like a miracle.
Keep the clubhouse about baseball. Keep the politics outside the park. Let the Mets be a team again, not a test. Because the moment the national pastime becomes just another front in the culture war is the moment we lose something that used to belong to all of us.
Julio Rivera is a business and political strategist, cybersecurity researcher, and political commentator and columnist. His writing, which is focused on politics and cybersecurity, is regularly published by many of the largest news organizations in the world.
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