Francisco Lindor’s year hasn’t gone as anyone would’ve expected. Sidelined at the very beginning of spring training and forced to miss the World Baseball Classic as he recovered, Lindor unsurprisingly got off to a slow start when the Mets’ 2026 season got underway. And just as he started heating up at the plate, he suffered a calf injury in a game against the Twins on April 22, the same game that served as Juan Soto’s return from his own calf injury.
While Soto was sidelined for three weeks, Lindor went two months in between major league games. Despite the lengthy absence, the Mets’ rehab plan saw him play in just three games—one with Double-A Binghamton and two with Triple-A Syracuse—before he was reinstated from the injured list. And since then, he’s hit pretty similarly to how he had hit before the calf injury, putting up a 91 wRC+ from Opening Day through April 22 and an 87 wRC+ from his return from the IL up to the All-Star break.
A few months can feel like a very long time, especially when the Mets are having one of their worst seasons of all time, but it’s far too soon to forget how great Lindor has been in his time with the team. And it’s also far too soon to give up on what he can do moving forward.
In his first five seasons with the Mets, Lindor had four of the top 31 seasons by a position player in franchise history by fWAR. His spectacular 7.7 fWAR season in 2024 has only been bested three times in Mets history, as David Wright’s 8.4 fWAR 2007, John Olerud’s 8.1 fWAR 1998, and Carlos Beltrán’s 7.8 fWAR 2006 seasons are the only ones that have been better.
Lindor’s 6.4 fWAR 2022 season ranks 15th in the history of the organization, and his 6.3 fWAR in 2025 ranks 17th. And his 5.5 fWAR 2023 is the one that ranks 31st. Even his relatively unimpressive debut season with the Mets in 2021, which saw him finish the year with 3.9 fWAR, ranks 64th. Only David Wright and José Reyes have matched Lindor with four seasons in those top 31.
If the Mets’ history of position player production isn’t a high enough bar, Lindor has been the sixth-best position player in baseball with 30.4 fWAR since the beginning of the 2021 season, trailing only Aaron Judge, Shohei Ohtani, Juan Soto, José Ramírez, and Bobby Witt Jr. If he’d had an injury-free first half and played roughly the projection systems saw him playing this year—roughly 4.0 to 5.0 wins above replacement depending on your preferred projection system—he’d at least be ahead of Witt and perhaps be even with or ahead of Ramírez and Soto.
Simply put, Lindor has been one of the best players in baseball, and the fact that he’s 32 years old should be considered a sign that he’s not anywhere near the end of his time as a great player. It’s certainly premature to assume that his production has fallen off—or will soon fall off—a cliff.
All of the projection systems at FanGraphs see the rest of Lindor’s 2026 season looking pretty much like his 2025 season did, hitting significantly above league average and adding roughly two wins to his fWAR over the course of about 60 games. The playing time projection seems fair, as the Mets have given him off days since he came off the injured list. And if he were to finish the year with something like 2.5 to 3.0 fWAR in 100 games. That would be a 4.0-to-5.0 win pace over the course of a full season.
To see Lindor live up to those projections wouldn’t be surprising. In each of his five seasons with the Mets, he’s been an outstanding hitter in the second half. The underlying metrics on Statcast page, while lacking in sample size, look similar enough to the past few years.
Will Lindor ever match that 7.7 fWAR season again? Probably not. But there’s nowhere near enough evidence to suggest that he can’t be finish with 4+ wins above replacement over the next few years. And given the readily available options to field a new shortstop within the organization and in the upcoming offseason, here’s hoping the Mets have no intention of trading Lindor.
