Whether or not Jeff McNeil was No. 1 in your hearts after the rat/raccoon fiasco, he will be No. 1 in your scorebooks whenever baseball resumes.
According to MLB.com’s Mets roster page, which looks a lot different right now thanks to the lockout, McNeil has switched from No. 6 to No. 1 in deference to newly-signed Starling Marte, who will take the No. 6 he wore in both Pittsburgh and Miami.
The page also lists other new Mets as Eduardo Escobar wearing No. 10, Mark Canha wearing No. 19, and Max Scherzer taking No. 21 – a change because both of the numbers he’s worn for the majority of his career, 31 and 37, are retired for Mike Piazza and Casey Stengel (he also wore 39 briefly in Arizona as a rookie, but apparently did not want to take that from Edwin Diaz).
Marte also wore No. 2 for his brief stints in Arizona in 2020 and Oakland in 2021, the former because David Peralta had No. 6 and the latter because No. 6 in Oakland belonged to manager Bob Melvin.
Usually, that kind of change for an established player means one of two things: either McNeil did it out of benevolence, or Marte, who just signed a four-year, $78 million deal, gave up something nice to get his preferred number.
Perhaps some rodent traps?
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