NY Mets history: The star prospect stolen by the Yankees over a signature

If you collected baseball cards in the late 1990s and early 2000s, you probably had a stack of rectangular Wily Mo Pena images in your bedroom. The name alone was enough to catch your attention. A top prospect with the New York Yankees, he almost began his career as a member of the New York Mets.

It was July 15, 1998, when the Mets and Pena signed a deal. However, on February 28, 1999, the contract was voided over the legitimacy of parental signature for the 16-year-old. He’d sign with the Yankees on April 5, 1999, 

Wily Mo Pena was the elite Mets prospect that never was

Here’s the whacky thing about Pena’s career: he actually did join the Mets. In 2009, they signed him to a minor league deal midseason. He toiled away in Triple-A for 41 games, hitting .276/.296/.414. It was his first of two consecutive years without a major league game logged. Pena was only in his age 27 season and already winding down.

Pena bounced around a lot starting with a trade by the Yankees to the Cincinnati Reds for Michael Coleman and Drew Henson. He had a successful 2004 season with the Reds, hammering a career-best 26 home runs in only 364 plate appearances. Later traded by the Reds to the Boston Red Sox for Bronson Arroyo, he hit .301 for Boston in 2006 but appeared in only 84 games.

Like many failed top prospects, Pena eventually found his way overseas where he had some success. It was in 2014 when he hit 32 home runs and drove in 90 in Japan. Just 32 at the time, many would have thought at one point it would’ve been the last of his prime years in the majors and not a swan song of foreign success after not making a huge mark in the majors.

A big hole in Pena’s game was hitting for contact. A 30.3% strikeout rate in a time when the average player was fanning at 17.1%, teams were far less patient for this problem. He finished his career hitting .250/.303/.445 with 559 strikeouts in 559 games. Worth -1.2 bWAR, this missed Mets stud prospect never took off elsewhere.

Pena probably would have become a colossal bust regardless of whether he stayed with the Mets or not. The question can become whether the Mets would have turned him into a better trade asset than what the Yankees did.

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