A Juan Soto MVP and 3 other individual NY Mets player goals we want

The New York Mets are a team with big aspirations heading into 2026. The mission in Queens isn't simply making it back to the playoffs after last season's disappointment. Getting there is a mere expectation. Doing damage and coming home with a ring is the goal.

From an individual player's perspective, excellence will be needed on several fronts in order to get there. The players will, of course, tell you that this isn't about individual accolades, but the more Mets players are able to rack up, the stronger their case will be to surpass the Dodgers in the National League and win the World Series.

Any talk of individual awards for Mets players has to begin with Juan Soto. He's the team's focal point, one of the brightest superstars in the game, and a player who has come close to an MVP award several times, but never gotten over the hump. He's not alone, though. There are three other players with a shot at taking home some hardware that we'd love to see.

Juan Soto and these other three Mets players taking home awards at the end of the 2026 season will delight fans

Juan Soto takes home NL MVP honors

There will always be the Shohei Ohtani elephant in the room, but it's important to note that even a "down" year for Soto last season led to a third-place finish in the MVP race. Part of that was due to an unexpected extension of Soto's game. No one expected the lumbering slugger to steal 38 bases when his single-season career-high was 12, but he did it anyway.

Tapping into that again, improving his defense now that he's in left field, and continuing to be one of the game's best offensive engines will be the three keys to getting him over the hump. The good news, he's already getting his engine revved up with a historic showing in the World Baseball Classic.

Luis Robert Jr. wins a Gold Glove

Luis Robert Jr. already has one Gold Glove to his name, taking home the trophy in the COVID-shortened 2020 season. Since then, he's put together several dazzling defensive performances that would have resulted in more hardware, if not for one thing.

Staying healthy is the biggest hurdle that Robert Jr. must clear in 2026. It's one of the Mets' keys to success. A big part of winning a Gold Glove is a player proving just that, that day in and day out, he can take the field and turn hits into outs. He has all the tools to make this happen, and achieving this goal will mean he's overcome his biggest bugaboo and put New York in great shape heading into October.

Dueling Cy Young nominations for Freddy Peralta and Nolan McLean

One of the great miscalculations David Stearns made last season was a belief that a group of mid-tier starters could rise to the occasion and form a formidable starting rotation. In trading for Freddy Peralta this offseason, he finally got a bona fide ace at the top of the rotation, and could have another potential top-of-the-rotation arm should Nolan McLean reach his potential.

Both of these hurlers finishing in the top five of the Cy Young voting will prove that the Mets have successfully built a two-headed monster at the top, putting them in a position to go toe-to-toe with any and all opponents in October. That would take the sting out of last year's planned rotation leader, Sean Manaea, struggling to break 90 miles per hour on the radar gun this spring.

A batting title for Bo Bichette

So we cheated a bit with the last goal, giving you a two-for-one, but this one is perhaps the most important goal of them all. When the Mets signed Bo Bichette, it represented a pivot. The club went from being built solely around power with Pete Alonso to now embracing a more balanced approach.

Bichette is a contact maven coming off a season in which he hit .311 and owns a .294 batting average for his career. He led the American League in hits twice, in 2021 and 2022. His addition to the lineup could prevent the stagnation we saw at times last year, when it seemed that far too often the club was waiting around for the three-run homer.

If Bichette is at his peak form in terms of making contact and racking up hits, it means the baton will keep getting passed and will put pressure on opposing pitchers in a new way. It will also help once the competition gets tougher in October, and being able to scratch across a run matters that much more.

He's no one-trick pony, with three 20-plus homer seasons under his belt, but the contact prowess is the true differentiator as long as he's performing at his peak.