Mets Monday Morning GM: Boxing Day tribute to James McCann

Boxing Day is that holiday we’d all see as kids on the wall calendar the day after Christmas. Without the Internet or Canadian parents, many of us had no idea what it was. The New York Mets celebrated Boxing Day early this year. On December 21, the shortest day of the year, they traded James McCann to the Baltimore Orioles.

The McCann tenure in New York ends with a .220/.282/.328 slash line in 603 plate appearances. Despite what you may remember, not all 603 of those trips to the plate ended with a double play groundout.

Unlike the veteran catcher he replaced, McCann never had his brilliant stretch of time with the Mets. He started off slowly in 2021. In 2022, he appeared in just 61 games and it was rough throughout. The Mets decided to box him up, send him to the American League, and get a little bit of relief in the process.

The Mets haven’t been shy about celebrating Boxing Day with their bad contracts

For those who haven’t bothered to look it up, Boxing Day is celebrated the day after Christmas on the 26th. It’s meaning seems to change. It is both a day for gift giving, shopping, and returning items you unwrapped a day earlier. We’re honoring McCann today for the last reason.

McCann isn’t the first contract to get eaten up. Robinson Cano was the man we all wanted to see shipped out. The Mets made the best baseball decision they could earlier in 2022 when a roster crunch had them DFA’ing the pricy veteran infielder rather than demoting Dominic Smith. As it turns out, both were inevitable.

McCann is a little different from Cano. We didn’t like his play on the field. The person he was, however, received no complaints. He never got suspended for PEDs. He wasn’t an albatross on the payroll that during the time of Wilpon ownership clearly held the club back. McCann was just a bad signing by a general manager who isn’t even with the team anymore.

Now gone from the team, we can ponder which player becomes the next we’ll want to box up and return to sender.