Wright retired following the 2018 season, and the captaincy dissolved with his departure. Over the seven seasons that followed under Steve Cohen's ownership, the question of a successor circulated through every spring training without finding resolution, and the name most consistently attached to it was Francisco Lindor's.
The profile Lindor had built by 2025 was, by any reading of the franchise's own historical precedent, the profile of a captain. His ten-year, $341 million contract, finalized on April 1, 2021, had committed him to the organization well into the 2030s and established him as a contractual cornerstone unlike anything the Mets had produced in the Cohen era.3 He had appeared in 150 or more games in each season from 2022 through 2025, establishing a record of availability that made him the most durable everyday presence the franchise had fielded in recent memory.4 His position at shortstop, the most demanding and most strategically central defensive role on the field, had kept him at the visible core of the team's on-field identity across an extended period of organizational rebuilding and ambition. He had satisfied, in other words, every condition that the franchise's own history indicated should be sufficient for the designation.
Cohen had never acted on any of it, and on February 16, 2026, at Clover Park in Port St. Lucie, he stated at his annual spring training press conference that he never would.
