Lindor reaches 300 career home runs on the final day of a season to forget

Francisco Lindor hit his 300th career home run in the Mets' season finale, a personal milestone that landed in an otherwise empty ballpark atmosphere. The shortstop finishes 2026 hitting .231/.317/.417 with 9 home runs in 52 games — a limited sample shaped by a season that battered this roster from April onward.

The 300-homer mark is a meaningful threshold for a player of Lindor's profile. He came up as a defense-first shortstop in Cleveland and has steadily built a power résumé that now puts him among the more productive offensive shortstops of his generation. Getting there on the last day of a 73-87 season, with the Mets sitting 21 games back in the NL East and already under new management, is simply how the calendar fell.

The Mets close out a year defined by a 12-game losing streak in April, a manager firing mid-season, and an injury list that at various points included nine players simultaneously. Lindor's milestone is the one clean note on the final page.