The New York Mets placed right-hander Robert Stock on the 15-day injured list Wednesday with numbness in his fingers, ending the 36-year-old journeyman’s unlikely 2026 season, via the MLB transaction log.
Stock, who weighs in at 260 pounds, had been scheduled to start Wednesday night’s game against the Baltimore Orioles at Citi Field. Instead, Xzavion Curry will take the ball.
The Mets listed Stock with a 5.93 ERA, 1-3 record, 29 strikeouts and 15 walks over 30.1 innings in seven starts and one relief outing. Reports indicated the season is over for him.
The move is a late-season twist in a comeback that already defied typical recovery timelines. Stock signed a minor-league deal with New York in November 2025 after a brief 2025 stint with the Boston Red Sox.
In March, while pitching for Team Israel in the World Baseball Classic, he reported shoulder discomfort. Testing revealed arterial thoracic outlet syndrome, the rarest form of the condition. He underwent surgery shortly afterward.
Typical TOS recovery can run six to 10 months. Stock returned far faster. He began a rehab assignment with High-A Brooklyn on June 19, pitched well in the minors, and was purchased from Syracuse on Aug. 2.
He immediately entered a rotation thinned by injuries and inconsistency, delivering a five-inning, one-run outing in his first start back. He later earned his first major-league win in seven years.
The late-season finger numbness is a new setback after that rapid climb. Stock’s 2026 line with the Mets was uneven—stronger stretches mixed with outings that inflated the ERA—but the story was never just the numbers.
It was a 36-year-old who rebuilt his career across the KBO, independent ball, the Mexican League, and Triple-A before getting another look in Queens, five years after a brief earlier Mets stint.
New York sits at 69-82 and fifth in the NL East with little left to play for besides evaluation. Curry stepping in for Stock is another example of the club cycling arms through the final weeks.
Devin Williams and Cionel Pérez remain on the injured list with their own late-season timelines, underscoring how thin the pitching staff has been.
For Stock, the 15-day IL placement closes a chapter that began with a WBC MRI and ended with a late-September roster move.
Whether the finger issue is related to his earlier TOS history or a separate problem was not immediately detailed in reports. What is clear is that a pitcher who fought back from surgery in three months will now watch the last two weeks from the sideline.
The Mets’ rotation questions for 2027 will be answered without him on the mound this month. Stock’s year still stands as one of the more determined returns on a disappointing Mets roster.
