Cyclones Insider v 1.0 - Amazin' Really Does Start Here

I’m Ben Kafka, an Account Executive here with the Brooklyn Cyclones, but my favorite part of the season is watching the players develop right here at Maimonides Park. This newsletter is my way of sharing a look at how the players performed and where they fit into the farm system, breaking down the front-office side of player development and the advanced stats behind it in a digestible way.

Statistics pulled from public baseball data: FanGraphs, Baseball Savant, & Prospect Savant

During the Cyclones’ 2025 Championship season, we saw talent that is now contributing to the Major League roster in Queens. Carson Benge, A.J. Ewing, and Zac Thornton all made their debuts with the Mets in 2026, and together they’re showing a promising glimpse of the next young core. By the eye test, Benge and Ewing are athletic disciplined, throwback-style players. Thornton is a strike-throwing, competitive innings-eater on the mound.

Benge and Ewing have seamlessly fit the model for the new look Mets post Alonso, Nimmo, and McNeil offensively. While Thornton, McLean, and Scott have pitched very well, emerging as a new young pitching core. In 2026, Benge, Ewing, and Thornton put together a combined 6.1 WAR (wins above replacement). WAR is a statistic used to essentially calculate a player’s contribution through offense, defense, and baserunning and get it down to one number. It provides a useful reference point for comparing players and is used by every Major League front office. Below is a breakdown showing context on league-average WAR values according to FanGraphs:

Fringe Big Leaguer: 0-1 WAR

Role Player: 1-2 WAR

Solid Player: 2-3 WAR

Good Player: 3-4 WAR

All-Star Player: 4-5 WAR

Superstar Level: 5-6 WAR

MVP Level: 6+ WAR

Starting with Benge, in 2025 with the Cyclones, he posted a slash line of .302/.417/.480.

A slash line is a fancy term for listing out a player’s main offensive statistic (Batting Average/On-Base Percentage/Slugging Percentage). Batting Average means the rate in which a player successfully records a hit, On-Base means the rate in which a player gets on base, and Slugging Percentage measures how much power is behind those hits, extra-base hits count for more than singles.

That is an elite slash line from David Stearns’ first draft pick of his Mets career in 2024. However, the underlying data that really showed Benge’s ability when he was in Brooklyn was his plate discipline, batted ball data, and speed. Benge’s plate discipline stood out even more than the slash line. He walked 41 times against just 50 strikeouts over the season, and during one 20-game stretch in the summer, he drew more walks (18) than strikeouts (15), which is rare for a hitter facing full-season pitching for the first time. On the batted-ball side, scouts pointed to his ability to drive the ball to the opposite field as his best tool, meaning his power doesn’t disappear even when pitchers try to throw him outside. Add in 15 stolen bases in 17 attempts, and you get a player who does damage, controls the strike zone, moves well, exactly the type of all-around, athletic profile that fits what the Mets are building around. That profile has carried all the way to the big leagues: on September 19th, Benge broke Pete Alonso’s Mets single-season rookie hits record, collecting his 156th hit of the year to pass Alonso’s mark of 155 from 2019.

Ewing’s path to Brooklyn was different from Benge’s, he started 2025 in St. Lucie and got promoted to the Cyclones in late April, but the production once he arrived was special. In 88 games with us, he posted a .288/.387/.388 slash line, drawing 46 walks against 66 strikeouts. What made Ewing stand out wasn’t power, it was his ability to put the bat on the ball. He made contact on 88% of his swings inside the strike zone, one of the best marks in the entire Mets system, which is a big reason his on-base percentage stayed high even without much thump in his bat. Once he got on base, he stole 44 bases in 51 attempts, tops in the organization. Add it up and you get a hitter who’s tough to strike out, gets on base at an elite clip, and turns on base into a threat, exactly the kind of disruptive, athletic player that made him fun to watch in Brooklyn.

Thornton’s 2025 was cut short, but what he did in his four starts for Brooklyn before moving on was as dominant a stretch as anyone put together all year. Across 20.2 innings, he posted a 0.44 ERA, striking out 25 batters while walking just 2, a strikeout-to-walk ratio over 12 to 1, which is an extreme number even by the standards of a hitter’s league level. That run earned him South Atlantic League Pitcher of the Month honors in April, and it wasn’t a fluke: he carried a similar level of dominance to Double-A later that year, finishing with the best strikeout-to-walk ratio in the entire Mets system among pitchers who threw at least 25 innings. It’s exactly the profile the eye test suggested, a strike-throwing competitive innings-eater who doesn’t beat himself, and it’s why he beat out a crowded field of arms for the big-league rotation spot in 2026.

Three different guys, three different paths, but all three prove the same point: what happens in Coney Island doesn’t stay in Coney Island.