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By Jon Paul Hoornstra
Contributing Sports Writer
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The Mets traded minor league pitcher Franklin Gomez to the Cleveland Guardians on Thursday for international amateur bonus pool money, according to Mike Mayer of Metsmerized.
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Gomez, 20, is a native of Venezuela who signed with the Mets in January 2022.
Gomez was the No. 22 prospect in the Mets' system, according to Baseball America. The left-hander went 0-2 with a 4.70 ERA in six starts for the Brooklyn Cyclones of the South Atlantic League in 2025, striking out 26 and walking 11 in 23 innings.
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The trade comes on the first day of the 2026 international amateur signing period, when teams who promised signing bonuses to young players around the world must put pen to paper.
Ostensibly, the trade will help the Mets secure one or more of the foreign-born players with whom they had reached a verbal agreement prior to Thursday.
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The Guardians are coming off back-to-back titles in the American League Central Division. They have a strong track record of nurturing their homegrown pitchers, with two Cy Young Award winners (Shane Bieber and Corey Kluber) having come through their system in the last decade.
They won't see Gomez for a while in Cleveland — if he reaches the big leagues at all — but he's an intriguing prospect nonetheless.
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Gomez debuted in the Dominican Summer League at age 16, appearing in 13 Dominican Summer League games with the Mets' affiliates. A key focus of his 2025 season and offseason conditioning was a deliberate velocity increase, which was slow to develop early in his career but showed gains as the Mets adjusted his training.
“A lot of young guys are chasing velocity … Franklin was kind of the inverse of that… when we told him, ‘You’re going to go out there and let it fly,’ we saw a velo uptick,” Mets pitching coordinator Kyle Rogers recently told Baseball America.
Now he'll head to the Guardians, who seemed to have leveraged their excess international bonus money wisely.
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