At the end of a challenging season, Jonah Tong is bouncing back.The New York Mets are poised to give their top pitching prospect another shot in the major leagues. In Tong’s last three Triple-A starts, he posted a 0.52 ERA with 17 strikeouts and six walks (17 1/3 innings).Still, it has been a trying season for the 23-year-old and one full of changes. Across 23 starts with Syracuse, Tong has a 4.54 ERA.In a Q&A with The Athletic this week, Mets vice president for pitching Eric Jagers discussed Tong’s recent improvement and his season overall. He shared insight about Tong’s arm angle, repertoire and outlook.Some questions and answers were lightly edited for clarity.Maybe we can start out with the big picture and then zoom in. What is your broad overview of his 2026?It’s certainly been a roller coaster for him. Even going back, he’s probably carried a good amount of weight from 2025 into ’26. You have things like the game staying the same, but everything around you is kind of changing.When he was rising through the ranks last year, you’ve got new, possible sponsor endorsement people reaching out. You’ve got more media attention. You go up to the big leagues in the midst of a race, and you’re not able to quite perform how you want and contribute, and I think you’re carrying that throughout the offseason. I believe he had some interest, too, from Canada with the World Baseball Classic. He’s going into spring training and trying to compete for a spot in a rotation. You’ve got a new staff. There’s a lot of new players.I think there’s just a lot. There’s a lot of expectation for him, on himself, that didn’t necessarily fundamentally change anything. But maybe pried his focus and joy and freedom away just a little bit going into the year.Was his major-league experience last year a good thing in hindsight? A bad thing? How do you view it, essentially one year removed from it?It’s hard to put a label on it. One, it was a really cool opportunity that he earned at the time. So in that part, it’s cool. It’s good. He had some fun moments, right? The debut was pretty good. He punched back against San Diego, and that was pretty good. And then he had some more unfortunate outings and appearances and things like that that certainly left a little bit of a sour taste in his mouth, I’m sure.So, in the grand scheme of things, I think it’s hard not to view it positively, that it will help him down the line. But yeah, hard to say whether it was good or bad, or should have done this, should have done that, stuff like that — I wouldn’t quite go there. But I feel like he’s now in a place where he is pitching with some more freedom and a lot of joy and a lot of things that we’ve seen from him in the past. But again, a lot underneath the hood has sort of led to that point.Why did he experience such a hard time on the mound this year before his recent stretch?This is sort of where the mental and the physical components meet. We did start to see some things trending in certain directions — not that they were new, but actually things that had been a part of Jonah’s development path in the past. Little things like starting to maybe stride a little bit more across his body, leading to a little bit lower arm slot, and impacting some of his pitches from an action and execution standpoint. Those things are always happening with guys over the course of the year.