How Mets Icon Noah Syndergaard Became an Ambivalent MAHA Poster Boy

Anybody want to play pickleball with Noah Syndergaard? Somebody must—like a million Mets fans, for starters. But none of them are here, in Westlake, Texas, the Dallas suburb where Syndergaard has settled since disappearing from baseball. His old teammate Jacob deGrom lives nearby, so we hop in Syndergaard’s golf cart and zip over to deGrom’s house. But the lights are off and nobody’s home. DeGrom, we remember, still plays Major League Baseball—he must be at the Texas Rangers’ ballpark, where he’s scheduled to pitch tonight. So that’s out.Friends? Well, Syndergaard’s got plenty, but it’s a weekday afternoon, and they’ve all got day jobs. Not Syndergaard. Though he still looks much like his old self—the six-foot-seven pitcher revered as Thor—today he lives like a 33-year-old “trust fund baby,” floating on tens of millions in career earnings and looking for ways to pass the day. “It gets a little lonely at times,” he says. We step out of the golf cart and enter his home through the garage, where he stores an Aston Martin DBX707, a Ford Raptor R, and about a dozen jugs of water, all glass. “A lot of guys have families already, and those come before whatever Noah wants to do.”And what does Noah want to do? He’s not quite sure. He calls his mom once, twice, three times a day. He shops for raw milk. He tends to his house, a rustic two-story home with vaulted ceilings, bright walls, and ample space to pursue physical perfection. We enter past the pantry, where he stacks something called banana water and seed-oil-free protein bars. Through an open doorway, a hyperbaric chamber seems to occupy its own room. “I could be like the real Clavicular,” Syndergaard says. (“What a jack-ass that guy is.”)He begins a tour in his office, where two magazine covers hang framed. A New Yorker issue depicts Syndergaard on the mound before a long summer sunset, his blond mane immaculate. A Marvel Battleworld comic is inscribed by Chris Hemsworth: From one Thor to another. We step out through an adjacent patio—home to a cold tub and sauna—and stretch out on a couple of lawn chairs by the pool. Here, Syndergaard says he feels like a “suburban dad”—without the wife and kids. He blows the leaves. He battles the wasps. He admires the trees that form a perimeter around his property. There’s a funny story about the cottonwood. It blooms in late spring—clusters of green seeds mature and split into clouds of cotton across the leaves. A decent gust of wind can start a flurry, which is exactly what happened one evening last April.“When I had that MAHA event,” Syndergaard says, “it looked like it was snowing out here.” Fuzz surrounded everyone—Dr. Phil, Del Bigtree, and 150 other supporters of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s crusade to Make America Healthy Again. He relays this story while dressed in a T-shirt bearing that very slogan. A wireless-signal-blocking fanny pack hugs his waist. His signature locks are up in a bun, tucked underneath a navy trucker hat from a company that sells dairy from grass-fed, pasture-raised cows. Along his temples, his hair is closely buzzed, revealing graying roots. Syndergaard says he has “no idea” when they first appeared, but I have my doubts about that. With his baseball career suddenly over, Syndergaard now devotes his life to optimizing every aspect of his physical being.In the process, he has emerged as a strapping, restless, extremely available figure for the MAHA-MAGA apparatus. A few weeks before my visit, he was in the Oval Office, supporting Donald Trump’s plan to revive the Presidential Fitness Test. Standing behind the Resolute Desk, Syndergaard beamed as the president introduced him: “Noah Syndergaard, sometimes referred to as Thor, and he looks like Thor to me,” Trump said. “You look great.”Syndergaard says he has another trip to DC planned and invites me to tag along. Children’s Health Defense, an anti-vax nonprofit formerly chaired by Kennedy, has invited him to speak about the supposed dangers of electromagnetic radiation. (In his bedroom, which is not part of the tour, Syndergaard says an EMR-protecting net hangs over his bed.) Kennedy, the Health and Human Services secretary, views Syndergaard as “an amazing partner” and “a close friend.” Syndergaard “recognizes the role of competitive sports in keeping us healthy, in maintaining cognition, and teaching discipline, resilience, confidence, reliability, and teamwork,” Kennedy tells me through a spokesperson. “Noah wants all American kids to have these advantages.”I try to register for the event online, but it’s booked up. Over email, I plead with Children’s Health Defense to save me a seat, but their comms guy won’t do it.“You’ll be good,” Syndergaard says. “I’ll make sure of it.”I have been going to Mets games for about 30 years. In a haze of improbable losses and long rides home on the 7 train, one memory is pristine: Game 3 of the 2015 World Series. The Mets trailed the Kansas City Royals two games to none in a race to four. We needed more than just a very good pitcher—we happened to have plenty of those at the time. We needed a hero. Onto the mound stepped Syndergaard, a 23-year-old rookie, all flowing blond hair and extreme velocity. His first pitch—a fastball—whistled over the head of the Royals’ leadoff man, Alcides Escobar. Escobar fell to a knee, then took a seat in the batter’s box. We roared like depraved onlookers at the Colosseum. After the game—a 9-3 victory—Syndergaard declared that any ticked off Royals could meet him at the mound.The Mets lost that series but promised to return behind what then-skipper Terry Collins still considers “the most magical young pitching staff ever assembled.” The unit comprised five rising stars: Syndergaard, deGrom, Matt Harvey, Zack Wheeler, and Steven Matz. Among them, Collins felt that Syndergaard’s curiosity set him apart—nobody asked more questions in the dugout during games. Plus, Collins adds, “he had no fear on the mound.”Ahead of the 2016 season, Syndergaard trained with a renowned powerlifter, Josh Bryant, and became the game’s hardest-throwing starting pitcher, routinely topping 100 miles per hour. He continued firing baseballs at enemies of the franchise—that year, at Chase Utley, who had broken our shortstop’s leg with a ruthless slide the year before. Syndergaard made the All-Star team, and in the Mets’ lone playoff game, he did not allow a hit until the sixth inning, tossing seven scoreless frames in all.Riding the Thor moniker, Syndergaard reached a level of celebrity rarely achieved in baseball. Fans flocked to his starts beneath blond wigs, wielding foam hammers. He inspired that New Yorker cover, charmed late-night hosts, and sat courtside at Madison Square Garden with his then-girlfriend Alex Cooper, whose media career had not yet taken off. Syndergaard was not the best player in baseball—but he may have been the most recognizable.I began to pursue him for a profile—but before I could get through, the Mets unraveled. Across a few seasons, Syndergaard tore his lat and contracted hand, foot, and mouth disease. DeGrom got hurt while hitting; our star hitter got hurt while tackling a boar. A pitcher told a reporter he’d “knock him the fuck out” in the locker room, a sex toy was left in the background of a photo posted by the team, and Mr. Met flipped off a fan. Seasons blurred.In February, 2020, I was told by Syndergaard’s agency that he “love[d] the idea” of an interview. Then, COVID-19 lockdowns began across America, and a week later it was announced that Syndergaard needed Tommy John surgery. The interview went poof.I kept after him in the years that followed, the story changing as his career took strange turns. In 2021, Syndergaard left New York to sign with the Los Angeles Angels—a natural setting to explore new beginnings. But his velocity ticked down and he posted the worst strikeout rate of his career. After 15 starts, he was traded to the Phillies. (Just before his red-eye to Philadelphia, he called his mom, Heidi, at a loss. “He said, ‘I don’t know what I’m doing.’ He was so upset,” she tells me. “It was heartbreaking.” The Mets had been “his team.”)After a half-season in Philadelphia—where a bearded Syndergaard carried the aura of an aging journeyman—he signed a one-year deal with the Dodgers, renowned for their Midas touch. So I pitched his agency a renaissance tale. But I couldn’t get to him—and Syndergaard couldn’t regain his form. “I would be the first player in history that the Dodgers made progressively worse,” he says now.He was cast off to Cleveland, setting the stage for a resurrection. But I did not hear back from his agency as Syndergaard barely cracked 90 miles per hour with his fastball. Syndergaard says he doesn’t remember considering an interview request that season but imagines he would have passed. “I can understand maybe not sharing,” he tells me now. “It was more so, what the fuck is going on in my life? Is this a nightmare? Is this reality?”After that, Syndergaard receded to the West Coast, where he tore his meniscus while learning to surf. He sat out the 2024 season, then settled for a minor league contract with the White Sox. When his fastball velocity dropped into the 80s, he was let go. At 32, Syndergaard was done.In March, I pitched Syndergaard’s camp one final story, about life after baseball. I heard nothing.Then one day in mid-April, as I walked up Wooster Street in Lower Manhattan, I bumped into Syndergaard himself by pure chance. He was happy to chat en route to shopping at John Varvatos and agreed to a profile on the spot. It would be a window into his second act as a—well, “I don’t even know,” he says. “I’m just going to expose myself to things that align with my values, and hopefully it opens up some doors.”The door to Senator Ted Cruz’s office swings open, and Syndergaard ducks in. I’m not sure who else is behind it or what they’re doing. An aide resembling a young Cruz ushers me away down a long corridor to a carpeted room. We sit opposite each other at a circular table and cross our legs. I mention I’m in from New York and he looks at me with pity. He calls it a “dangerous city.” Twenty minutes pass and the meeting adjourns. Back in the hallway, Syndergaard says that it went fine—he signed a couple of baseballs and took a photo. A lobbyist expresses concern about that: Syndergaard has “brutally frame-mogged Ted Cruz.”Syndergaard was never outwardly political as a player, but he did bring a proto-MAHA approach to pitching. “I think it’s ingrained in our evolution—we had to throw stuff to kill stuff,” he says. He viewed recovery from his 2020 elbow tear as a biohacking challenge. He tells me he inquired about stem cell treatments as an alternative to surgery and was dissuaded. Syndergaard underwent Tommy John but declined to stay in New York for a conventional physical therapy program. Instead, he decamped to Florida, where he hand-picked a trainer, rented a house equipped with various restorative beds and tubs, and frequented a nearby beach for grounding, a self-explanatory practice that connects one to the earth.As the pandemic dragged on, the instincts Syndergaard brought to health and pitching evolved into something larger. Down in Florida, he became convinced that “we put way too much faith in a government that does not have our best interest.” He never aired those views during his career, keeping with baseball’s tight-lipped culture. But he sees quasi-retirement as “a safer place”—and he urges reticent conservatives across baseball to “suck it up and join the fight.”In Westlake, Syndergaard also feels liberated from baseball’s anti-doping rules. “I can do all the peptides in the world now,” he says. (Currently: tesamorelin, ipamorelin, and IGF-1 LR3. He’ll soon switch to BPC-157 and TB-500 for healing.) His peptide whisperer is Brigham Buhler, founder of Ways2Well and a recurring Joe Rogan Experience guest whose clients include Aaron Rodgers and many more celebrities. “Noah lives the lifestyle, and it’s resonating throughout his health metrics,” Buhler says.Twice in the past year, Syndergaard flew to Panama City for IV stem cell treatments from Neil Riordan, who has also appeared on Rogan. The therapy, which uses culture-expanded cells derived from donated umbilical cords, is generally not allowed in the US. Syndergaard would like to send other pitchers to Riordan’s clinic, but none have followed him there yet. “Health, wellness, most baseball players don’t give a shit,” Syndergaard says.He hopes to bring his father to Panama next. Brad Syndergaard has stage 5 chronic kidney disease. The same hereditary illness affected Brad’s mother and two sisters, who died from related complications. The family is looking for a kidney donor; Noah isn’t a candidate because he carries the same genetic mutation. In the meantime, he urges his parents to ask their doctors about alternative treatments—and to cut seed oils. “It’s hard to live around,” his mom, Heidi, tells me. “He came in the other day and was shaking his head because I have a box of Froot Loops. I said, ‘Noah, I’m an old woman, and sometimes you just need Froot Loops.’ When he was nine, he was pudgy, and he liked Froot Loops too.”The machismo of Thor, it turns out, represents a complete departure from the kid Noah once was. Syndergaard grew up in a small one-story home on a cul-de-sac in Mansfield, Texas, 35 miles southwest of Dallas. Brad worked as a horse trainer and breeder; Heidi as a medical technologist. Young Noah quietly dreamed of moving the family someplace with a second floor, but sports did not seem like the ticket. He was a self-proclaimed pushover with man boobs, an awkward haircut, and thick glasses. He constantly tried to quit—from football, when they made him play offensive line; from soccer, when they made him play goalie; from baseball, where he felt bullied by the rich kids whose parents all knew each other. Heidi refers to his friends as “the kids you wondered about.” He kept the lid on a deep well of anger and worried he’d pop. Then puberty hit. He began to sprout and take an interest in his health. He swapped out Gatorade and cereal for water and cottage cheese. “Every year after that I added a little more to the health transition,” he says.Today, Syndergaard looks—and sounds—right at home in the GOP’s celebrity orbit. When I mention that my father is a retired infectious disease specialist, Syndergaard asks, “Was he like, ‘Fuck Fauci?’ ” (“No,” my dad says.) He has hobnobbed among the right-wing elite, at Tucker Carlson’s Christmas party in Tennessee—where he refused to touch the spread because he “had to assume seed oils”—and Trump’s second inauguration. Syndergaard has voted for the president twice, skipping 2020 only because he was rehabbing in Florida. “I could have done the mail-in,” he realizes now. “Could have sent in a couple votes.”And yet, Syndergaard insists he’s not trying to become a MAGA figurehead. Despite his voting record, he tells me, “I’m not saying I want my son to grow up and be like Donald Trump. It was the lesser of the two evils in my opinion.” In general, he says, “I don’t know border policy, foreign policy, economics—I would just rather dive into something I’m passionate about and use it for good.”During a recent interview with conservative commentator Tomi Lahren, he criticized trans athletes in women’s sports and fielded questions about his ex-girlfriend Cooper. Syndergaard says that he hadn’t intended—or expected—to discuss either topic. “I got ambushed,” he says. “It’s like, once you start peeing, it’s really hard to stop.” He adds, “I’ll get better at that with time and experience.” Rhetorically, he asks, “Am I just a mascot?”As we navigate a balmy afternoon in DC, the question lingers. Just before the Children's Health Defense event begins, I tell the host, Wisconsin senator Ron Johnson, that I’d like to ask him a few questions about Syndergaard, he squints and says, “About who?” Onstage at the US Capitol Visitor Center, the emcee, Hot Chick comedian Rob Schneider, wings an introduction about how sports leagues fear controversy: “That’s why everyone wears the same uniform—they want uniformity.” Then he says, “Please welcome, Noah Cider-gaard!”Getty Images Syndergaard (sin-der-gahrd) steps up in a taupe three-piece plaid suit and delivers a short speech. “Once I decided to hang ’em up, I got really bored and I needed something to do,” he says, revealing the premise of my article to an audience of about 100. “So doing things like this kind of gives me a compass and a North Star to work towards.”After the event, a lobbyist coordinates the visit with Cruz. Heading in, Syndergaard seems ambivalent—and envious of the political operators around us. “Everyone’s wearing suits and making decisions for the United States—that’s kind of badass,” he says. “If I could get to that, it’s a new role, an identity,” he tells me. “I want something, a path, and if I’m compensated for it, it defines my path more. But I don’t know what I am right now, if that makes sense. Why am I even here?” He explains, “If I’m here because of my name and image, after a while I’m not going to want to do that anymore, feeling like a prostitute or something.”When the meeting is over, we exit the Russell Senate Office Building and linger on a street corner. Up ahead, the Washington Monument pokes out above Constitution Avenue. We pick up a couple of Lime scooters and Syndergaard leads the way, cutting toward a bike lane in the center of a two-way street. We reach the Monument, then shrug and cruise on. Our afternoons are wide open.I have no way of proving this—the only witnesses are four teenagers on the next court over—but when Syndergaard and I step onto the pickleball court in Texas, I am the (slightly) superior player. In our pregame rally, I have Syndergaard on the move, ranging to his right, where he hits a surprising number of shots into the net, and to his left, to an erratic backhand. Neither of us has played before. I feel I have the edge.Then we play to 10. Syndergaard serves five times, and I only steal a point. One-serving-four becomes 2-6, 4-6. His serve again; 7-4, 8-4. He begins to strut, hungry to rip another. Nine-four. Ten-four. That’s game, but Syndergaard says we can keep going to 15. I take this for mercy. Eleven-four. I begin to understand what is happening. Four-twelve. I am reminded of a story from Collins—now it echoes like a siren—about the time Syndergaard learned how to throw a two-seam fastball one afternoon and incorporated it into a game that night. Four-thirteen. That appears to be Noah Syndergaard. Four-Fourteen. I am Alcides Escobar. Four-fifteen. That’s game (again)—but Syndergaard is not satisfied.We hop back in the golf cart and head over to the driving range. Syndergaard is new to golf and discovering that it can reawaken some old feelings. “It’s like finding a flow state,” he says. “It’s addicting.” Swinging from the left side, as he did at the plate, Syndergaard smokes a couple dozen drives and packs it up until tomorrow.Back at his house, he heats up dinner from his favorite meal-prep service—one of many “bangers” in his fridge: grass-fed, grass-finished beef shoulder roast and assorted vegetables, served with black truffle butter aioli. Syndergaard estimates that he has eaten this dish 250 times in the past two years. Gratingly, he calls it his cheat meal.At seven, we turn on the local Rangers game before first pitch. On the screen is Jacob deGrom, warming up at age 37. On the couch is Noah Syndergaard, nursing a banana water at age 33. He’s slung low, his chin tucked against his chest, his right leg extended across the cushions, his left bent at the knee, foot on the floor. He stares up toward deGrom.“He’s about to turn 38 soon,” Syndergaard says. “That gives me hope.” Hope? Of a return? “I still have intentions probably. Maybe it’s just delusion.”Baseball loves an unlikely comeback story—especially one by a pitcher. R.A. Dickey, for whom Syndergaard was traded to the Mets, drifted for years, pitching in AAA as old as 36, yet won the Cy Young Award at 38. Syndergaard mentions Daniel Bard, a lanky right-hander who shined with the Red Sox at 25, disappeared at 28, returned at 35, and peaked again at 37. And how about Dennis Quaid? “In The Rookie,” Syndergaard says, “I mean that guy was teaching school and then all of a sudden started throwing 98.”Often, pitchers find their groove in low-stress environments overseas, but Syndergaard won’t leave his parents. Others endure the minor leagues as long as possible because they need the paycheck. That won’t be Syndergaard. “The carrot’s not necessarily money,” he says. “The carrot is like, I want my identity back.”Syndergaard spent years trying to recover it. He worked with countless big-league pitching coaches who swore they had the right mechanical tweak—get into your hips, get downhill faster, don’t feel your legs. And he frequented burgeoning baseball labs like Driveline, in Arizona, and Maven, in Atlanta. “They all said very different things to fix me,” he says.As he tried to process all he’d heard, Syndergaard’s nervous system overheated. Long after his body healed, he developed a malady much spookier than ligament damage: a “minor form” of the yips.It is a dreaded, mysterious phenomenon. Rick Ankiel, whose career was derailed after he spontaneously lost the ability to throw strikes during a Cardinals playoff game in 2000, considers the yips “a mental injury that nobody wants to talk about.” But Syndergaard is willing to share what he knows.He describes the yips as a state of unwelcome hyperawareness. “I’d be mid-delivery, and I’m like, ‘Whoa, what’s going on right now?’” he says. Instead of feeling blissfully “dumb” on the mound as he did in his prime, when his body and mind would operate in a flow state, Syndergaard became overly conscious of every movement. “You watch Harry Potter at all?” he says. “You know in the first one they have the Devil’s Snare? They fall in and it’s like, you have to relax, the more you struggle, the harder it is to get out. That’s kind of what it was.”Syndergaard traces the condition to May 2021, when a setback in his recovery from Tommy John—a bout of elbow inflammation—made him doubt if he’d ever pitch again. He still finds the episode “triggering” to discuss and wonders if the yips developed to protect him from feeling that anguish again.He tried to calm his mind through meditation, reading, therapy, and sessions with sports psychologists. He underwent hypnosis, including EMDR, a method often used to treat patients with post-traumatic stress disorder. Nothing brought him any closer to his old self, to peak Thor.“I look at that person, I don’t even know who that was, both physically and mentally,” he says. Nor would the Noah from 2015 recognize the graying man on his couch. “That person would say, ‘You’re not playing baseball at 33? You’re a failure?’” He’d call the old man weak “for being so analytical or in my head. And I’m like, I can’t just go get dumb again. I don’t know how to.”Syndergaard is well aware of the bitter irony at play, that after devoting years to the holistic understanding of his body he has been undone by information overload. “I know so much,” he says, “but I don’t know anything at the same time.”Up ahead, the Rangers game begins. In the first inning, deGrom touches 99 and strikes out MVP-favorite Yordan Alvarez with the tight slider of a much younger man. As our conversation winds from Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to Bartolo Colon, I ask Syndergaard why he agreed to be interviewed back in April. “To remind people I’m still alive, I guess,” he says. He mentions “exposure,” too—and that he recently found a new manager to help put some things in motion. There’s chatter about collaborating with Turning Point USA, the political vehicle of the late Charlie Kirk. Syndergaard seems intrigued by the idea—and a little wary. “I don’t know,” he says. “I’m like, you realize I’m not an expert in anything, right? I just played baseball.”A version of this story originally appeared in the September 2026 issue of GQ with the title “Thor Goes to Washington.”