It’s not often that we turn to an economics site to get the most accurate assessment of the New York Mets’ disastrous 2025 season, but that’s definitely the case with this team’s epic collapse.
The folks from Amazon’ Avenue delivered the goods, though, with this piece in their feed from WT Economist. It’s called “The 2025 Mets: the Dogs That Did Not Bark,” and the title references a murder case solved by Sherlock Holmes in which the fact that the dog didn’t bark during the crime helps the ace detective notch the win.
That makes it seem like this Mets rundown is a slam piece, but it’s not. It starts by running through eleven things that could have gone wrong but mostly didn’t, then offers up a final Mets' assessment that’s surprisingly accurate:
The big, bad dogs didn’t bark. So how can we deduce the murderer?
Start with the fact that the Mets used 46 pitchers, which tied them with the Atlanta Braves, a team that had their season ruined by pitching injuries. With the Braves it was their big dogs who got hurt, as the piece points out, but with the Mets it was secondary hurlers like Kodai Senga, David Peterson and Clay Holmes who were just a few of the key failures.
Also, the Mets didn’t have enough good pitchers from the minors ready to go until the very end. This is still the case assuming young starters like Nolan McLean, Brandon Sproat and Jonah Tong end up in New York this year, and it’s a big flaw that GM David STearn somehow needs to fix.
The bullpen had its own set of injuries that eventually put the Mets’ season on life support:
The need to throw pitches that damage the arm to get major league hitters out is baseball’s disease. The Mets had one of the worst cases of that disease in 2025.
The solution to this problem, according to the piece, definitely sounds like it’s coming from an economist. The Mets need to rethink what’s important, and that means more pitchers who can throw more innings, even if those innings end up being mediocre. Mediocrity is better than bad, or so goes the argument, and pitches that result in fewer strikeouts and walks, fewer foul balls and better defense behind the pitchers are the way out of the injury trap.
It’s an intriguing argument. Call it the economics version of analytics, but it’s not going to change the way MLB clubs like the Mets endlessly chase velocity and wind up with bad pitching. The point is well taken, though, and it’s definitely worth a look and then some.