The New York Mets' season is in freefall, and the litany of problems is shocking when you take them all together.
Nearly everything that can go wrong has gone wrong for the New York Mets so far this season, and they’re getting more of exactly the kind of attention they don’t need or want. Jorge Castillo of ESPN chronicled most of what’s been going sideways extensively in a recent piece, and it’s worth touching on some of what he mentioned.
Start with the relationship between outfielder Juan Soto and shortstop Francisco Lindor. They’ve never been tight, and rumors of friction between the two Mets stars have been making the rounds since early last season.
Now they’re getting more negative attention. Their respective lockers have been separated this season in the clubhouse, and the ravenous NYC media noticed that they barely exchanged greetings on Opening Day. Moreover, Soto wasn't in contact with the club when he was out with a calf strain, and now Lindor is out for a longer stretch with a more severe version of the same injury.
Soto is considered a grinder who produces at the plate but is so-so in the field, while Lindor has taken a ton of heat this season for his mental mistakes, which include bad choices at short and getting picked off on the bases while playing with his batting gloves. The contrast is glaring, to the point where it’s hard not to notice the lack of leadership on this team.
Those mistakes have filtered down to Lindor’s teammates, who have run through stop signs from coaches on the base paths, committed basic fielding errors that would embarrass a Little Leaguer, and been the victim of miscommunication so severe that the wrong pitcher ended up coming into a critical late-game situation during the team's recent homestand.
Some of these individual errors might be understandable or even excusable if the Mets were winning, but they’ve lost 17 of their last 20 games with no end to the losing in sight. They’ve become almost impossible to watch, and they’re losing series to bottom-feeding teams like the Colorado Rockies and the Washington Nationals.
There’s no end in sight, and the first month of this season is starting to look a lot like the last two months of last years. Maybe worse, actually, as the Mets have barely been competitive in a lot of games during their latest bad run.
No one really knows why manager Carlos Mendoza still has a job at this point, and he’s being forced to defend players making decisions that are indefensible. Mendoza was chosen to manage by GM David Stearns, who blew up the roster this offseason to change the culture, so firing Mendoza would also be a strong indictment of Stearns and an admission that everything the Mets did in the offseason has been an abysmal failure.