For a little while Wednesday night the Mets played non-embarrassing baseball. Which isn’t to say they were leading — they weren’t — but that they weren’t being beaten as badly as seemed likely at first.
Clay Holmes pitched OK-adjacent, giving up two runs in the first but escaping far worse harm, and hung in there until the fifth, when he gave up a single and a run-scoring double, departing with the Mets down 3-1.
Enter Gregory Soto, who simultaneously has been quietly terrible and in the top half of the Mets’ trade-deadline acquisitions in terms of performance, which tells you all you need to know about how the trade deadline has turned out. Soto immediately allowed the inherited runner to score, escaped the fifth without further harm, and then fell apart in the sixth, putting the game out of reach.
To dwell further on the nightly failures of this increasingly woebegotten team would verge on sadism: The Mets are now 31-46 since June 13, the fourth-worst team in the majors, and the real story of this year increasingly is about the nearly three months in which we’ve tried to convince ourselves that they somehow aren’t the team we’ve been watching fall flat all summer. It’s pointless to scoreboard-watch and worry about a specific team on their heels in the wild-card hunt; as the SNY crew noted, if they don’t start winning games, someone is going to catch them.
A couple of miscellaneous notes before we put a merciful bow on this one:
One culprit noted in the Mets’ summer swoon was their apparent passivity on fastballs. For a while the Mets seemed to have flipped the script on that, hunting fastballs and rejuvenating their offense (the pitching failed at the same time, alas). But now they look befuddled by fastballs again. To be fair, Ranger Suarez and Cristopher Sanchez have pitched two beautiful games and would have been tough opponents against anybody. But the Mets were particularly hapless Wednesday night against Sanchez’s sinker. How did this lesson get unlearned?
Tuesday night saw Sean Manaea display some bad body language coming off the mound, followed by Carlos Mendoza hustling him into the tunnel for what seems to have been a firm talking-to. Which led to a long conversation in the booth Wednesday night about confidence and fight and a lot of other baseball stuff — a conversation I found deeply annoying.
Look, Manaea’s body language really was terrible, Mendoza really did haul him off by his ear, and he really did pitch better after that. But do you honestly believe Manaea’s nightmare of a year is due to a lack of confidence or fight? Or is it more likely that his struggles are because he has a loose body in his elbow? Isn’t it far more likely, in fact, that the injury is most of the problem?
Write this down: During some dull homestand next June or July, Manaea will quietly admit to Anthony DiComo or one of the Athletic beat guys that he couldn’t finish his pitches properly because of the elbow in 2025 but thought he could fight through it, or some variation of that.
Which is so much more interesting than this Just So story about confidence and fight: If you’re an injured player, what is your responsibility to your club? Where’s the line between gutting through it because you’re a gamer and admitting you’re too compromised to help your team win? That’s an old story for athletes — the most honest take on it I can recall is from Bobby Ojeda — and it’s one that Keith Hernandez and Ron Darling know perfectly well. That’s the story I would have liked to hear and could have learned from, instead of an empty one I’ve heard innumerable times that’s never taught me anything.
I figured we’d lose this series given that the Phillies are great at home and we suck on the road. Before it started I just didn’t want us to get swept. One game left to see if this can happen but does it have to be on Fox?
Thanks for the take on Manaea’s elbow… these tropes about players’ character shouldn’t be anywhere besides maybe the NY Post’s pages these days. It’s just lazy media.
As for the Mets’ swoon… I will reiterate that having a 6th playoff team is just asking for mediocrity in the postseason. If the Mets somehow sneak in with 86 wins or something, then take 2 from the Dodgers and 3 from the Phillies, we’ll all be happy, yeah, but does a team that played Rockies-level baseball for three months even deserve a shot? Should we really be celebrating teams like the ’22 Phillies or ’23 Dbacks that did strung together wins at the right time even though they were barely good? I say set a floor for the wild card teams (88 wins? 89? 90?) and if you don’t meet that, you’re out regardless of where you finish.
Hey MLB, let’s flip a coin and put the A’s in as a BONUS WC. They are a pretty exciting hitting team, and will probably add a few thousand more fans to the ratings.
Manfred will probably do something like this in the future, the whore.
I was unfortunate enough to be seated in Section 236 at CBP last night (fortunately the ticket was free). Even the Phillies fans I was with could see the lack of fire in the Mets this year vs. last year. At the end of the game, the very nice usher in our section asked if I needed a hug on the way out of the stadium…while she was a lovely lady…I replied, “Thank you, but I think i need a drug more than a hug.”
If the Mets happen to somehow stumble into the playoff, which the current system easily allows, I think it’ll be a disservice to the team in the long run. Sterns & Co. need to really evaluate why this $330MM+ collection of player cannot put together a consistent season vs. the “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” paradigm that has existed, of late.
I thought yesterday they may be tanking to get a better place in the lottery. Was obviously joking, but I may have been on to something—Imposter Syndrome, anyone?
i was thinking a black sox redux myself.
not that gambling has much play in the sport ;0]
the night before last marte leads off the 9th, first pitch swinging, pop-up.
i don’t think i’ve ever seen this done with such regularity.
Genius idea to go back to a 6-man rotation…with so many crappy starters. How did that extra rest work out for Sean M and Clay H?
Well, my prediction here about Helsley turned out correct. He pitched ONE good inning, was found to be “turning it around” so Mendoza put him right back out there, and he got bombed. If you think any of the coaches and manager deserve to be retained in off season…I’ve got a bridge to sell you. But my guess is: Cohen will do nothing.
We were down 9-2 when Helsely came in. Not sure that’s a sign of complete confidence in him
To me that’s exactly when he should be pitching.
walking the walk i completely ignored the until i was heading out out on the bike.
7-1. because i’ve stopped caring i listened to the next few innings on my ride.
more runs allowed. complete embarrassment of a team.
and yup, we usually these ‘i was hurt’ admissions long after it’s too late.
….which it already is for this, ever more dreadful team.
I’ve wondered about this often, whether players (and the Mets) are able to evaluate accurately when they’re ready to come back from injury. I’ve often heard how Marte has been playing through various injuries for 2 years now. If these are professional baseball players then they shouldn’t be on the field if they’re not 100%. And has Alvarez completely recovered?
At this point I am convinced something happened in that clubhouse on June 13. The contrast between before and after is just too stark. Some of it is explainable by normal standards, e.g., the pitching was better in the cooler weather, Soto and Lindor got hot in the warmer weather, etc. I could never really fully buy into the hypothesis that it was Senga getting hurt, that’s just the surface. It has to be something else, I don’t know what. This team seems like it cares about each other, but I’m not convinced there isn’t a schism somewhere. We’ll learn about it in the off-season or in ten years when someone retires, gives an interview, or writes a book. I’m not venturing any public theories, but I do have them.
UNLESS: C’mon Mets, prove me wrong. Get going, secure the post-season, and make a deep run. Ya Gotta Believe.
PS: Jason, I found that Manaea discussion ridiculous, too. So what if after being called on the carpet he pitched well for two innings? It didn’t have any carryover to the team Tuesday or yesterday, either. They still looked terrible. If Mendoza has the ability to inspire a better performance, what is he waiting for?
We all look for explanations for things that we can’t explain. But there is no logical reason that June 13 should be the demarcation point. The Mets just regressed to the mean, that’s all. This is who they are, and were for a good portion of 2024 as well.
Yes, let’s keep in mind that this plucky, lovable team that everybody embraced last October was 89-73. They came perilously close to not making the post-season and then came within one Pete Alonso swing of suffering a humiliating first-round exit in Milwaukee (after going down meekly in Milwaukee in two of the last three pre-Atlanta regular season games the weekend before).
If they somehow back in this year with an 84-78 record, we’re supposed to just forgive all sins and sing Motown tunes to them in October?
Seth: you do realize you just offered an explanation for that which we can’t explain as well?
:0)
and yes, last year’s lovable team had to scratch and claw atop the best record in baseball post-inflection point from failing to sailing (sorry!)
it took *that* much to make up for the poor start.
this time, we went from team of destiny to months-long train wreck. it feels like ages ago that i spoke the mets praises, and watched standings to be sure the mets were still atop the entire MLB.
that they even have a whiff of a chance now speaks to how much it takes to fall out completely after such a strong start. it’s a bit of an phantom limb of a season we’re watching.
and glad you mentioned the motown, Guy K. for me that became a tedious and contrived sing-along before it even became a thing. citi becoming wrigley (all those years the cubs were not competitive.) and every time lindor has an at bat?? cringe!!
Maybe Soto and Lindor don’t get along. See Soto comments saying that Marte is the actual captain. But that should not matter. These guys need to play better on the field when it counts (looking at both of you — and Nimmo sucks).