For all the talk about the historic futility of the Mets, it’s worth it to take a moment to recognize the unique depths to which they have fallen this year. After Tuesday’s doubleheader sweep, the team stands at 22-32—which puts them on pace to go 66-96 over the entire year. Obviously, there are still two-thirds of the season to get through, and maybe the next 108 games will go better. But given that the Mets seem headed to selling at the deadline, there is a distinct possibility that the roster will only be weakening from here on out, making it entirely reasonable to suspect the team might end up pretty close to that 162-game projection.
The last time this organization failed to win at least 70 games in a season was 2003, when they went 66-95. Before that, you’d have to go back another decade to 1993 to find a Mets team with a winning percentage that low (which is the last time the Mets lost 100+ games in a season). This means that the current squad we’re watching is on pace to be, quite literally, one of the worst teams in many of our lifetimes.
Again, maybe the Mets will rebound just enough to avoid such futility. But nevertheless, the point is clear: Something has gone very, very wrong this year. And if we want to avoid seasons like this becoming the norm, then we—or, more accurately, David Stearns and the rest of the front office—need to identify what the problems have been and how to fix them.
The simplest thing to do would be to point the finger directly at Stearns. After all, this is his first season after taking control of baseball operations, and the team he has put on the field has been as bad or worse than any other past GM has given us. It would be easy to default to the mindset that his moves have failed and that he has subjected us to this awful group of players.
The only problem with that? Most of the guys Stearns acquired this offseason have performed about as well as or better than we could have expected. Luis Severino and Sean Manaea are both running ERAs in the low 3s across their first ten starts. Harrison Bader has combined his typical stellar center field defense with slightly above average offense. J.D. Martinez struggled a bit initially (due to, in all likelihood, the lack of a proper spring training), but has largely put up the kind of offensive numbers he normally does since then. Jake Diekman has been a fairly solid bullpen signing. Et cetera, et cetera.
Sure, there have been some blunders. The Adrian Houser/Tyrone Taylor trade has not worked out well. Joey Wendle is already gone. Not all the relievers the Mets took flyers on panned out. But these moves were mostly the lower-scale ones of the offseason—and no front office is going to nail 100% of their transactions. Maybe you can also point to moves that the Mets should have made but didn’t, but it’s hard to identify the realistic alternative path the team could have taken that would have made them good instead of just slightly less crappy.
No, the problem hasn’t really been with the players that Stearns brought in. The problem has been with the players he inherited. Across the board, the guys who were supposed to be the key members of the team’s core—the guys who could be relied upon to lead the charge and soldier the heaviest load of the team’s production—have either been hurt or have not been nearly as good as the Mets have needed them to be.
Let’s review some of the key culprits on offense, shall we?
- Francisco Lindor has had a weird season—the fact that his batted ball metrics have largely been in line with his career norms can lead one to believe that he has simply suffered from bad luck this year. Nevertheless, the Mets are paying him $34 million to be a star player, and a 92 wRC+ simply isn’t good enough.
- Pete Alonso is currently putting up a 119 wRC+. That would be pretty good for most players. But for a first baseman whose defense has seemingly taken a step back, he would really need to be in the 130-140 range he was in earlier in his career to provide value to the Mets. Instead, he’s currently on-pace to put up less than 2 fWAR over the course of the 2024 season.
- Jeff McNeil has followed a mediocre 2023 season with an even worse 2024. Furthermore, the underlying batted ball metrics suggest that his current 90 wRC+ is not a fluke, and it makes it difficult to believe that the player we saw in 2022 will ever be coming back.
- Brandon Nimmo is one of the few guys whose offense has been more or less what the Mets expected—though being in left field instead of center does suppress his overall value some, especially because he has looked fairly unremarkable defensively out there.
- Starling Marte has just been okay offensively—and he has paired that average offense with some of the worst outfield defense since the days when Lucas Duda was patrolling right field.
- Brett Baty still can’t hit the ball in the air.
- Francisco Alvarez has been hurt—though he, too, was struggling to hit the ball in the air when he was healthy.
Again, this is just the offensive players. If we want to turn to the pitching side, we can of course point to Edwin Díaz’s season from hell, and we can also point to the injuries suffered by Kodai Senga and Brooks Raley. In all cases, players the Mets were expecting to get well above-average production from have either given them no or negative value this year.
So why does all of this matter? It matters because, as we alluded to in the beginning, the first step towards solving a problem is by admitting there is one. And it would be so much easier for the Mets if the problem here were not the players that we fans have been watching and growing attached to over the past several seasons. If the problem were the mercenary players that Stearns brought in over the offseason, we could comfort ourselves with the knowledge that the Mets’ overall core remains strong, and hope that some better moves next offseason could lead to a team that could actually win.
But the facts are the facts: the Mets’ core simply is not good enough. Lindor has not been good enough. Alonso has not been good enough. Díaz has not been good enough. McNeil has not been good enough. It hurts just to write these things, given that it was only two years ago when we believed that a team led by that group of players was good enough to win it all. But everything we’ve seen since then, especially this year, has pointed us to the contrary.
So what’s the solution? Here’s where we get to the hardest part, because there are no quick fixes here. Sure, Stearns can and should still be looking to acquire players in free agency or trades who can become a part of the team’s future core (Juan Soto, for instance). He should also look to replicate some of the success he had with the short-term deals he handed out this past offseason. But those things alone won’t lead the Mets out of this hole. The only path out is by putting in the long, hard work to develop a new core of largely homegrown players that can lead the team to happier days. Some of the work on that front is already well underway (the organization has clearly gotten better at pitching development and is slowly starting to see the benefits of that). Some of the work still needs to be done (the hitting development still leaves a lot to be desired). Some of the players who will comprise the next good Mets team’s core may already be in the farm system or even on the major league squad. Some of them might be drafted or acquired in the next few years. In any event, this is a multi-year process, and we need to accept that the team won’t bear the fruits of that endeavor overnight.
What we (and by extension, Stearns and company) can’t do is continue to operate under the assumption that the core the franchise currently has in place is good enough to the point that one or two moves will be enough to lead them back to relevance. The fact of the matter is that several of the players comprising the current group’s core will not be on the next good Mets team. Some others might be (Lindor and Nimmo, for instance, are locked up for a long time, and there’s still reason to believe they can be solid players over the next few years), but they might not necessarily be the biggest pieces of that future squad.
Again: this sucks! It sucks having to acknowledge that the players we’ve rooted for over the past few years have not been getting the job done. It sucks to think that 2022 might have been the last time we will see a good Mets team led by Pete Alonso hitting big dingers or Edwin Díaz coming out to “Narco” to close out a tight game. We will form new attachments to any good players who help to form a future Mets core, but several of the guys comprising this one may well never again reach the heights we imagined they would in this organization, and that—you guessed it—sucks.
But what’s the alternative? The alternative is what we have known for most of our lives as Mets fans—a front office that is unable to acknowledge the reality of the players it has, one which makes short-sighted moves with the thought that this time the moves in question will be the ones to get them over the hump. David Stearns is supposed to be a different kind of front office executive, someone who will be able to lead the Mets to a different kind of process that will lead to different results. Perhaps he will end up doing that—but the path to getting there will be long and painful, and Mets fans need to be emotionally prepared for that. The truth will set you free—but not until it is finished with you.
