Contending - but Running Out of Room
This is the fourth installment in the 2025 Mets Season Review Series. Each post steps back from day-to-day noise to diagnose what actually happened, why it mattered, and what it revealed about the organization beneath the results.
By the end of July, the Mets were still very much in the race. But the way they were winning — and losing — made one thing clear: the system no longer had slack.
Data sourced from BB Reference, Fangraphs, StatHead. BaseRuns and Pythagorean Record here.
📊 Monthly Snapshot (July)
JULY 2025 SNAPSHOT
OUTCOMES
OPPONENT & SCHEDULE CONTEXT
July mirrored June in form, but with less margin and more volatility.
🧮 Outcomes vs Expectations (July)
Takeaway:
The Mets continued to outperform BaseRuns. Execution and leverage management were still masking erosion — but the gap was widening.
⚾️ Run Creation — Monthly
Runs Scored Distribution
Quantitative read
The offense remained streak-driven
There was still no reliable “grind” profile
Wins largely required favorable scoring environments
🛡️ Run Prevention — Monthly
Runs Allowed Distribution
Quantitative read
High-RA games were now increasingly common
The Mets were no longer suppressing damage
Bullpen stress was translating into outcomes
🧠 Qualitative Context (Monthly)
By July, the Mets’ core problem was fully visible:
Manaea and Montas were effectively lost as rotation stabilizers
Senga never returned to form after his hamstring injury
Peterson was showing clear fatigue signals
Holmes, while solid, could not consistently reach 5–6 innings — and his workload had roughly doubled year over year
The rotation was no longer just thin. It was structurally short on innings.
The bullpen continued to absorb the load — but at a cost that was becoming harder to hide.
📈 Season-to-Date (Through July)
📊 STD Snapshot
The Mets entered the deadline firmly in contention — but trending sideways.
🧮 STD Outcomes vs Expectations
STD takeaway:
The Mets had progressively drifted from “banked wins” toward “borrowed wins.”
🧩 Strategic Takeaway (Pre-Deadline)
By July 31, the picture was clear:
The Mets were good enough to justify adding
But the primary need was innings, not just leverage
The cost of acquiring durable starters was perceived as extremely high
The internal system had no immediate MLB-ready length left
This was not a team one move away. It was a team trying to stabilize a collapsing load-bearing structure.
💬 Audience Prompt
At the deadline moment, did this feel like a roster that needed finishing touches — or one already operating on borrowed time?
🔁 Transition to the Trade Deadline Diagnostic
The Mets acted decisively at the deadline. They addressed what they believed were their biggest risks.
What they chose not to address — and why — would define August.
7 comments:
I think at the end of July, if the acquisitions for the bullpen and of Cedric, the entertainer, had panned out, the Mets would’ve been playoff bound. But the bull pen was crumbling in August with injuries, and the bullpen acquisitions as I said did not come through. I still pen this seasons (2025) collapse on the utter collapse of the pitching. Yes the bullpen guys were worked hard, but the injuries were very unfortunate. However, I’m getting a little ahead of your narrative, other than to say, I think the moves were reasonable, and that if they were even moderately successful, the playoffs would’ve been achieved by the Mets.
Gawd, I hate lookin bak
Through July, I still feel they are destined, but the complete meltdown of the rotation killed the bullpen - even WITH the mini vacay included. Can you imagine without? Sproat’s and McLean should have come in now or the Mullins trade should have been for an arm. Also the Rogers trade was just plain stupid.
They were luckier in July than they should have been, and many thought that was just June's bad luck evening out. Mendoza at this point was panicked on the inside, though calm looking on the outside. He was ready to pull the starters for the most minute reasons. What if he did not? What if Senga was left out there to clean his own messes up. What if Peterson worked his way out of those jams? I hope history doesn't repeat itself here.
So true. The all left so many men on base. Felt like every game. Was so hopeful they would be able to adjust at the deadline…
At least we have another year of Mendoza. Wonder if he's learned his lesson?
Sorry only getting to this very interesting post now. The pitching kept us from making the playoffs, but the unbalanced production in the lineup was an ongoing problem that would have sunk us in the playoffs. Just a word on the offense. The worst overall team performance was recorded during a period when two previous non-contributors -- Baty and Alvarez -- performed not just their very best, but pretty well by any measure. Maybe a lineup is not just about individual performance, but mesh, balance and consistency as well.
There is also no getting away from the most alarming feature of the offense. The inability to help the team win a single game when trailing after 8 innings. This is roughly as unimaginable as the Jets inability to secure an interception over the course of an entire season. The Jets couldn't even run into an interception; and the Mets offense could not even run into a well placed error by the opposition.
In the Mets case it displayed a lack of clutch hitting -- or let's call it 'high leverage hitting.' Muncie on the Dodgers didn't have much a batting average overall, but he was a pretty the clutch hitter last year. Inglesias it well the year before for the Mets, and more importantly, he did so in the clutch.
Back to pitching. Pitching is similarly not just about how individuals perform overall, or even about how the bullpen and the starting rotation each perform separately over the course of the season. It is the mesh, the integrative performance and the overall predictability and consistency of that performance.
I fully understand Stearns' decision making at the deadline. Looking at the pitching staff as a whole, it is largely about innings and their distribution among pitchers, and the number of high leverage situations you find yourself in and the pitchers you have that deal well with those situations, etc. Innings first and foremost. By mid July, most every game was having the look of a bullpen game no matter the starter. Even if you could get another starter on to the roster, even a reliable one, it would still be the case that you would need to rely an inordinate amount of time on the bullpen. A mix of starters and bullpen is what made sense. The distribution between the two would have depended on availability in the trade market and cost. It was obvious that the number of starters available at reasonable costs was extremely low, whereas the supply of relievers was more plentiful. On the other hand, given the way pitching staffs are used these days, every contending team always needs more relievers, so the demand was reasonably high as well. Very good relief pitchers were traded during this period at prices that were not outlandish on average. The Mets were rightly unwilling to pay the very high costs mediocre starting pitchers were commanding and chose to fill the innings gap with relievers; and to be fair they did quite well (as judged on an ex ante basis) in picking up relievers who one would think could handle both innings as such and high leverage situations as well. Nothing worked out as it would have been reasonable to expect it would.
It was a painful season to experience as a fan (and no doubt as a player as well). But it provided a lot of important information, some of it especially important, perhaps nothing more important than showing that the run of 2024 was an outlier outcome given the composition of the team. In other words, it forced the FO to see the underlying issues as structural and not accidental. 2024 was the accident,; 2025 was the proof of that! What we are seeing now is the FO response to the conjunction of the 2023/24/25 seasons taken as a whole. Losses are lessons, more often than wins are. Let's see if the FO has learned their lessons well.
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