As the New York Mets’ losing streak continues to extend, now reaching 11 games (longest since 2004), there has been much written about the futility. Of course, when things are going very wrong, everyone wants a reason. They need to blame someone for the disappointment of watching a team full of promise take a nosedive. Let’s look at the potential culprits:
A) It’s the starting pitching. Well, certainly we have not gotten the best out of new ace Freddy Peralta with his 4.05 ERA in 26.2 innings. Kodai Senga has been a bust since his second start, with an 8.83 ERA, 1.90 WHIP, and only 17 innings pitched in four starts. David Peterson has lost his starting job already. But McLean has been very good (2.28 ERA, 0.76 WHIP) and Holmes has been solid (1.96 ERA, 1.09 WHIP) so it would be difficult to say that starting pitching is the reason for 11 straight losses. It’s not them.
B) It’s the Manager. We have all had a few things to say about Carlos Mendoza’s management of the pitching staff and some of his peculiar choices to sit players after a good game. But when you see the way this team has performed on the field, making physical and mental mistakes and failing to execute pitches and at-bats, it is hard to imagine that Gil Hodges could do any better. It’s not him.
C) It’s the bullpen. The last two losses were late give-aways with two different relievers throwing middle-middle pitches in critical situations and being burned. That really hurts. But when the team scores 19 runs in 11 games, anything less than perfect saves nothing. It’s not them.
D) It’s the “new core”. David Stearns replaced much of the core of the 2025 team with a new set of players. Gone are McNeil, Nimmo, Alonso, and others. Here are Semien, Polanco, and Bichette. The latter three have done little to help this team win, but the former three were present for the team’s long, slow crash out of the playoffs and they didn’t pick it up. It’s not them.
E) It’s David Stearns. As just mentioned, Stearns made the decision to blow up the core and rebuild the team. Stearns signed a bunch of veterans off waivers or low end free agent deals to build in “depth”. Stearns brought in Peralta but not Cease; he brought in Bichette but not Tucker. As you have seen from the series by RVH, he had a plan that was very feasible and he took action when many GMs would have just run last year’s team out there expecting a different result. It’s not him.
F) It’s the injuries. Juan Soto came up lame. Polanco never really seemed healthy. AJ Minter had not recovered. These are all factors that may have impacted the team, but these injuries are nowhere near the level of adversity faced in prior seasons by this team or any other ballclub. It’s not that.
G) It’s the coaching. Somehow the Mets’ entire lineup can’t get a hit in a critical situation, ranking 26th in MLB in average with RISP. Overall, the team has the 23rd best batting average in a league with 30 teams. They can’t all go bad at once, so it must be the hitting coaches. Well, look again. The same thing happened to this team last year with an entirely different set of hitting coaches. They all got let go so we could start fresh with new ones. Same with the pitching coaches. It’s not them.
I could go on, but you get the gist. In fact, if you can force yourself to watch the post-game analysis and interviews of the manager and the players, you get a similar result. This collapse cannot be pinned on one thing. It seems like everything contributes at different times (and always the worst times). Some would say, “That’s baseball” because there are always some set of unexpected results in baseball games due to the difficulty of the game. But uncanny coincidence of many events to bring on such a mind boggling losing streak can only happen rarely. This has happened twice in a row if you consider last year’s post-June collapse.
There is one last possibility. It is a curse. Yes, the word that was once associated with the futility in Boston and Chicago is now taking root in Flushing Meadows. The curse has unknown origins, but could date all the way back to 1987 when the defending champion Mets were expected to become a dynasty but lost the NL East to the Cardinals and were dismantled over the next few years. It was certainly there in 2006 with the stunning game 7 loss in the NLCS. The curse was intensified by Jimmy Rollins in 2007 causing them to lose a seven game lead with 17 to play. It was there in 2015 when the hottest team in baseball cooled off against the Royals. The curse was in full effect last year to will the team to failure. There are countless ghosts that come back to haunt the team in the form of cast-off former players that did not perform in Queens but rise to stardom elsewhere. In yesterday’s game the ghost of Michael Conforto drove home PCA (ghost of Javy Baez) to neutralize the Mets’ lead in the bottom of the 9th.
I think it’s time for Pedro Cerrano to sacrifice a live chicken (if you remember the move “Major League”). He can summon Jobu to take fear from the bats. Maybe that is a solution that the front office has not yet considered.
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