The Mets rotation is not the issue. The offense is.

The NY Mets keep trying to make the wrong part of the team sound louder than it is. The bulk pitchers have a 2.61 ERA over the last nine games, and that should be enough to stop pretending the mound is the thing dragging this club down.

The staff has done enough to keep games reachable. The offense keeps shrinking those chances anyway, and that is the part that keeps getting buried under the cleaner-sounding debate.

The offense is the part that keeps forgetting how to hit. That is the real problem. Not the rotation. Not the bridge innings. The bats.

The pitching has done enough

I do not want this to turn into another generic “the Mets need to hit” recap, because everybody already knows that. The sharper point is that the pitching has been giving them a chance, and the offense keeps handing it right back.

That is why the recent conversation around the staff feels a little off. Yes, the Mets still have to sort through health and timing, and I get why the Kodai Senga rehab watch still matters. But the last nine games are not telling a story of a rotation getting shelled.

The bulk work has been good enough to keep the games in front of them. Instead, the lineup keeps shrinking the field and making every night feel like one mistake decides the whole thing. That is not a pitching problem. That is a lineup problem.

The Mets have had plenty of noisy issues already, so I get why people want to zoom in on the mound. The rotation being the loudest one right now would make sense if the staff were collapsing. It is not.

The lineup keeps shrinking the games

This is where the real frustration lives. The Mets have a lineup with enough name value to avoid nights like this, and yet they keep producing too many of them.

Juan Soto keeps giving them the version they paid for, and the rest of the offense keeps making that feel smaller than it should. That is how you end up running out of room for quiet bats and still acting surprised when the game turns into a one-run headache.

That is the part that keeps landing the same way. The Mets do enough to stay around the game, then the offense goes flat and turns a winnable night into a coin flip.

I would not overcomplicate it. The Mets do not need a new rotation theory, and they do not need to keep chasing the wrong explanation because it sounds cleaner in the moment. They need the bats to stop disappearing. Right now, that is the bigger problem by a mile.