Quinton Fesq
The New York Mets got swept in Chicago this weekend, and Sunday’s finale was the kind of loss that lingers. For 8 innings, the Mets played their best baseball of the series — Tobias Myers opened with 2 scoreless frames, David Peterson followed with 3.2 more in a bulk role, and MJ Melendez supplied the game’s only run with a solo homer in the fifth. A 1-0 lead with 3 outs to go.
Then Devin Williams allowed a leadoff single and a one-out RBI double to pinch hitter Michael Conforto, a wild pitch from Craig Kimbrel moved the ghost runner to third in the 10th, and Nico Hoerner’s sacrifice fly ended it. Final score: Cubs 2, Mets 1. Eleven losses in a row. The longest slide the Mets have been on since 2004, and the 3rd-worst start in franchise history — behind only 5-17 finishes in 1962 and 1964, when this team was a first-year expansion club with no business being competitive.
This one was supposed to be different. The Opening Day payroll was $352.2 million, tops in baseball. Francisco Lindor and Juan Soto were supposed to anchor one of the most dangerous lineups in the league. Through 7-4, that looked like a reasonable expectation. Then Soto strained his right calf on April 3, and then things began to fall apart.
Soto is expected back during the upcoming homestand, but the damage of his absence is already written into the record — 11 straight losses, 19 runs scored, a team batting .145 with runners in scoring position over that stretch. Without the one bat capable of changing the shape of an inning on contact alone, every single mistake from the pitching staff has gone unpunished by the offense. That is not a coincidence.
When the Numbers Stop Looking Like a Slump
There is a version of a losing streak that is explainable — bad luck, a brutal schedule, a bullpen that imploded for two weeks. That is not what this is. Over 11 games, the Mets are averaging 1.70 runs per night, have scored more than 2 runs exactly twice, and are posting a .537 OPS as a team. The 17 extra-base hits across the entire stretch, from a lineup that was constructed to do damage in the middle, is not a cold stretch.
It is a lineup that has consistently failed to do the one thing it was paid to do. Mark Vientos, Luis Robert Jr., and Bo Bichette have all gone through this stretch without stringing anything together, and the lineup construction around Soto’s absence has left the Mets without a consistent run-producer anywhere in the order. Aaron Judge and Ben Rice have combined for more home runs than the entire Mets roster. That stat gets cited as a punchline, but it is really just a data point.
The pitching is a more complicated story. Kodai Senga has been a genuine problem — an 8.83 ERA through 3 starts is not something you paper over — and the bullpen’s vulnerability showed up again Sunday when Williams, pitching for just the 3rd time in 2 weeks, couldn’t hold a one-run lead in the ninth. But the team ERA sits at 4.06, which is squarely middle of the pack, and Sunday proved that even a combined 5.2 scoreless innings from Myers and Peterson gets wasted when the offense can’t score. Brooks Raley, Luke Weaver, and Huascar Brazobán have held their end in stretches. The bullpen did not cause this losing streak. The offense did.
What makes all of this harder to sit with is the pattern behind it. Since June 2025, the Mets have had 4 losing streaks of at least 7 games. That is not a team going through a rough patch — that is a team with a documented inability to stay afloat, a recurring structural failure that has now repeated itself across more than a calendar year. They are currently tied with Kansas City for the worst record in baseball. The Colorado Rockies and the White Sox have better records.
The Mets are the first team in the league to reach 15 losses this season, and to climb back to 90 wins from here they would need to go 83-57 over their remaining 140 games — a .593 clip from a roster that is currently playing .318 ball. Only 4 teams in MLB history have dug out of a 10-game losing streak and reached the playoffs. The math is not impossible. It is also not forgiving.
“Eleven losses, that’s a lot, whether it’s in April or any point of the season,” manager Carlos Mendoza said. “But nobody is going to feel sorry for us. We have got to find a way.”
Lindor offered something more pointed after the game. “It’s gonna get loud. It’s gonna get very loud,” he said. “Everyone here knows it. We’ve got to stick together. And fight.” He is right on both counts. The noise around this team — around Mendoza’s job security, around the front office’s roster decisions, around a $352 million payroll sitting 8 games under .500 — is already building.
The homestand starts Tuesday with Nolan McLean on the mound against Minnesota, and Soto’s return somewhere on the schedule gives this lineup a genuine reason for optimism. But Soto coming back stops the bleeding. It does not explain away 11 games of .145 baseball with runners on base, and it does not fix Marcus Semien, Brett Baty, and Carson Benge all needing to produce at the same time for this offense to function. The homestand will tell you whether this team has a pulse. What it probably won’t tell you is whether that’s enough.
More about:New York Mets
