This story was excerpted from Anthony DiComo’s Mets Beat newsletter. To read the full newsletter, click here. And subscribe to get it regularly in your inbox.
NEW YORK -- Of all the thoughts to emerge out of the Mets’ postgame clubhouse Saturday in Pittsburgh, the one I found most germane came from Francisco Lindor.
“This is not like a magic thing -- this is not how it works,” Lindor said of the players-only team meeting he helped orchestrate for a second season in a row. “If that’s how it worked, we would have done it a while ago.”
For weeks, Lindor and the Mets resisted the idea of a formal team meeting. It’s not as if their players were giving poor efforts. It’s not as if they were failing to grasp the issues affecting them.
To the contrary, the Mets had reason to believe they could organically work their way out of this mess.
The origins of their downturn, after all, can be traced back to losing starting pitchers Kodai Senga and Tylor Megill to injuries, disrupting a rotation that had led the league in ERA. That was (and remains) a temporary problem. Beyond that, weather around the country was warming, resulting specifically in some better offensive performances at home. The Mets were also coming off a season in which they demonstrated notable resilience by playing deep into October.
So there wasn’t much urgency to call a team meeting, understanding these things aren’t panaceas. Every year is different. Many meetings fail to bear fruit. What’s more, such closed-door conversations tend to become very public, very quickly. Because media members are delayed from entering a postgame clubhouse if a formal assembly is happening, meetings are a hard thing to keep secret.
Once a club has a team meeting, it becomes a thing. The Mets can now either be the club that held a team meeting and notably improved (see: 2024), or the club that held one to no avail (see: 2019).
While the fate of the 2025 Mets won’t be clear for many weeks, by Saturday, it was obvious -- despite all the cautions listed above -- that it was probably time for them to gather and discuss their shortcomings. This is still a good team. It remains one of the most expensive rosters in baseball history, with high-caliber talent dispersed throughout it.
It’s still a team with a good record, too. The Mets are 48-37, significantly better than they were at this time a year ago. They’re two games out of first place in the NL East. If the season ended today, they would host a Wild Card Series at Citi Field.
So there’s time to save the season and a lot worth salvaging. Trade Deadline acquisitions will help, but the real improvements can’t begin until the Mets start playing better, plain and simple. That means stars like Lindor and Pete Alonso and even Juan Soto, who’s been hot in June but can still give the Mets more.
This roster is too good to get outscored, 30-4, in a three-game series against one of the worst teams in the Majors.
“Tough stretch, no sugarcoating it,” was how owner Steve Cohen put things in a post to X early Monday morning. “I didn’t see this coming. I’m as frustrated as everybody else.”
Now that the Mets have officially held their big Team Meeting (capital T, capital M), it’s time to see if, for the second year in a row, that will wind up making a difference.