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 -- The Mets have a credibility problem.
Ten percent of the way through the season, they are 7-9, losers of five straight and employers of an offense that’s proven lifeless over significant stretches.
It’s barely mid-April, yet on Sunday morning the New York Post back page headline blared: “GETTING LATE EARLY.” And that was before the Mets created almost no offensive pressure in a 1-0 loss to the A’s -- their fifth in a row at Citi Field, in advance of a long cross-country flight and a series against the two-time defending champion Dodgers.
The good news is the Mets still have 146 games left to play, they still possess one of the most talented rosters in the sport, and no one else in their division looks all that formidable. But that’s where the credibility problem comes in. Last year, all those things rang true as well, as the Mets bled their early NL East lead down to nothing, then gave away their Wild Card berth on the last day of the season. At every stop along the way, president of baseball operations David Stearns, manager Carlos Mendoza and various Mets leaders preached patience, insisting that the team would be fine.
They weren’t fine. So this time around, it’s hard to trust their words without seeing some sort of proof.
Asked about that concept after Saturday’s loss, shortstop Francisco Lindor replied, “It’s a different year. You’ve got to see it from a whole different lens. This is not the same team, and even if it was, it’s a new year. We have new opportunities.”
“I’ve got to be better,” Lindor added, phrasing those words in exactly the same way he did countless times in 2025.
Lindor has become the face of the Mets’ current crisis, especially with superstar teammate Juan Soto on the injured list. In addition to his usual early-season slump, Lindor has looked out of sorts on defense, making several uncharacteristic mental mistakes. Mendoza, to his credit, didn’t defend the shortstop in his usual way this weekend, instead calling Lindor’s miscues “weird” and “hard to explain.” So is a lot of what’s happened in Flushing over the past 10 months.
Lindor also represents one of the only remaining through lines from the disappointing Mets teams of the early 2020s. Over the offseason, the Mets replaced the bulk of their longtime offensive core, moving on from Pete Alonso, Brandon Nimmo and Jeff McNeil in an effort to spark change. As one of the incumbents, Lindor does have to be better. So do the newcomers brought on to refresh this roster. Very few Mets are immune from blame.
“I don’t know if we’ve hit our stride in any particular area of our team,” Stearns said over the weekend.
At this point, trust between the team and its fan base has eroded. That’s fair. After games, with microphones pointed at them, Mets types can say any number of things about the length of the season and the talent on the roster and the certainty that everything will be just fine.
Their players do have the capacity to change all this. They do have the ability to fix it. But until something actually does change, their words -- this time around -- will continue to face skepticism at every turn.