Mets incompetence grows but they're making a change in their rotation
Lack of offense and inconsistent pitching continue to haunt the Mets as they dropped their 10th straight game on Saturday
What’s Up with the Mets? ⚾️
The Mets lost their tenth game and fourth series in a row, falling 4-2 to the Cubs on Saturday (box)
RHP Freddy Peralta got off to a solid start, allowing just one run on three hits through the first five frames, but walked two consecutive Cubs with two outs in the sixth before getting the hook
1B Mark Vientos broke his latest slump with a mammoth 434-foot homer in the top of the second inning to give the Mets an early 1-0 lead
RF Brett Baty finally notched his first walk of the season, but did nothing with it
3B Bo Bichette scored the Mets’ second and final run of the game after C Francisco Álvarez reached first base on a two-out throwing error by Cubs 2B Nico Hoerner
After taking over for Peralta, LHP Brooks Raley surrendered a three-run pinch-hit homer to Carson Kelly on the first pitch he threw; it was the first home run he’d given up since 2023
The Mets outhit the Cubs, but failed to drive in more than two runs for the fifth time in the last six games
LHP David Peterson was scratched from his scheduled start today; RHP Tobias Myers is starting in his place. It is not believed to be a health-related substitution
Roster Moves 📰
1B/DH Jorge Polanco (right wrist contusion) placed on 10-day IL, retroactive to Wednesday, April 14
C Hayden Senger recalled from Triple-A Syracuse
Play of the Game 🤬
Sigh.
Of course Brooks Raley gave up his first homer in years in the worst possible moment. Of course.
After securing the first two outs in the bottom of the sixth, Freddy Peralta walked Chicago outfielders Ian Happ and Seiya Suzuki. With lefty Moises Ballesteros due up, Carlos Mendoza called on lefty Raley to take the hill. The Cubs countered with Carson Kelly off the bench, who immediately did this:
Mendoza, Peralta, and Semien Speak 🗣️
Carlos Mendoza, Freddy Peralta, and Marcus Semien addressed the media after the loss:
Mendoza said you could “make a case” that there’s a psychological element to the team’s struggles as the losses mount, but also reiterated that “no one’s going to feel sorry” for them.
He said they have five and a half months ahead of them to “write their own story” and that “multiple people” are talking about the on-field issues behind closed doors, but also acknowledged that it only matters so much what’s said in the clubhouse.
Mendoza said that he thinks the coaching staff is doing a “tremendous job” keeping the players prepared and putting them in positions to have success, despite the lack of results on the field.
Mendoza validated the fury of the fans, saying that he and the players are similarly “pissed.”
Regarding the losing streak and keeping the right mindset, Peralta said, “We are professionals, and we need to make adjustments and play better.”
Peralta said he wasn’t feeling any extra pressure on himself and felt he was competing up to the last pitch.
Semien doubled down on Mendoza’s sentiments, saying, “This is a big boy league; there’s no time to dwell on tonight. Tomorrow is a new day.”
He said it’s not challenging to keep the right mentality amid the losses: “I understand the game doesn’t owe you a thing…we gotta go out and get it.”
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Down on the Farm 🌾
1B/DH Ryan Clifford (No. 4 prospect, Triple-A): 4-for-6, 3 R, 5 RBI, 2 HR, 2B, BB
RF Nick Morabito (No. 12 prospect, Triple-A): 1-for-6, 3 R, 2 BB, SB
DH/SS Ronny Mauricio (Triple-A): 3-for-7, 2 R, 3 RBI, HR, 2B, SB, K
CF A.J. Ewing (No. 3 prospect, Double-A): 2-for-5, R, 2 K, 2 SB
SS Elian Peña (No. 8 prospect, Single-A): 2-for-5, R, 2 RBI, BB, K, SB
LF Randy Guzman (Single-A): 0-for-2, 2 R, 2 BB, K, 2 SB
BOX SCORES
Single-A STL | High-A BRK | Double-A BNG | Triple-A SYR (Game 1) / (Game 2)
Today’s Game 🗓
Match-up: Mets (7-14) at Cubs (11-9)
Where: Wrigley Field - Chicago, IL
Starters: RHP Tobias Myers (0-1, 3.46 ERA) vs. RHP Javier Assad (1-1, 8.10 ERA)
When: 2:20 PM EDT
Where to Watch: SNY
Looking to stave off a record-tying loss, the Mets are making a change ✍️
At the risk of sounding maudlin, these middling Mets certainly have a knack for cultivating misery en masse.
Some have characterized this slump as the Mets hitting rock bottom; others have insisted that the sky is falling. I’d instead suggest that this team would be most accurately represented by a Hanna-Barbera cartoon where a less-lucky Mr. Magoo type goes skydiving with a faulty parachute, lands in a tree, and hits every single branch with a veritable ‘thud’ on his way to the ground.
As Marcus Semien told Steve Gelbs in his postgame comments, each game has been different, and these Mets have lost in a lot of different ways. Each of those losses has featured at least one moment that hits palpably harder than the rest preceding it, as if to signal that any hope of a victory has once again been squashed. Several of those moments have come at the hands of uninspiring outings from Kodai Senga and David Peterson, each of whom entered the 2026 season with question marks hanging over their heads that they’ve done painfully little to answer.
With Peterson struggling since the season began and a further-demoralizing 11th-straight loss on the table, the team decided it was time to make a move, giving Tobias Myers the nod to take the pill in the series finale instead. Peterson was a healthy scratch, so it seems a clear signal is being sent that his days as a rotation regular are numbered, if not already up. While it remains to be seen if this demotion is permanent, the proverbial leash is being pulled ever shorter until there’s a discernible improvement in performance.
It’s been a little while, but Mets fans famously got a front-row seat to Tobias Myers the Starter in the 2024 postseason, when he allowed just two hits over six innings of work in Game 3 of the Wild Card series. While he only got nine starts in 2025, his stat line in a relief-forward role looked almost the same as it did as a full-time starter — an encouraging sign of adaptability, even considering the near 90-inning difference in sample size.
Though he hasn’t been striking out a ton of hitters to start the year, Myers’s debut season in Queens is off to a solid start. Through his first 13 innings of the 2026 season, he’s posted a 3.46 ERA and a 0.77 WHIP with nine strikeouts against just one walk allowed.
So far, Myers has been throwing a four-pitch mix that features the expected fastball and slider paired with a cutter and a new-ish splitter that he only started throwing last year. That splitter has been his most effective pitch out of the gate, eliciting a 30% whiff rate and generating nearly half of his strikeouts — it should get quite a bit of usage today.
Upon an admittedly cursory glance at the data, this group of hitters will be an interesting one for Myers to square off against; they look to be a good matchup for his pitch mix. Through his first few appearances, Myers has been deploying the majority of his mix and getting the bulk of his results in parts of the zone where Chicago hitters have proven vulnerable so far.
While the Cubs have been hitting fastballs and sliders well to open the season, they’ve been less effective against splitters, and generally ineffective against breaking balls; Myers likes to deploy his fastball across that northwest-to-southeast slash through the zone seen in the heatmap above, mostly working it into the corners or on the edges and then deploying the splitter roughly 10 miles per hour slower and two feet lower in the zone. Looking at the K charts, the same spot where Myers has gotten most of his strikeouts this season is where Chicago’s hitters have struggled the most; if his splitter’s locked in this afternoon, I’d anticipate Myers finding some swing-and-miss success with it.
Of course, if Myers delivers a strong outing and the offense again fails to contribute more than a run or two, this could all quickly prove to be nothing more than wishful thinking.
If you skipped past all the charts and numbers to head to the comments section and let off further steam about how bad this team is, I do not blame you at all. The Mets are almost impossible to watch right now…but you don’t need me to tell you that.
They will win again at some point; if Myers puts up a quality start and the lineup scores more than two runs, that day could very well be today. They obviously won’t lose every game the rest of the way, and it’s still early enough that any hole being dug isn’t insurmountably deep. There are some precious few positives hiding among the copious negatives.
But they’re losing. A lot. No positive spin there.
The team is pissed. The fans are pissed. And that’s going to persist until they’re back in the win column consistently. No amount of hopeful stat analysis is going to change that.
To loosely quote Mendoza’s postgame presser, it ultimately doesn’t really matter what gets said here, there, or anywhere — they simply need to start winning.
Around the League 🚩
Braves lefty Chris Sale recorded his 2,608th career strikeout, surpassing Hall of Famer and former Met Tom Glavine on the all-time strikeout list (MLB.com)
Former Met and current Oriole reliever Rico Garcia has 10 hitless innings to start his season; Garcia is currently in the midst of a 31 1/2 scoreless inning streak dating back to last season
Shohei Ohtani extended his on-base streak to 50 games with a two-out single in the ninth inning
Tigers ace Tarik Skubal allowed just one run on four hits and tallied 10 strikeouts over six innings in Detroit’s 4-1 win in Boston
Diamondbacks center fielder Corbin Carroll hit his fourth career grand slam to walk off the Blue Jays, 6-2
"At the risk of sounding maudlin, these middling Mets certainly have a knack for cultivating misery en masse." Nice. Anything that gives me a chance to smile about the Mets is a good thing! You may be the only sportswriter in America who's acquainted with the world "maudlin".
I'd quibble that the questions about Senga and Peterson HAVE been answered, i.e., the answer is that they're no longer good pitchers. The big downside about starting Myers is that now you've lost your best (only?) long reliever. I was thinking they might call up Christian Scott. Btw, we should have a readers' vote: Which fact is more sorrowful, that Baty has one walk on the season or that Lindor has one rbi on the season?