One Giant misstep by David Stearns
Also - the Mets will try and right their ship quickly on the road beginning in Chicago tonight
What’s up with the Mets? ⚾️
The Mets mercifully had Monday night off, and will begin a six game road trip in Chicago tonight
Did one bad throw change the trajectory of the 2025 Mets? (NY Post)
The Mets are still confident they can get to the playoffs (NY Daily News)
Winning alone can’t save these Mets (Newsday)
Injury Updates 🏥
CF Tyrone Taylor (left hamstring strain) is expected to be activated ahead of tonight’s series opener with the Cubs
Just Mets Podcast 🎙️
This week on the Just Mets Podcast, Michael and Rich reacted candidly and pragmatically from a disastrous week for the Mets which put them on the outside looking in for the playoffs.
Playoff Race 🏁
The Mets, Reds, and Diamondbacks were all off on Monday night, while the Giants lost to the Cardinals 6-5. The Mets remain in a statistical tie with the Reds for the final wild card spot, but the Reds own the tiebreaker over the Mets with six games left in the regular season.
As a reminder:
The Mets own the tiebreaker against the Giants (season series: 4-2) - if they finish with identical records, the Mets would finish with the higher seed or eliminate the Giants
The Mets do not own the tiebreaker against the Reds (season series: 2-4) - if they finish with identical records, the Reds would win the higher seed or eliminate the Mets
The Mets and Diamondbacks finished their season series tied (3-3), but the Diamondbacks maintain a better record against the NL West than the Mets do against the NL East, so Arizona would either finish with the higher seed or eliminate the Mets
The Mets own the tiebreaker against the Cardinals (season series: 5-2) - if they finish with identical records, the Mets would finish with the higher seed or eliminate the Cardinals
The Padres own the tiebreaker over the Mets (season series: 2-4) - if they finish with identical records, the Padres would finish with the higher seed or eliminate the Mets
Per FanGraphs, the Mets have a 50.2 percent chance of making it to the playoffs.
Down on the Farm 🌾
All Mets minor league affiliates aside from Double-A Binghamton have finished their seasons.
Double-A Binghamton trails Erie 1-0 in their Eastern League Championship Series and will play game two tonight at 6:35.
Today’s Game 🗓️
Match-up: Mets (80-76) @ Cubs (88-68)
Where: Wrigley Field - Chicago, IL
Starters: LHP David Peterson (9-6, 3.98 ERA) vs. RHP Cade Horton (11-4, 2.66 ERA)
When: 7:40 PM EDT
Where to Watch: SNY
David Stearns’ biggest misstep of the season ✍️
Yesterday, for the first time since the first week of April, the Mets woke up the outside looking in at the National League playoff field.
That statement is damning enough on its own and illustrates just how dramatic, drastic, and unfathomable this team’s collapse has truly been.
It remains to be seen how the final week of the regular season will play out, but prior to this season, only one team in the Wild Card era was ever 21+ games over .500 and then failed to make the postseason.
Look away, folks, that one team was these same Mets back in 2007.
So how did we get here?
In a season where Juan Soto is a legitimate MVP candidate, Pete Alonso is having his most complete offensive year since he was a rookie, Francisco Lindor may well go 30/30 again, and Brandon Nimmo is having his most prolific power season, this should not have been in the brochure.
The issue on offense, however, is the fact that beyond their top four threats, this team’s line-up has been far too inconsistent.
Sure, Jeff McNeil is having a nice year, but he also looks out of gas now, and even on his best day, it’s hard to call him a difference-maker.
Mark Vientos’ regression from a year ago has been alarming, and it seems as though it took the Mets brass far too long to acknowledge that Brett Baty has outperformed both he and Ronny Mauricio and should be the regular third baseman.
Francisco Álvarez has missed time on the IL on multiple occasions in 2025, and his back-up, Luis Torrens, has also been sidelined due to injury. The fact that Hayden Senger—a lifetime minor leaguer—has been on the Major League roster as often as he has been this season is an indictment on the club’s organizational catching depth—and says all you need to know about how the front office views 2022 first-round pick Kevin Parada.
There’s also the fact that from an offensive standpoint, this team has gotten absolutely nothing from center field, which brings me to arguably the most enormous misstep of the David Stearns era.
Stearns is a smart guy, and for the most part has done a really solid job in his post atop the Mets’ front office. But let’s be honest, he completely flopped at the trade deadline, and pretty much all of his moves since last November outside of signing both Juan Soto and Pete Alonso.
When news broke that the Mets had acquired Tyler Rogers, in general it was viewed as a positive. Rogers is a legitimate right-handed set-up man and would in theory help the team’s beleaguered bullpen. But once the details came out, pretty much everyone had a much different opinion.
José Buttó was a good Met, but Rogers was inarguably a bullpen upgrade, and Blade Tidwell had been passed by other young arms on the Mets minor league starting pitching depth chart. Those two for Rogers would have been fair. But also giving the Giants center fielder Drew Gilbert is potentially one of the decisions that sunk the Mets battleship in 2025.
Gilbert was raking in Syracuse and was deserving of an opportunity to fix the Mets center field problem.
Instead, he went to the Giants, who immediately called him up. While he hasn’t been spectacular in San Francisco, he has contributed nine extra-base hits, driven in 13 runs, and brought youthful energy and excitement to a team that needed it.
Rather than give their own minor leaguer a chance, the Mets shipped three other minor league prospects to Baltimore to acquire Cedric Mullins, who in 40 games with New York has slashed just .188/.287/.291.
From the macro perspective, it’s easy to see Stearns’ thinking. Soto and Nimmo are here for the long haul in the outfield corners. Former first-round pick Carson Benge has ascended to the top of the team’s prospect rankings, and will likely be the club’s starter in CF very early in 2026. That thinking contributed to Gilbert being expendable, but there’s no debating the situation could have been handled better this summer.
Of course, we all know about the problems the Mets have had on the mound this summer. They’ve set a Major League record by using 46 different pitchers, and unfortunately, the vast majority have been ineffective.
Nearly all of the mound moves Stearns and company have made have blown up in their faces, and were it not for the emergence of the club’s trio of rookie starters over the last few weeks, the situation would be even more dire.
That said, when things go so far sideways like they have for the 2025 Mets, the tendency is to look for a scapegoat, whether that’s Stearns, manager Carlos Mendoza, or members of the coaching staff.
But it’s also an indisputable fact that this team has far too much talent to have struggled for as long as it has, and the most blame of all must be directed towards a clubhouse that let a golden opportunity slip away in 2025.
Around the League 🚩
MLB owners approved Patrick Zalupski as the new owner of the Rays - he will purchase the club for around $1.7 billion (TB Times)
Freddy Fermin delivered a walk-off single in the 11th inning to give the Padres a 5-4 win over the Brewers and clinch a playoff berth for the Friars in the process
Ronald Acuna Jr., Michael Harris III, and Drake Baldwin all drove in multiple runs in Atlanta’s 11-5 drubbing of the Nationals - Atlanta did sign Charlie Morton for the rest of the year after he was released by the Tigers
Former Met Justin Verlander was tagged with his 11th loss of the season as the Giants fell to the Cardinals by the score of 6-5
I do agree the Mullins trade was terrible and didn’t make sense at the time to me. Drew Gilbert was not hitting well in AAA until maybe a month before the deadline and has a .485 ops in his last 15 games. Hes not the reason we may not make the playoffs. I do agree the bottom of the order and the streaky bats of our top guys other than Soto are an issue and then every pitcher underperforming is what killed us.
In his first off-season David Stearns added JD Martinez, Joey Wendle, Zack Short, Jake Diekman, Luis Severino, Sean Manaea, Adrian Houser, Jorge Lopez, Michael Tonkin, Yohan Ramirez, Harrison Bader, Jose Iglesias & Tyrone Taylor. 7 of these 13 additions were so unproductive they were DFA’d within half a season. Only 2 of the 13 made it to a second season. In his second off-season he added Frankie Montas, traded a promising young bullpen arm for Jose Siri and only added 1 arm to the bullpen who lasted 13 games. Frankly, Stearns has been a disaster.