Put it in the Books: An Autopsy of the 2025 Mets

Some final thoughts on the 2025 season from the entire Just Mets staff…

What’s Up with the Mets? 💭

• RHP Nolan McLean was named MiLB Breakout Player of the Year

• RHP Jonah Tong was named Minor League Pitching Prospect of the Year

• Glenn Sherlock - long time coach for the Mets who had served most recently as their catching instructor - has decided to retire (New York Post)

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The Just Mets Podcast 🎙️

In the latest episode of The Just Mets Podcast, Rich MacLeod & Tim Britton (The Athletic) go inside the Mets clubhouse to figure out what happened in this post mortem of the 2025 Mets.

Check out a free preview on YouTube, or subscribe on Patreon for the full episode.

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Final Thoughts on the 2025 Mets ✍️

Michael Baron

It has been difficult for me to articulate my feelings and thoughts on what transpired for the Mets in 2025. Sometimes, I find myself just staring into space, thinking all sorts of things about this team, good, bad, or otherwise. Mostly bad, of course, because this goes down as a spectacular disaster for this franchise, damaging their reputation further in the process.

I have spent a lot of time over the last 16 years watching, listening, learning, processing, examining, and challenging the Mets for the sole purpose of my desire to see them win a World Series. I didn’t necessarily believe they were capable of doing that this year, but I certainly expected them to keep their train going, get into the playoffs, and at the very least, avoid doing what they did in the end, which was a belly-flopped collapse on the order of $340 million. Now that train has been completely derailed and for the first time, I simply cannot align my thoughts and my feelings on the matter aside from just feeling humiliated as a fan, humiliated as a writer, and humiliated for our readers.

Disappointment isn’t even an accurate word to describe what I think. Nor is anger, nor is surprise, or anything like that. I am not surprised, I am not disappointed, and I am not angry. I don’t know what I truly feel. It’s a combination of unsurprised shock and utter embarrassment.

I just want it to all be better. I want it quickly fixed, I want this season to be something we are laughing at in the coming years. I personally have no more room for another classically Metsian year like this one. I’ve experienced 1988, the early 1990s, the disappointment of 1998, those bone crushers in 2000 and 2006, the daggers of 2007, 2008, and 2021, and that entire decade of the 2010s outside of 2015 and 2016 when the club was nothing but a laughing stock around baseball.

Enough already. Stop saying you’re smart and know what you’re doing and then failing in the end, and put your money where your mouth is.

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Rich MacLeod

The first thing I felt when the final out was recorded on Sunday was exasperation. Not just with a team that spent three-and-a-half months collapsing in slow motion, but with myself for ever believing it could have ended any other way.

But not long after that, another feeling set in: relief.

This season of Mets baseball took nearly everything out of me. In a season that started with so much promise, the 2025 version of this club became absolutely exhausting to watch on a daily basis.

They became the complete antithesis of the team we all fell in love with just one year ago, finding ways to lose games on a routine basis and seemingly crashing into an invisible wall over and over and over again anytime they required a clutch hit or a big out.

It is embarrassing that this team – with this talent they’ve so often referenced this season – could not even make the postseason in an era where nearly half of the league gets in. The indignity of that failure is now something that we as fans have to reckon with, while the organization is tasked with finding a way to make sure nothing like this can ever happen again.

I hate that things ended the way they did, but I’d be lying if I didn’t tell you that another part of me is relieved that this is finally over. I no longer have to tune in every single night, knowing what is likely going to come, and continue to hope for the hopeless.

Now we take a couple of weeks to lick our wounds. Soon enough, offseason optimism will creep back in, as it always does. There will be a day when we start to dream about next year.

But for now, I’m just glad this one is finally over.

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Justin Mears

Welp. At least that’s over?

Six months ago, the Mets began a season in which expectations were higher than they’ve ever been for this franchise, and for more than two months, it looked like this could be one of the best Mets teams ever.

It’s easy to point to the night Kodai Senga got hurt as the turning point, considering the stark contrast in the team’s record before and after that incident, but this collapse cannot be oversimplified that easily.

It was a collective failure across the board, and certainly the pitching staff as a whole is front and center. The quintet of Senga, Sean Manaea, Frankie Montas, Griffin Canning, and Tylor Megill would have seemed a fair bet to make one full turn of the rotation at least once this summer, and instead, all five were on the injured list at the same time at one point. David Peterson was a deserving All-Star but faded substantially as his innings piled up down the stretch, to the point where he did not even start the team’s do-or-die game 162.

In the end, the team’s pitching woes have to start with the club’s primary decision-makers, and if we’re going to praise David Stearns for his successes, he deserves criticism for the failures. Especially since the rotation problems were not just one mistake, and instead were a comedy of missteps. Letting Luis Severino and Jose Quintana walk could have made financial sense, but I think he underestimated their impact on the team’s clubhouse—not to mention on the mound—and taking a flier on Montas seemed misguided the day it was announced. Stearns then failed to do anything to address the team’s glaring weakness at the trade deadline, knowing he had internal minor league options that could help—but then waited too long to pull the trigger on giving Nolan McLean, Brandon Sproat, and Jonah Tong an opportunity at this level.

My biggest takeaway from 2025 is honestly just disappointment they wasted performances from their high-end talent.

The 2006 Mets are remembered fondly by our generation of fans as the organization’s best team in recent memory. That year, Jose Reyes, David Wright, Carlos Beltran, and Carlos Delgado combined to put up a collective 20.9 WAR.

This season’s big four of Francisco Lindor, Pete Alonso, Juan Soto, and Brandon Nimmo were not quite there—at 18.3—but to waste dynamic offensive seasons from your four best players in their prime is hard to do—and flat out inexcusable.

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Andrew Steele

I was writing this while watching the opening games of the Wild Card Round, and it only then hit me that the Mets really didn’t make it.

We’re a few days removed, and yet I still can’t really fathom what exactly happened on Sunday. Despite the fact that the Mets were one of the worst teams in all of baseball from June 13 onwards, despite the fact that they absolutely crapped the bed in the series opener against the Marlins, and despite the fact that the offense did absolutely nothing all game long, I was still convinced that this team was going to find a way to rally in the ninth inning and sneak into the playoffs.

Would they have deserved to have made the postseason? Hell no. But between the sheer amount of talent on this team and the fact that no other team wanted anything to do with that final Wild Card berth, it still just seems inconceivable to me that the Mets didn’t make it. And I would argue that this collapse was both worse and more embarrassing than the implosion in 2007 for the reasons already listed, not to mention the high expectations surrounding this team throughout 2025.

Trawling through the wreckage of a complete bust of a season, it isn’t being a prisoner of the moment to say that the complete meltdown and failure to make the postseason will act as a black mark against this group for the rest of time. And so it should. The failures of 2025 should stick to the ribs of the ownership, every front office executive, every member of the coaching staff, and every single player for a very, very long time.

A lot went wrong this season, and a hell of a lot needs fixing if the train is to get back on the tracks in 2026. The pitching philosophy needs to change, and the front office should be going aggressively after more sure things to insert in the starting rotation. More needs to be done to both balance the lineup and address the abysmal defense that really helped sink this team down the stretch. As such, I don’t think players like Mark Vientos and Jeff McNeil should be viewed as guarantees to be on next year’s roster. This current group needs shaking up. The same team can’t come back next year. It just can’t.

Of course, there is plenty of time to get into all of that, and I know we will be diving into specific team needs throughout the offseason. For now, though, I’m just so mad at this team for falling apart the way they did. I’m also mad that the Mets jumped all over themselves to make it clear manager Carlos Mendoza’s job was safe minutes after the all-time collapse was sealed. After such a disastrous season, everything should be on the table, and everyone should be subject to a rigorous review.

I just hope next year is better, and I also hope that the front office does whatever is necessary this offseason to ensure what happened this year never ever happens again. I know some fans don’t like this narrative, but this team played without a pulse and without any real urgency or fight in so many key moments over a four-month stretch. That kind of mentality needs to be eradicated and banished for good. Only then can this team really move forward.

All in all, I’m still just shocked that we are where we are. But I’m also relieved because the last three plus months were tough for all of us. Let’s hope this organization hits the reset button in the right way and comes back stronger in 2026.

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Drew Van Buskirk

Let me start by giving flowers to Juan Soto, Pete Alonso, Francisco Lindor, and Clay Holmes for their on-field contributions this season. All of their respective numbers speak for themselves; you don’t need me to reiterate them here.

This was easily the most consistently inconsistent baseball team I’ve ever watched. If their starter miraculously lasted longer than five innings (if that), they failed to provide run support; if their offense got hot early, the bullpen would insist on making sure that no lead was safe. Conservatively, I’d estimate 75% of the score update notifications that went to my phone this season triggered some sort of mild cardiac event… I should speak to someone about that.

Hindsight already being 20/20, I could go on and on with stats explaining the various, vast statistical discrepancies that spelled doom for this team from the get-go — and I will at some point — but we all watched what happened. An extra homer here, a better-placed ball there, a starter delivering one more halfway-decent start or the bullpen stranding a few more runners, and we’d probably be singing a totally different tune today… albeit likely an apprehensive one. This team’s only season-long consistency was its lack of chemistry, and that disconnect showed up on the field nearly every day.

And yet, despite that absence of clubhouse cohesion, I’ve never believed Carlos Mendoza should be fired. What we saw on display this year was a confluence of far too many problems to pin on one person, especially when that person isn’t the one signing players or executing trades. At the end of the day, Mendy had to play with the cards in his hand. Did he make questionable in-game decisions? Absolutely. But at the same time, if this franchise wants to establish a new culture in all the ways they say they do, another two-year management tenure with a firing one year removed from an NLCS appearance isn’t the way to do that. There has to be some room for error when calculating your time allowance for growth. To me, overhauling the coaching staff and retooling the roster is the first place to start; if familiar problems persist at that point, then make a management change, even if it’s at the 2026 All-Star Break.

Now, with all that said, I do think Mendy’s seat should be particularly hot next year, and frankly, so should the seat of David Stearns. Nibbling around the financial fringes and banking on your vaunted pitching lab having yearly success with diamond-in-the-rough career rehabilitation projects is a now-proven-faulty approach to building a championship contender. Similarly, digging your heels in on bad decisions you’ve made is a worse look than saying ‘sayonara’ to a guy that isn’t working out and taking a multimillion-dollar bath — hopefully that’s a note he takes next year.

So, we’re going to see a largely new coaching staff next season; as long as base-stealing savant Antoan Richardson doesn’t go anywhere, I’m fine with that. Nolan McLean will likely be next year’s ace, and both Jett Williams and Carson Benge should get camp invites with legitimate opportunities to make the big league team; I’m also fine with that.

Beyond that, I’m not really sure what changes this front office decides to address first. Unless management is absolutely in love with Ryan Clifford (and honestly, even if they are), the most obvious move in free agency, to me, is re-signing Pete Alonso. Re-signing Edwin Díaz should also be a priority, and call me crazy, but if early recovery and rehab look good, I’d extend a good-faith deal to Griffin Canning. Canning’s stuff proved to be a perfect match for what the lab likes to do, and having him and Clay Holmes anchoring the back half of the rotation in the second half next season could be a potentially potent pairing.

Otherwise, the only thing that’s for certain is that this locker room is going to look very different in a matter of months.

After what we just sat through, that’s a good thing.