The Mets Are Stuck in Baseball Hell (Again)
Painfully mediocre, expensive and old, New York is in a place both depressing and familiar.
I haven’t really written much about the New York Mets this season,1 mainly because — what is there to write about? They were hovering around .500 for most of the year until a recent skid (losses in 8 of 11 games ahead of Tuesday’s action) sent them plunging deeper into the recesses of the NL East. The Mets are now are tracking for only 79 wins in my composite forecast, with just a 16% chance to make the playoffs.
And… how is that any different than usual? Barring some kind of miraculous turnaround, this would mark the seventh time they’ve missed the playoffs in the past eight seasons, and the sixth time they’ve finished below .500 in that span. This type of disappointing ballclub — expensive, mediocre and old, with plenty of future salary still on the books — is par for the course for this franchise, regardless of who is in charge or who’s wearing the laundry.
In fact, we can narrow down the parameters for the kind of “baseball hell” the Mets are currently in, and always seem to be in. Since 2002, when the team disastrously brought in Roberto Alomar, Mo Vaughn and Jeromy Burnitz, having already bid farewell to many of the veterans who helped fuel New York’s return to relevance in the late ‘90s, there have been 43 instances across MLB2 where a team:
Finished below .500
Had a payroll ranked among MLB’s Top 10
Ranked 20th or worse in average age (where younger is better)
Of those 43, the Mets have seven of them — or 16.3% of all the cases of a team being old, expensive and mediocre in all of baseball over the past 20+ years. The next-most frequent offenders are the San Francisco Giants with six such seasons, but at least they also won three World Series (and nearly won another one) over that span of years. All the Mets have to show for it is a five-game World Series loss to the Kansas City Royals and an NLCS near-miss that ended with Carlos Beltran leaving the bat on his shoulder for the final strike.
Another way of looking at it is that the Mets have been in baseball hell for roughly one-third of the past 23 seasons, stuck with a losing roster that offers little hope for things to improve anytime soon. The characters change, but the story remains the same.
This time around, the culprits include disappointing seasons from Francisco Lindor, Pete Alonso, Jeff McNeil and Starling Marte in a lineup that ranks just 23rd in OPS, a mediocre rotation that badly misses the injured Kodai Senga (and needed more from Jose Quintana and Adrian Houser), a post-injury version of Edwin Díaz that is not his old self yet and a defense that ranks 29th out of 30 teams in fielding Wins Above Replacement. A well-rounded and competitive roster, this is not.
An expensive one, however, it is. Between all of those names above (among others), the Mets are paying a league-high $207,880,000 to players who are on pace to accrue fewer than 2.5 WAR this season. A few Mets are tracking for more — a list that features Brandon Nimmo (3.9), Reed Garrett (3.9), Sean Manaea (3.3) and Jose Butto (2.7) — but mostly the team is not getting much bang for owner Steve Cohen’s bucks.
That’s not set to change anytime soon, either. The team has $143.5 million committed to the 2025 roster, and $106.3 million committed in both 2026 and 2027. New York is on the hook to pay Lindor $34.1 million per year through the 2031 season, at which time the shortstop (who is tracking for an OK-but-unspectacular 2.5 WAR at age 30) will be 37 years old. Fans and the media have their eye on one player who will add a lot to those salary totals next offseason if the Mets reel him in — Yankees RF Juan Soto — but it feels like getting him to exchange Yankee pinstripes for a lighter shade of blue will be a lot easier said than done.
In the meantime, new GM David Stearns also needs to make a decision on Alonso, who will be a free agent next winter and is the team’s most recognizable star aside from J.D. Martinez… but is also a Scott Boras client and probably pretty overrated because so much of his value come from home runs. (Aside from his 53-HR, 5.1-WAR breakout in the juiced-ball season of 2019, Alonso has broken 4 WAR in a season just once — and he’s on pace for only 1.6 WAR this season.)
As the excellent blog wrote yesterday, New York can’t easily “blow up” this roster aside from selling off Alonso at the deadline along with other expiring contracts. In other words, there aren’t many easy ways for the Mets to climb out of their spot in baseball hell. (There never are.) The team’s incredible 101-win campaign in 2022 — Cohen’s second season as principal owner — appeared to signal a new era for a franchise that seemed cursed most of the time under previous management. But that now looks more and more like a mirage, with this franchise continuing to chase the same old, expensive, ineffective formula as it always has.
Filed under: Baseball
Aside from seeing them come up high on lists like these.
Including teams (like the Mets) on pace to join this club in 2024.