On Sunday the New York Mets lost both games of a doubleheader to the Colorado Rockies, scoring a total of one run across the two contests and falling to a season-worst 10 games below.500 with a 9-19 record. Carlos Mendoza told reporters multiple times that "it’s hard to explain."
The numbers underline the collapse: the Mets have now scored fewer than two runs in a game 10 times this season, lost all three games in the series against the Rockies and managed only a single run across two games on a day they had hoped to make up ground. The sweep erased the momentum from earlier in the week, when the Mets had won a pair of games to break a 12-game skid.
Some of the raw contrasts only deepen the sting. The Rockies, who lost 119 games last year, operate with roughly a third of New York’s payroll, yet they swept the Mets this series. New York now owns the worst record in baseball along with the Philadelphia Phillies, and through the team’s first 28 games this season the Mets sit at numbers not seen in the franchise since 1981 — that year’s club was 8-19-1 through 28 games.
Internally, the problem is simple in description and stubborn in practice: most of the Mets’ hitters are not producing at acceptable levels. That makes the club’s soft part of the schedule — the stretch they had been expected to use to recover — feel like a missed opportunity. A midseason managerial change would be the most drastic reasonable option, but David Stearns has never made a midseason managerial change in his 10 years as a top executive, and any replacement would likely come from inside the organization, names often mentioned include Kai Correa, Andy Green or Carlos Beltran.
Mendoza did not pretend to have an easy answer. He repeated on Sunday that "it’s hard to explain" and added, with the bluntness of a manager in a dugout that won’t cooperate, "it’s the business, right?" He tried to steer the conversation back to work: "The only thing I’m worried about is getting the guys going," he said, and warned that his immediate responsibility is practical: "My job is to find a way to get those guys out of the funk." He would not say whether he had received any assurances from the Mets’ higher-ups.
The broader expectations set this spring make the fall sharper. Owner Steve Cohen set making the playoffs as the baseline goal after the Mets failed to reach the postseason last season; instead the club finds itself mired in the worst record in baseball. The team’s inability to capitalize on easier opponents has turned a calendar meant for healing into a sequence of questions about personnel, approach and leadership.
There is a friction at the heart of this club’s slide: talent, payroll and stated goals point toward contention, but the product on the field — a lineup that too often produces one or zero runs and a 9-19 ledger — says something else. That contradiction is the urgent problem Mendoza faces every day in the clubhouse.
If the facts of this season amount to a single imperative, it is this: restore offense. Mendoza has said repeatedly that the suffering is fixable and that he is focused on getting the group moving. How he does that — and whether he will get the time to do it given the expectations that greeted spring training — is the defining question for the Mets now, and it is one Carlos Mendoza will have to answer at the dugout door.
