The New York Mets on Tuesday suffered their seventh straight loss, this one a 2-1 defeat to the champion Los Angeles Dodgers that featured a true pitcher’s duel between Nolan McLean and Yoshinobu Yamamoto. That seventh straight defeat — punctuated by a more recent stretch in which the Mets have scored a total of one run in their last three games — dropped New York to 7-11 on the young season. That puts them in last place in the National League East.
All of this of course comes on the heels of the Mets’ 2025 collapse that saw them go from 21 games over .500 and the best record in baseball in the middle of June to missing the playoffs entirely thanks to a 21-32 mark from Aug. 1 onward. Not surprisingly, Mets owner Steve Cohen had some thoughts about all this. Cohen wrote on social media after Tuesday’s defeat:
“Nobody likes to lose but I saw some ‘green shoots tonight.’ On offense, Lindor had two hits including a home run. Bichette got a double hitting it to left field as opposed to recently being right field prone. Benge got a solid hit. Soto started his running progression today. Semien hit a shot that might have been a home run on a warmer night. Finally, Nolan McLean pitched an outstanding game going 7 innings. Hang in there fans, we will turn this around!”
With a start like this, which puts the Mets on pace for a 99-loss season, there are of course many culprits. Infield production has been a serious problem, for one. Thus far, Mark Vientos, Marcus Semien, Francisco Lindor, and Bo Bichette have combined for a slash line of .208/.270/.302 with a mere four home runs in 255 at-bats. Lindor has the highest OPS+ of that quartet with a figure of 75, or 25% worse than the league average. Lindor and Bichette are surely in for better days, but that’s little comfort in the present. Elsewhere, promising rookie Carson Benge has thus far failed to launch, as he’s presently lugging around an OPS of .440. In the rotation, Kodai Senga and David Peterson have a combined ERA of 6.68 through seven starts.
The biggest factor may be the absence of lineup fulcrum and one of the best hitters in baseball Juan Soto, who’s on the injured list with a calf strain. He’d been off to a vintage start in 2026, but he hasn’t played since logging a single plate appearance on April 3. In the 10 games since Soto went down, the Mets have scored a total of 28 runs. As Cohen noted, though, Soto is making progress in his recovery from what can be a difficult injury. To say the least, they sorely need him back in the lineup.
More broadly, there’s much riding on this season. Manager Carlos Mendoza entered the year with some level of seat warmth, and the 2026 results to date haven’t helped that. While there’s probably little cause to think president of baseball operations David Stearns is in any peril, he’s quite invested in the current roster. That’s because this past offseason, Stearns and the Mets let popular figures like Pete Alonso and Edwin Díaz walk and instead replaced them with, in essence, Jorge Polanco and Devin Williams with Bichette also brought in to enable a shuffling of the corner infield spots. As well, Stearns traded away long-time second baseman Jeff McNeil and replaced him with Semien, whom Stearns acquired by dealing Brandon Nimmo to the Rangers. None of those decisions are necessarily bad as things stand now, but the level of churn means that the 2026 roster and season is very much a reflection of Stearns’ decision-making. We know how it’s going so far.
Of course, it’s very early yet, as barely 10% of the regular-season schedule has been played. Soto is working his way back, and there’s a theoretically accommodating stretch of schedule toward the end of April that will see the Mets play 12 straight against the Colorado Rockies, Washington Nationals, and Los Angeles Angels. The end of that stretch is probably the next serious checkpoint for the Mets. In the meantime, they can take some heat off themselves by ending the current losing streak and preventing the owner from feeling the urge to reassure a fan base that, in light of the past several months, probably doesn’t want to hear it much right now.
