How the Mets lost their groove: Inside baseball’s biggest collapse

MIAMI — On the field hours before a game during the final weekend of the regular season, a member of the New York Mets eyed the visitors’ dugout, struggling to make sense of what he was thinking.

“There was magic last year; you walked in the building on a day like today and you were expecting to win the game,” the person said. “This year? I don’t know.”

With a $340 million payroll, with Juan Soto signed to the richest contract in sports history, with a team coming off a rejuvenating trip to the National League Championship Series, the Mets failed to even reach MLB’s expanded postseason field. Two months into the season, they were baseball’s best team. Three and a half months later, they became the sport’s biggest failures.

“We were a better team, talent-wise, this year than we were last year,” a veteran Mets player said. “Everyone will always compare this year versus last year. On paper, we are a much better team this year than we were last year, and I don’t think it’s necessarily close. It just didn’t work.”

The Mets’ meltdown was a slow march to infamy. It befuddled people throughout the Mets’ organization — from the players in the clubhouse who had never been surrounded by this much talent to the executives who’d constructed a roster they believed worthy of a championship.

From conversations with more than a dozen people in the organization, including players, coaches and executives, the Mets’ internal evaluation has become clearer — how they view the evolution of their clubhouse culture, how Juan Soto in his first season in Queens fit alongside Francisco Lindor, how Carlos Mendoza handled adversity in 2025, how their defense emerged as a startling deficiency, what they regret about how they handled a season that spiraled away, and what David Stearns has to change this winter.

Needing a win to stay alive, they fittingly lost on the final day of the season. Like a runaway train, it was easy to see coming. Still, hours after retreating to the clubhouse with stunned looks on their faces, players said they needed time to properly reckon with all that went wrong.

The Mets’ prolonged demise can be structured in a couple of different ways. You can view it, as most have, as pivoting in the middle of June, when a series of injuries to their starters first threw their rotation in disarray. Or you can view it, as many in the organization do, as two distinct periods of tumult: a June swoon explained away by injuries, and a slump over the past two months that carries no such excuse — one that started at the trade deadline when the team felt best about itself and its prospects.

By the time the Mets arrived at the final weekend of their season in Miami, top brass felt decidedly different. Regardless of whether the team made the postseason or not, they had to figure out one key question.

What the hell happened?

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In the wake of Sunday’s season-ending loss, the scene in Miami’s visiting clubhouse wasn’t quite what it had been when 2024 concluded at Dodger Stadium. There were no tears on Sunday, no huddles raising a bottle to toast as fun a season as they’d ever had.

Instead, there were chuckles to hold back anger and carefully chosen words to express what felt inexpressible.

That gap, between a vibe that was invariably described as immaculate in 2024 and one that resonated at a different wavelength in 2025, is the elephant in the room for these Mets. Given the talent, what was missing behind closed doors? What was off?

Among sources, a consensus emerged: The 2025 clubhouse was understandably different from the one in 2024, and it didn’t carry as much day-to-day energy. However, 2024 set an almost impossible clubhouse standard to match, and nobody viewed the clubhouse near the top of the team’s problems this season.

“We didn’t have OMG or a pop superstar on our team,” said Brandon Nimmo. “We don’t need to try to make that happen.”

One player wondered if the team possessed the same drive that propelled it in 2024 — if the want-to existed at the same desperate level. After all, the group had proven a lot of longtime doubters wrong last season. Would they be motivated quite the same way this time around?

Others, however, saw a group working as hard as ever.

“Playing with these guys every single day, there was no question of heart or passion or want or desire or work ethic. You can have all those things and that doesn’t guarantee success,” Pete Alonso said postgame Sunday. “We had plenty of effort, we had belief.”

In a conversation late in the summer, Brandon Nimmo said, “If somebody is being lazy or not working, then a hard conversation needs to be had, but that’s not what I am seeing here.”

Several people did mention that the Mets missed the presence of their quote-unquote energy guys. Jesse Winker, who provided an edge after his acquisition last summer, played just two games after May 4. Jose Siri was out for five months. Sean Manaea and Francisco Alvarez endured injuries and struggles.

When asked if chemistry was off, a veteran player said, “I don’t know if that is the case. We do have a lot of different personalities. But the guys are great. Everyone gets along really well. I don’t know. We have so many veterans that know how to do the job, handle their business and address things and people that need to be addressed. We are not lacking leadership.”

But the leadership dynamic, too, was different this season — not worse, sources were clear, but different. That’s to be expected when you add a superstar like Soto to the mix — not just a great player on a huge contract, but a different personality than Lindor. Soto is more business-like, with everything in service of performing in that night’s game, whereas Lindor carries a more laid-back, even friendlier, approach. Different players gravitate toward one or the other, and that’s not a problem in and of itself, multiple sources said.

Does this have to be Lindor’s team or Soto’s team? Or even just one player’s team? Nimmo and Alonso, two of the longest-tenured players on the team, are also part of the leadership mix.

Sources granted the condition of anonymity for more candor, simply said, “No.”

“That’s too much for one guy,” said a club source, who added that an ideal leadership situation includes voices from every part of the roster.

Lindor and Soto, that club source continued, will naturally grow more comfortable with one another over time — a process that they saw progress this season.

“Moving forward, that’s something the team needs to figure out,” the source said. “It happens organically.”

While players and staffers acknowledged that the clubhouse wasn’t the same as it was last season, they rebutted the idea that it was detrimental to the team in any way.

“There’s no ill will, animosity or finger-pointing,” one player said. “Everyone is committed to the same goal.”

One player pointed out that there was more cross-pollination in conversations this season: relievers engaged with starters, pitchers engaged with position players. He took that as a sign of cohesion, of everyone pulling on the same rope.

“I don’t think that the atmosphere or any character flaws or anything like that, I don’t think any of that was a problem,” Nimmo said Sunday. “It came down to executing, and we didn’t execute enough.”

“Every year, every clubhouse has issues,” a team source said. “Winning solves them.”

On the final weekend of the season, one staffer pointed in the direction of the clubhouse.

“There shouldn’t be good vibes in there right now,” they said. “If there were good vibes in there, that would be the problem.”

“Team chemistry,” manager Carlos Mendoza said after Sunday’s loss, “is you go out and win games.”

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By the final weekend of the season, Mendoza’s patience with a roster that never seemed to learn from its mistakes was running out. After a sloppy loss Friday night, he sounded exasperated.

“We continue to make the same mistakes,” he said, “and it’s costing us games.”

At a certain point, when does that reflect on the manager and his coaching staff?

“I take responsibility. It starts with me,” Mendoza said Sunday. “I’ve got to take a long look at how I need to get better.”

Underachievement on this scale necessarily raises the question of the manager’s job security, even one year removed from being the toast of the town. Mendoza’s predecessor was fired one year after being voted National League Manager of the Year. None of his past four predecessors managed a third season with the Mets.

“Since Day 1, when you’re in this chair, you’re on the hot seat. Simple as that,” he said Sunday.

And yet, while several sources pointed to flaws here and there with Mendoza’s managerial style in 2025, the Mets as an organization are still happy with Mendoza as their manager.

“David chose the right guy,” one club source said.

A few players thought Mendoza’s communication was not as sharp as it could be. Others suggested that he showed some unnecessary panic early in the season when he kept shuffling roles for different players. That will be part of the conversation this winter.

“I really think he’s done everything in his power,” another club source said. “In this market, you want that type of leader: somebody who is steady and going to be honest.”

That doesn’t mean Mendoza’s coaching staff is safe. The Mets’ defense was a season-long issue. While the offense put up good overall numbers, it operated far too often in boom-and-bust cycles. The pitching staff never put it together in the second half, with many of its purportedly reliable arms underperforming.

The expectation is that there will be at least some turnover in that coaching staff ahead of next season.

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Talk to anyone in the sport these last few weeks about the Mets, and you’d inevitably reach an eye roll and a consensus conclusion.

“Their defense kills them,” one scout summarized late in the season.

Stearns, the president of baseball operations, cited defense as a concern as far back as May. After a brief window of improvement in the summer, it collapsed comprehensively over the final two months of the season.

Every Lindor error led to two unearned runs, it seemed. Alonso struggled with throws to first base, in one case costing the team a game and in another leading to an injury to the starting pitcher. Mark Vientos took a step back at third base, and New York’s outfield let far too many fly balls find grass.

There were the obvious errors — 19 in the final 29 games of the season — that ceded free bases, provided extra runners and prolonged innings. Over the past two months, only one team has allowed more unearned runs than New York’s 28.

Then there were the fringe plays the Mets consistently did not make — plays that don’t go down as errors (at least not anymore) but that a majority of big-leaguers make. This was an area the Mets had emphasized midseason, especially in turning double plays. Down the stretch, there was a play or two every night you could point to as pivotal.

Finally and most frustratingly, there were the mental lapses. The Mets left bases uncovered. They missed cutoff men. They forgot to back up. These aren’t high-concept principles.

The subpar defense exacerbated the team’s pitching woes, the strengths of the club’s hurlers aligning poorly with the weaknesses of the fielders behind them. No pitching staff in baseball generated more ground balls than the Mets’; they finished in the bottom third in the sport at turning ground balls into outs. That contributed to the struggles of, say, David Peterson down the stretch.

That was emblematic of the team’s failure to play a sort of complementary baseball, of the whole never equaling the sum of its parts.

Fixing the defense is not straightforward. There had been individual improvement in recent years: Vientos being a tenable third baseman last season represented a win. Brett Baty becoming an above-average third baseman and a playable second baseman counts as another.

But the collective regression was unmistakable. Jeff McNeil, Nimmo, Alonso and Lindor are into their 30s; defense typically declines at that stage. Soto, for all his talent, graded out as one of the sport’s worst defenders this season, according to advanced metrics.

Outside of Alonso at first base, the Mets’ position player group is under contract next season.

“Their best hitters are bad defenders and vice versa,” said one scout.

One team source labeled this Stearns’ biggest and most intriguing challenge this winter. Another looked at the solution in broader terms — that the Mets needed to become the type of team and organization that more consistently improves defenders.

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The two starting pitchers who spoke after Sunday’s loss were supposed to be the guys New York would lean on in a postseason series: Sean Manaea and Kodai Senga. Instead, Manaea was pulled five outs into his outing on Sunday. Senga couldn’t sit in the dugout because he’s technically still a minor-leaguer, demoted earlier this month. This was the risk Stearns ran in counting on those two pitchers, specifically, to helm the rotation. Each had submitted exactly one season as a front-line starter in the majors, and he eschewed adding another established arm at the trade deadline, a decision that backfired.

“It’s a complete failure,” Manaea said of his season on Sunday.

But multiple people within the Mets feel they failed Manaea and Senga. The regret that stands out for July isn’t so much what the Mets did and didn’t acquire at the trade deadline. It’s the decision three weeks earlier to bring both Manaea and Senga back before the All-Star break.

The Mets made that unorthodox decision, preferring not to wait the extra week like most teams do around the break, because of the precarious state of their rotation at the time. They had just survived a turn with both Justin Hagenman and Brandon Waddell in the mix. And they wanted the best read possible on Senga and Manaea ahead of the trade deadline.

With the benefit of hindsight, they wish they’d done it differently.

Senga was a mess after his return. It wasn’t just that he couldn’t recapture the topline form he’d shown before Alonso’s high throw led to his hamstring strain. He wasn’t even a viable big-league starter, earning a demotion to the minors in September to work on his mechanics. In retrospect, an extra rehab start in the minors in July might have prevented his minor-league starts in September.

“I wasn’t able to control my body the way I wanted to after the injury,” Senga said through interpreter Hiro Fujiwara on Sunday. “That showed up in the results.”

After his return, Senga pitched to a 5.90 ERA.

“Looking back on it, you had the injury, and then you’re coming back and we had the All-Star break. You’re full steam ahead, you come down, you build back up, and then the break is a lull,” assistant pitching coach Desi Druschel said. “It doesn’t seem like very much, but I think it has an impact in particular on pitchers.”

Manaea, too, struggled to locate his fastball at the top of the zone the way he had last season, leading to only brief flashes of competence within his starts. He got the ball on Sunday but wasn’t trusted to work out of a jam with two outs and two on in just the second inning.

Manaea’s ERA for the season was 5.64.

“If I performed half as good as I did last year,” Manaea said Sunday, “we’d be in a good spot.”

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When the media was allowed in the clubhouse after a September loss in Philadelphia, nearly every player sat at a locker. Typically, at this time, nearly 20 minutes after a game, players are shuffling in and out. On this day, there was only silence.

Earlier, Mendoza had talked in a postgame news conference about needing his players to fight.

They were MLB’s only team never to mount a ninth-inning comeback. Last year, they’d delivered eight of them, many in big games, to build momentum.

Where had that fight gone?

“We would’ve fixed it by now,” a club official said over the final weekend. “It is hard to wrap our heads around the why part of it.”

All year, the Mets touted their talent.

“In my heart of hearts, this is the most talented team I’ve ever played on,” Nimmo said. “After the trade-deadline acquisitions, I truly believed this was a team that could win the World Series.”

They didn’t even give themselves a chance.

Those well-regarded acquisitions at the trade deadline? Flops, for the most part. Those outstanding individual seasons from Soto, from Lindor, from Alonso? Footnotes now to the team’s overarching failure.

Last year was magic. This year was just an illusion.

(Top photo of Juan Soto: Lynne Sladky / Associated Press)