On an otherwise lovely Sunday afternoon, in the fifth inning of the 162nd and final game of the 2025 MLB regular season, New York Mets first baseman Pete Alonso stepped up to bat with the bases loaded and two outs. His team trailed the Miami Marlins, 4-0, in a last-chance, must-have game that the Mets needed to win to have any hope of making the playoffs.
This season, Alonso drove in 126 runs, set a new all-time Mets career home run record, and tied for the National League lead with 41 doubles (although, to be fair, he also led the National League by grounding into 23 double plays). And on Sunday, with the Mets’ season hanging by a thread, Alonso connected with an Edward Cabrera pitch so resolutely that the ball ricocheted off his bat and toward the left-center gap at 115.9 miles per hour—the hardest-hit ball of the entire Mets season.
Later that night, after the game, Alonso would tell reporters that as he swung, he “thought for sure it was a double and we were going to get rolling there.” (Indeed, based on its speed and direction, that shot had an expected batting average of .780, in theory.) But what actually happened was that Alonso’s hopeful heat-seeking missile beelined into the glove of Marlins outfielder Javier Sanoja, who seemed as surprised as anyone to have caught the third out. Alonso looked exasperated. The three Mets base runners were stranded. The game didn’t end there, but the Mets wouldn’t get any closer than that to a comeback.
With their 4-0 loss to the Marlins on Sunday, the Mets finished the year with a 83-79 record—one win shy of the number they needed to wrestle the last up-for-grabs wild-card berth away from the Cincinnati Reds. Just like that, the $340 million 2025 Mets officially missed the postseason altogether. In many ways, that Alonso at-bat aptly (and sadly) encapsulated so much about Mets baseball in 2025, a season defined by flashes of brilliance and odd flukes of physics and a frustrating inability to capitalize on opportunities right there for the taking when it mattered most. Even one hell of a crack of the bat from a star like Alonso couldn’t reverse the franchise’s astonishing downward spiral in the second half of this season. As things stand now, there’s a decent chance that by the time the Mets reconvene next year, Alonso—among others—could be gone.
All of this has made for a bewildering state of affairs. This time last season, the Mets were just beginning their magical, maniacal run to the National League Championship Series. Just last December, the Mets won the Juan Soto sweepstakes, signing the free agent for $765 million over 15 years and signaling that the team was all in and ready to win now. And as recently as a few months ago, the Mets were among the best and most joyous teams in baseball, sitting at 21 games over .500 and flipping bottles in the dugout with childlike glee.
But then the Mets drifted all the way out of playoff contention, a collapse that Jeff Passan described as “a disasterpiece” carried out by players whom Mike Francesa dismissed as “gutless bums.” What went so sideways? And what happens next?
Really, it’s hard to overstate the extent of this Mets collapse. On June 12, the Mets improved to 45-24 with a 4-3 win over the Nationals, earning the best record in baseball. They then proceeded to go 38-55 over the next three and a half months, including a 2-14 stretch in early August during which New York waved bye-bye for good to the NL East lead and a run of eight straight losses in the first half of September that put the wild card in jeopardy, too. Mets play-by-play guy Gary Cohen called it a “slow-motion backwards march” by the team. Francesa called it a “slow drip.” To one fed-up Mets vlogger, it was “a tedious, putrid, slow-motion car wreck of a season.” To me, it felt as though the Mets, once in full summer bloom, had withered on the vine, dropping dead leaves to the ground to get trampled.
On one SNY broadcast, the fellas shared a stat that will be forever imprinted in my memory: Of all the MLB franchises to hit the 21-games-over-.500 mark over the years, only two (2) teams in history wound up finishing the season with a worse record than this year’s 83-79 Mets. One was the 1977 Chicago Cubs. And the other? The 1905 Cleveland Naps. (We all get the 1921 Akron Groomsmen we deserve, you know?) When it comes to unfortunately memorable stats and the 2025 Mets, though, nothing comes close to this one: When they trailed after eight innings this season, New York’s record was a cool 0-70.
If you ask me, that’s borderline impressive, man, but on Monday, Mets top executive David Stearns had a less amused take. “It’s very difficult for me to explain,” Stearns told reporters one day after the Mets’ elimination. “That’s an inexplicable stat, and I’m not going to sit here and make up an answer for it.” Had any one of those 70 games gone a little bit differently—if the Mets hadn’t stranded those runners against Houston, or if Brandon Nimmo and Starling Marte hadn’t struck out in the bottom of the ninth against the Nats, or if Jacob Young hadn’t randomly morphed into 2006-vintage Endy Chavez to rob Francisco Alvarez—the Mets might be gearing up for their first playoff game on Tuesday. Instead, they’re left to stew from the sofa, just like their fans have been for months.
One strange feature of this season was that while the Mets routinely struggled to win close games, they often rebounded with mega-offensive showings in which every bat seemed on fire and every swing ran up the score. Soto finished the 2025 campaign with 43 home runs, 38 stolen bases, and an OBP of .396—about as sterling a showing as anyone could have hoped for when he signed his nine-figure contract with New York. Still, on Sunday night, a dejected Soto described his first stint with the Mets as “a failure.” Team captain and shortstop Francisco Lindor, who knocked in 31 long balls this year (11 of them on leadoff at-bats!), shared a similar self-assessment: “I failed,” Lindor told reporters after the game, tears in his eyes.
While this is unlikely to make Soto or Lindor feel better—I can report that it certainly doesn’t soothe me—the truth of the 2025 Mets season is that it wasn’t so much the bats that ultimately led the team’s letdown. It was the starting pitching … or lack thereof.
On June 12, during that same win over Washington that put the Mets 21 games over .500, a shaky throw from Alonso to pitcher Kodai Senga as he covered first base led the new Mets hurler to lunge awkwardly and strain his hamstring, an injury from which Senga still hasn’t fully recovered. In hindsight, that botched play marked the beginning of the Mets’ long trudge to the end.
A few days later, Tylor Megill busted his elbow. (He recently underwent Tommy John surgery.) And by the end of June, things got worse when Griffin Canning popped his Achilles. Meanwhile, David Peterson was in the midst of morphing from an All-Star into a blinking question mark. Stearns’s attempt to perk up the pitching staff at the trade deadline by picking up Ryan Helsley, among others, backfired when Helsley performed less like a closer and more like a hired saboteur. At one point in August, he blew three consecutive saves.
Back in June, the ERA of the Mets pitching staff was one of the best in baseball. In the months that followed, it was among the worst. By the end of September, the Mets rotation remained as chaotic and unreliable as ever, with the team relying heavily on rookies and reclamation projects. Starting on the mound for Sunday’s make-or-break final game against the Marlins was Sean Manaea, who lasted all of five outs before being followed by a procession of seven other guys. (You know things aren’t going great when your closer gets called in for two innings during the bottom of the fifth with the team down four runs.)
“From a roster construction perspective, on the run prevention side of the ball,” said Stearns on Monday—one of like six or seven times he used the phrase “run prevention” in his presser—“um, we didn’t do a good enough job of fortifying our team when we had injuries mid-season. … We went from a very good team to a team that wasn’t good enough.”
The Mets’ implosion this year was so complete, and so downright leisurely, that New Yorkers had plenty of time as it was happening to compare this nightmare to the GOAT Mets meltdown. That would be 2007, forever the benchmark in infuriating futility. That year, the Mets blew a seven-game lead with 17 games remaining and lost their playoff spot to the dreaded Phillies, scarring a generation of Mets fans.
There certainly are similarities. Both 2007 and 2025 featured Mets teams that were coming off runs to the NLCS the previous year, heightening everyone’s expectations and making the dismantling feel that much worse. Both seasons ended in free fall, with the Marlins all too happy to steal a win and seal the deal on the final day. Seeing old Mets ace Tom Glavine give up seven runs in that first inning of Game 162 was torture—but then again, so was seeing the absolute patchwork of mid pitching that Mets coach Carlos Mendoza stitched together on this year’s gotta-win Closing Day.
On a daily basis, though, the two seasons felt different. The 2007 crash was destabilizing, even violent: It felt like the very ground underfoot was crumbling into oblivion as the sure-thing Mets were ousted from the playoffs in a span of just a couple of weeks by a gangbusters Phillies team that went 13-4 down the stretch. This year’s Mets descent was much slower and far more pathetic. And it was interrupted every now and again by flashes of Mets-adjacent whimsy—Katia Lindor playing the national anthem on her violin before her husband ripped a dinger in her honor; SNY broadcast maestro John DeMarsico winning an Emmy for TV magic like this—that made me briefly disbelieve that my favorite team was in extreme danger.
Unlike the 2007 Phillies, this year’s eventual usurper, the Cincinnati Reds, didn’t so much chase the Mets down as simply wait them out. (The Reds, whose $119 million payroll constitutes about 35 percent of the Mets’, finished their season 25-26 to back into the wild card.) And unlike the 2007 Mets—who would have made the playoffs back then if they had the additional four wild-card berths we have today—this year’s iteration of the team couldn’t even accomplish that much.
That 2007 team infamously followed up its collapse by running it back, which led to another all-time tailspin in 2008 (complete with the requisite terrible loss to the Marlins in the last game of the season, natch). For the modern Mets, this year’s damage is already done. All they can do now is try not to let such sordid franchise history—call it back-to-back whacks—rear its head once again.
In the end, I sure was a sucker. Maybe it’s because I was spoiled last season by a Mets team that just kept making big moments happen. Maybe it’s because I was slow to realize that the first half of this season wasn’t walking through that door. Maybe I spent too much time watching wholesome footage of the guys in the SNY production truck selecting the most vivid angles of Edwin Díaz striding to the mound, or Alvarez pausing in disbelief at his own moon shot. Maybe I got too good at tuning out the gloomiest and most Eeyore-core Mets fans, the ones who are always hemming and hawing about some meaningless loss in May like it’s an elimination game. (It turns out I owe the gloomiest and most Eeyore-core fans a huge apology.)
Whatever the reason, for too long I kept ya-gotta-believing that, in the end, the Mets would find their way into the playoffs, where anything can happen, and does. On Saturday night, after a 5-0 Mets win over Miami staved off elimination for one more day, Alonso merrily outlined some superstitious choices he’d made in a TV interview. “I’m wearing Juan Soto’s socks,” he said. “I put on Francisco Lindor’s eye black. And then I used Brandon Nimmo’s lotion.” It was around this point that my brain was taken over by Jimmy Dugan in A League of Their Own growling, “We’re gonna win!” Unfortunately, Jimmy Dugan was wrong.
The 2025 Mets are no longer with us. Uncle Stevie Cohen has issued his official “I owe you an apology” eulogy tweet. How can the organization ensure that the 2026 Mets improve upon both the distant and the recent past? There are the tentpole pieces to keep building around, like Soto and Lindor and, I would argue, the finger-wagging Diaz, who will probably opt out of his contract to test the market, but who ought to be a priority for the Mets to re-sign. Then there are the young guns: Nolan McLean and Brandon Sproat showed that they can hang in the big leagues, while Jonah Tong, still hella raw (and totally mismanaged by the desperate Mets, poor guy), has fun potential. Brett Baty was a difference-maker whenever he was in the lineup (which is probably why I keep seeing his name pop up as trade bait). Ronny Mauricio is poised to take on a bigger role. If I don’t have something nice to say about Jeff McNeil and Ryne Stanek, I won’t say anything at all.
There’s a big name missing above—the polar bear in the room. When the Mets’ season ended on Sunday night, it took no time at all for the future of the Mets’ biggest, bounciest boy to become front and center. Less than 24 hours earlier, Alonso had been busy showing off Soto’s socks to the world. Now, bummed and frank in his season’s-over scrum, Alonso confirmed what everyone had already assumed: Yes, he’ll be opting out of his Mets contract.
Whether this means he’s leaving is another story. Will the Mets brass seek to showcase its hyperrational hedgie ruthlessness by moving all the way on from Alonso and reallocating that spend into, say, run prevention? Or will Cohen choose to quietly sign Alonso to a loud contract and keep the team’s star corps intact? It’s likely that the Mets’ interest in Alonso is tied to his willingness to accept a DH role, just as it’s likely that Alonso’s interest in the Mets is tied to their willingness to offer him more money than some other team. Watching Stearns’s presser on Monday, there was a clear difference in the way he answered questions about Mendoza—“Yeah, Carlos is coming back next year”—and Alonso. “Pete is a great Met,” Stearns said. “We’ll see where the offseason goes.”
Wondering if Alonso will be a Met next season is far from a new phenomenon; I’ve been steeling myself for the sight of him in some weird other jersey for years. But even if I “get” why this might be goodbye, it’s a bummer to think that the party may have already ended—and during a season without a proper goggles’n’bottles celebration, to boot. Alonso may be a certified Florida Man, but he’s also a homegrown Met through and through: a thicc-necked icon, a culture fuckin’ carrier. Guys like him don’t come along all too often, even if players like him do. A little over a week ago, after the Mets’ final home game of the regular season at Citi Field, a reporter asked Alonso if it had entered his head that this could be his final curtain call in Queens as a Met. “If I had a nickel for how many times everyone in this room has said that,” Alonso said, “I’d be really, really rich.” He added, “I’m a firm believer that the right thing is going to happen. You can’t necessarily control destiny.”
On Sunday, the Mets did control destiny for a time, but they couldn’t control their own game—even when they tried cranking the dial up to 115.9 miles per hour. When it was all over, Alonso was spotted in the visitors clubhouse with a beer and a stogie—“creature comforts for a mourning player,” observed MLB.com. I wondered if maybe he would keep Soto’s socks as a small souvenir. There is no joy in Metsville these days, and if I had a nickel for every time the Mets came from behind in the ninth inning to win a game in 2025, I’d have $0.00. There’s no truer accounting than that.
Katie Baker
Katie Baker is a senior features writer at The Ringer who has reported live from NFL training camps, a federal fraud trial, and Mike Francesa’s basement. Her children remain unimpressed.