The New York Mets came into the 2025 season with World Series aspirations. And could you blame them? They’re coming off a 2024 season in which they went on an unexpected run to the NLCS, in which it took the eventual World Series champion Los Angeles Dodgers six games to dispatch the Mets. The 2025 season also comes off the heels of the Mets reeling in the biggest free agent in MLB history, in superstar slugger Juan Soto, to an unprecedented 15 year, $765M free agent contract. Not to mention retaining, at the time, staff ace Sean Manaea, and homegrown star Pete Alonso. The combination of those things put the Mets towards the very top of many preseason lists for World Series contenders and picks for World Series champions.
Lets just say, on September 26th, the Mets are very much in playoff positioning, but it has been a long, hard, and arduous road to get to this point. The Mets started this season with a 45-24 record through 69 games, which was the best in baseball. Their record since that start has been 37-53, which is only better than the lowly White Sox, Nationals, Twins, and Rockies. It’s hard to believe a team that was 21 games above .500 in the middle of June and looking like a surefire 100+ win team, is now heading into the final weekend of the regular season with 82 wins and a one game lead for the final wild card berth. The pitching has been dreadful, the offense has been extremely inconsistent to say the least, and president of baseball operations David Stearns’ trade deadline acquisitions have not exactly worked out the way the team had hoped and planned.
The Mets came into the season with a smoke and mirrors starting rotation that outperformed every metric through the first two months of the season. Most “experts” and fans knew it wasn’t sustainable. The Mets had a starting rotation ERA of 2.79 as of June 13th, with most of the starts coming from Griffin Canning, Tylor Megill, Clay Holmes, David Peterson, Kodai Senga, and Paul Blackburn. It was a very makeshift rotation after the spring training injuries to the aforementioned Manaea and free agent signee, Frankie Montas, who Stearns signed to a two year, $34M free agent contract. Soon after June 13th the Mets would suffer major blows to their rotation including season ending injuries to Canning and Megill, a significant injury to Senga, and Holmes hitting wall when he got to the middle innings of starts. The return of Frankie Montas didn’t help mitigate any of that damage as Montas quickly pitched like one of the worst pitchers in baseball. Sean Manaea would soon follow Montas back into the rotation right before the All Star break, and would wind up having a decent July despite not going deep. Once the calendar flipped to August, Manaea would significantly regress and Montas would injure his UCL, shutting down his season. Senga would return to the rotation but he hasn’t been the same since returning from his injury. Peterson, who earned his first career All Star Game selection, had a masterful first half, before he himself would crater after the All Star break and buoy the starting rotation as well.
All these injuries and regression would cause the Mets to eventually call up not one, not two, but all three of their highly touted & prized pitching prospects in Nolan McLean, Jonah Tong, and Brandon Sproat to help patch up the leaks. McLean has made eight starts, Tong has made five, and Sproat has made three. For the most part the results have been great. McLean looks like the future staff ace composing a 2.06 ERA through his first 48 big league innings. Tong has also flashed his goods at times, but has also had a rougher go of it, having been mauled by the Texas Rangers in one his starts where he didn’t make it out of the first inning, and a bad start in his most recent outing on the northside of Chicago. He had an uneven outing versus Cincinnati, while having two great starts against Miami and San Diego. Sproat looked like an absolute ace in his first career start in Cincinnati, where he carried a no-hitter into the sixth inning, where he would run out of gas and eventually get outdueled by Reds ace Hunter Greene. He followed that up with a masterful six shutout innings against the Rangers, before he would offer up a poor showing against the Nationals in his most recent outing. The three prospects have been doing their part to right the ship and keep the Mets afloat into the postseason but it still doesn’t discount the fact that the Mets’ starting rotation ERA since June 13th, when the season began to go downhill, is a ghastly 5.17. Only the Twins, Nationals, and Rockies own worst starting rotation ERA’s than the Mets since that date. Unfathomable when you think about it.
The Mets head into their final series of the year in Miami against the Marlins holding onto measly one & two game leads in the wild card race over the Cincinnati Reds and Arizona Diamondbacks, respectively. This is a Marlins franchise that knows very well how to end a Mets season in disappointment. The most infamous being the 2007 season, where the Mets famously blew a seven game division lead in 17 games to the Philadelphia Phillies, with the Marlins taking two of three games from the Mets at Shea Stadium to close out the season and keep the Mets out of the postseason. The Marlins did the same thing the following year, taking two of three from the Mets to close out the 2008 season, once again keeping the Mets out of the postseason. The Marlins (77-82) were only officially eliminated from postseason contention on Thursday, which is a testament to how well they’ve played over the second half of the season and the never give up attitude the team has adopted. All Mets fans know it will not be an easy task for the Mets to sweep or at the very least take two of three in this series to ensure they make the postseason. It also doesn’t help matters that the Marlins are planning to deploy their three best starters over the weekend in Sandy Alcantara, Eury Perez, and Edward Cabrera. The Marlins will certainly not make things easy on the Mets, as the boys from Queens aim to capture their second straight postseason trip.
The Reds will finish their season in Milwaukee, while the Diamondbacks finish up in San Diego. Both Milwaukee and San Diego have clinched postseason berths, but Milwaukee has also clinched a first round BYE into the NLDS, so they’ll want to keep their players fresh and ready with the layoff they’ll have coming. San Diego, while two games back of the Cubs in the wild card race, still have a shot of chasing down the Cubs for home field advantage in their first round wild card series if they can sweep Arizona and the St.Louis Cardinals could pull off a sweep of the Cubs in Chicago. That should help out the Mets’ cause going into the weekend. The Mets do not own the tiebreaker over either of the Reds or DBacks, thanks to dropping the season series to Cincy and having a worse intradivisional record than Arizona. So that means the Mets must finish one game clear of each team by the time Sunday’s games end to ensure they make the postseason. A 2-1 weekend in Miami would eliminate Arizona and would force Cincinnati to sweep their series against the Brewers. A sweep in favor of the Mets puts all of this to bed as there would be nothing the Reds or DBacks could do to catch the Mets. A losing weekend for the Mets and that very well may spell doom on the 2025 season as we know it.
World Series aspirations have turned into simply postseason aspirations with three games to go in the season. It is one of the more unlikely and bizarre collapses from a team that was doing so well the first half of the season and has since cratered in the second half. To go from the best record in the sport in mid-June and a five game lead for the division, to trying to scrape across any extra wins they can get in the final week and trying to stave off the Reds and Diamondbacks is such a fall from grace for a team with the caliber of stars on their team and a payroll north of $330 million. If this team does miss out on the playoffs, you could very well be looking at manager Carlos Mendoza being shown the door, even after such a successful rookie campaign as manager.
I personally would not get rid of Mendoza under any circumstance. He wasn’t dealt a great hand with his pitching to start the season and helped curate great results out of what he had available to him until Montas and Manaea got healthy. The offense sputtered to begin the season (especially with runners in scoring position (RISP)), but eventually turned it around and now boasts four players with 25+ home runs and two 30/30 players, along with slow and marginal improvement from the young players. The choice to convince Stearns to finally call up the pitching prospects has proved to be a shrewed but wise move to help stabilize the rotation during the stretch run and before the team really tossed away their chances. But when a team the caliber of the Mets starts so great and possibly “chokes” away a postseason spot on the final weekend, someone will need to answer for it with their job. Like Mendoza, Stearns is in his second season with the team, but it will not be him after the improvements with the team he has made, plus helping further build up the teams minor league depth. Plus, executives tend to get longer leashes with their jobs. I believe, like with Stearns, it’s not going to be Mendoza as he has the respect of the clubhouse and has been doing everything possible to keep this out of control train on track. With that being said, you very well may be looking at pitching coach Jeremy Hefner or hitting coaches Eric Chavez and/or Jeremy Barnes exiting the organization if this team misses out on the playoffs.
All three coaches are very well liked in the clubhouse but do have tenure with the team, where making a change at their positions could be the route the team needs to move in to get the results they expect and to get further than they’ve already been before. The Mets of course need more depth for this team but that’s something to worry about in the postseason. Given the regression in performance between Manaea, Peterson, and Senga, there’s reason to believe that Hefner will be the one who’s job is lost. The players themselves can help possibly negate those worries by sweeping the Marlins this weekend in Miami and clinching a trip to Los Angeles for another wild card series.
Brandon Sproat is the announced starter against Sandy Alcantara in Miami on Friday night but the Mets have yet to announce their pitching plans the rest of the weekend. There’s the possibility the Mets may call up fireballing relief pitcher Dylan Ross from Triple-A Syracuse as soon as Saturday, to help out in the bullpen. Ross has made 28 appearances at Triple-A and has a 1.69 ERA, to go along with 39 strikeouts across 32 innings pitched. The only caveat is Ross has walked 22 batters, giving him a 6.2 BB/9 rate. The Mets may also choose to bring back up Kodai Senga, who was demoted to Triple A three weeks ago to work on his mechanics and get right. Saturday would be a spot where Manaea and/or Holmes would pitch, but both pitchers came in for relief in Wednesday’s lopsided loss to the Cubs. They each tossed a single inning, with Manaea tossing 16 pitches to Holmes’ 14. Those could be considered each of theirs throw days and thus keep them on track to pitch again on Saturday. Peterson had a disastrous outing on Tuesday in Chicago, where he only threw 42 pitches across 1.1innings, while giving up five runs, all earned, on five hits & two walks. Peterson is the logical and likely candidate to oppose Edward Cabrera on Sunday given he’ll be on the standard four days’ rest and only threw those 42 pitches in his previous outing. One can only hope that if that is the case, Peterson is quickly able to put that bad Chicago outing behind him and rediscover the pitcher he was in the first half of the season.
Can the Mets stare ghosts from their past (the Miami Marlins to close out a season) right in their eyes and not flinch? Or will this weekend be another nightmare filled finish to a season for Mets fans that have seen and been through it all already? With three games to go in the season, a one game wild card lead, and a pitching staff with enough leaky holes to make a sponge blush, can the Mets right the ship in the most crucial of times and get themselves into the postseason where they belong? Only time will tell, but if this team flunks their most important test yet, we could see wholesale changes all over the organization. Steve Cohen didn’t amass his billions by being nice and not being cutthroat.
BroadwayToFlushing.com 
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