Winning Road Trip Still Triggers Mets 'Lost Season' Fears

The New York Mets just ended a nine-game road trip with a winning record. They have been OK - not great, not very good, but not brutally bad - since their 12-game losing streak. In fact, in the 17 games since the skid ended, the Mets have the same record as the Los Angeles Dodgers and San Diego Padres, the titans of the National League West.

And yet, as the Mets come home for a six-game homestand, it feels like this just-concluded road trip and the last two-plus weeks have underlined the increasingly hopeless nature of their season instead of providing glimmers of optimism. In fact, the Mets went 5-4 on their road trip, are 8-9 in their last 17 games - and still arrived back in New York with the worst record in baseball.

Welcome to the Mets, where even winning is a reminder of how much losing is likely still to come.

Mets Offense Remains Meager

The Mets went 5-4 against the Los Angeles Angels, Colorado Rockies and Arizona Diamondbacks, which is nice but also the bare minimum for how anyone should perform against two teams who should be relegated and the perpetually mediocre Diamondbacks, who are 347-341 since the start of the 2022 season.

It was also a 5-4 trip that could have been much more successful. The Mets were 4-1 following a 10-5 win on Wednesday but lost three of the final four games, including the last two tilts against the Diamondbacks

The final four games provided reminders of the Mets' potentially irrecoverable flaws, especially on offense. The Mets scored just eight runs in those four games, including six in regulation (they scored twice in the 10th inning of a 3-1 win Friday night). Juan Soto and Bo Bichette, the last above-average hitters left standing in a depleted lineup, went 1-for-27 over the four games.

They'll get better, probably.

Perhaps Mark Vientos, who had at least three potential homers perish on the warning track inside Chase Field over the weekend, will have another breakout week upon returning to the friendlier confines of Citi Field. And rookie Carson Benge (who is batting .286 with a .776 OPS in his last 13 games after hitting .162 with a .505 OPS in his first 24 big league games) has looked increasingly comfortable at the plate.

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But with Francisco Lindor (left calf), Jorge Polanco (Achilles, wrist) and Luis Robert Jr. (back) all out indefinitely, the Mets are what they've shown to be thus far - not only one of the worst offensive teams in the majors but one of the worst offensive teams in team history.

The Mets have scored four runs or fewer 31 times, the most in the majors and four such games ahead of the San Francisco Giants and Cleveland Guardians. Their 139 runs through 40 games are the second-fewest in the majors, nine more than the Giants, and the fewest for the Mets through 40 games since the 1981 team (135 runs). The only other teams in franchise history to score fewer runs through 40 games were a quartet of pre-1969 squads. That's not great company.

David Stearns' Winter Moves Haunt The Mets

This is, of course, an indictment of the four-dimensional chess David Stearns pretended to play over the winter, when he dumped franchise icons Pete Alonso, Jeff McNeil, and Brandon Nimmo all in the name of run prevention and apparently trying to change the Mets' culture.

Turns out getting rid of the durable Alonso and Nimmo and replacing them in the field with the injury-prone Polanco and Robert Jr. was a bad idea.

Stearns and his online acolytes will likely point out that the Mets have been better at run prevention this year. The Mets are 10th in the majors with a 3.85 ERA, appreciably better than last year's 4.03 mark, which ranked 18th. They also have a 3.46 ERA over the last 15 days.

Of course, the 170 runs the Mets have allowed through 40 games are 40 more runs than they allowed through 40 games last year, when their pitchers had a 2.90 ERA. So what happens if the recent improvements don't hold and there's regression within a largely rebuilt staff?

The Mets have also surrendered 17 unearned runs this season, one more than they gave up through 40 games last year. Their fielding run value, per Statcast, is minus-3. They were at minus-5 last year.

The only Mets with a fielding run value above plus-1 are Lindor and Benge, who both have a fielding run value of plus-2. You know who else has a fielding run value of plus-2? Pete Alonso.

They also fail the eye test as administered by keyboard jockeys and 11-time Gold Glove winners alike, with fill-in or out-of-position players providing reminders they are performing as fill-ins or out of position at the worst possible times.

Thought Keith H made a pointed comment today re Mets' poor defense. "We've seen it happen a lot this year, where the Mets have been burned with people playing out of position."

— John Harper (@NYNJHarper) May 10, 2026

The Mets made three errors in Sunday's 5-1 loss, including two throwing errors charged to third baseman Andy Ibanez. a recent waiver claim playing over the left-handed hitting Brett Baty against southpaw Eduardo Rodriguez.

No offense to Ibanez, but his presence on the roster is a reminder that Stearns' moves continue to haunt the Mets. Austin Slater and Ibanez, who was signed as a free agent in late April, batted fourth and sixth while playing in place of Baty and Benge against the left-handed Jose Quintana in Thursday's loss to the Rockies before going 0-for-7 as the third- and sixth-place batters Sunday. At least Benge made it back to the lineup Sunday.

Making moves at the margin worked in 2024, when the Mets overcame their 24-35 start to reach the NL Championship Series. But that was a reasonably healthy team with a homegrown core that had proven it could handle the highs and lows of New York.

These Mets are a banged-up, disparate collection of newcomers, most of whom will be short-timers in New York. They also have the disadvantage of performing in what has thus far been a loaded NL, where eight teams have winning records, including the entire NL Central.

The Mets are eight games out of the last wild card spot, which is an almost incomprehensible deficit in the second week of May for a team with these resources. Even if overachieving teams such as the St. Louis Cardinals (23-17 with a plus-3 run differential) and Cincinnati Reds (22-19 with a negative-33 run differential) regress to the mean, where is the Mets' path back to contention?

Stearns should probably mimic Giants president of baseball operations Buster Posey, who began overhauling his mismashed roster Saturday by dealing Gold Glove catcher Patrick Bailey to the Guardians. USA Today reported Sunday the Giants are also eager to deal underachieving and overpriced veterans such as Willy Adames, Matt Chapman and Rafael Devers.

And who knows? Maybe Monday's news that top prospect A.J. Ewing - who has played just 12 games at Triple-A Syracuse and 58 games above Single-A ball - is being promoted to the bigs for Tuesday's series opener against the Detroit Tigers is the start of a retooling/rebuilding/some kind of corporate buzzword Stearns will use as a synonym for a retooling or rebuilding.

A cynic might suggest the faster Ewing begins performing alongside Benge in the majors, the faster Stearns can spin the idea the future will be better than the present. And if Ewing can't spark the worst team in baseball and his development is endangered by the rapid promotion? Then this is another Stearns move that reminds us these are the Mets, who always have further downward to travel, even in the big league basement.

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This story was originally published May 12, 2026 at 12:16 PM.