The eighth inning of Thursday’s loss to the Washington Nationals summed up the stunning, collective disintegration of the 2026 New York Mets.
On a day when enough had gone right that the Mets had a one-run lead and their three back-end relievers available to hold it, one of them faltered yet again.
This time, it was Luke Weaver, who surrendered a two-run, go-ahead homer to Nationals shortstop CJ Abrams that put the Mets down a run.
Still, trailing by a run in the bottom of the eighth, the Mets received a gift: The Nationals once again decided to pitch to Juan Soto. He rewarded their generosity with a ringing double high off the center field wall that put the tying run in scoring position with no one out and the No. 3, 4, and 5 hitters in their lineup coming up. The tide was turning.
Then it went back out: Austin Slater grounded out. Mark Vientos lined out. Tyrone Taylor lined out. The chance slid away and so did another game. The Mets lost another series. They will have the worst record in baseball on the first of May.
“Not good enough, obviously. Not a secret,” manager Carlos Mendoza said. “That’s not gonna do it. We’ve gotta start winning series. That’s not good enough.”
As the Mets suffered through a 12-game losing streak, then continued to sputter after it ended, two other struggling teams in major markets fired their managers. Mendoza’s future has been a topic of whispered conversations around the industry and on-screen conversations beamed around the country.
But neither Steve Cohen nor David Stearns nor any players have pointed to Mendoza’s leadership as a problem in recent weeks. If anything, Cohen and Stearns have indicated a desire to be patient, and an understanding that if change is needed, Mendoza is not the only place to make it.
As of late Thursday afternoon, as reporters filed into the Mets clubhouse where players solemnly packed bags for Anaheim, no indications surfaced that a change was coming. Indeed, that eighth inning – set up in part by the run that scored after Mendoza asked MJ Melendez to bunt against a lefty in the sixth despite Melendez homering earlier against a righty – made another argument that the Mets' problems are more structural than managerial.
For example: The man who stepped to bat after Soto doubled was Slater, the second-latest right-handed hitter added to the Mets dilapidated roster this week, pinch-hitting for the lefty Melendez. The Mets added Slater to their roster earlier this week after he struggled in early-season duty with the Marlins. In his second at-bat in the last week, and second ever as a Met, Slater grounded out to shortstop.
Then came Vientos, hitting cleanup because someone had to do it. Luis Robert Jr. hit the injured list, where fellow candidates Francisco Lindor and Jorge Polanco are also currently at. The day game after the night game was Francisco Alvarez’s day off. In fairness to Vientos, he had come through with a go-ahead hit two innings earlier. But this time, he lined out to second. Vientos is hitting .236 with a .638 OPS this season. League average is .242 and .714.
The Mets’ last chance was Taylor, also picked for platoon advantage, but by no means a part of this team’s initial vision for the heart of its order. Taylor hit the ball well but lined out to left field. Soto never moved. The Mets are similarly stuck.
So far, Stearns has been as patient with his lineup as he has been with his manager. In giving Tommy Pham a shot, then trying Slater instead, and cycling recently acquired infielder Eric Wagaman onto the roster to replace Robert on Thursday, Stearns has only made moves when forced to do so around the margins. Depending on how the Mets play over the next few weeks, his relative patience will look either admirable or unconscionable.
He and the Mets did make another move for a hitter Thursday, claiming veteran infielder Andy Ibáñez off waivers from the Athletics. He can play second, third, and first and has also played some major league games in the outfield in parts of six big league seasons. He has 28 career homers and a .688 career OPS.
Exactly how they will use him remains to be seen, and he is hardly the only player on the roster whose path to contributing is not clear. David Peterson and Sean Manaea, both of whom struggled in the Mets’ 14-2 loss to the Nationals Wednesday night, are also in sustained limbo.
The Mets’ willingness to give both repeated chances to rediscover their old form made sense in the first few weeks of the season, just as it did with Kodai Senga. The sample was small and the urgency less great.
But Peterson has not missed enough bats and Manaea’s stuff has not been explosive enough to give him any margin for error. And as the sample has grown, the urgency has, too.
The Mets placed Senga on the injured list with lumbar spine inflammation this week, the most comfortable answer to the question of how to remove the struggling veteran from the rotation without giving him away.
Manaea is being paid $25 million this year. Even for Cohen, that is a lot of money to pay someone cut in May. Plus, Manaea at his best was a crucial part of the Mets rotation that somehow carried them to the National League Championship Series in 2024.
But the Mets are also through churning through middle relief options these days: Reserving a spot for a struggling starter-turned-long-man in Manaea means losing one that could be used for the kind of helpful short reliever the Mets need. Peterson appeared to be a reliable long reliever during his seven innings of relief work over two outings last week. But the Mets already have a reliable long reliever in Tobias Myers. Traditionally constructed teams do not usually carry two.
And yet, even with all those shortcomings, the Mets still found themselves six outs away from a series win Thursday afternoon before these 2026 symptoms surfaced again.
“It just feels like there’s a little bit of a culture that’s just adapted to it unintentionally. It’s just how winning and losing goes,” Weaver said. “… Sleep is lost. Your mind wanders. You just kind of get into a fixation you don’t really need to be in. I think the answers are kind of in those words: It’s simplifying the process and maybe doing less. Maybe it’s less reps. Maybe it’s more about just enjoying why you do this for a living, trying to find your inner kid and the joy of why you play the game.”
Some things are improving. 23-year-old Carson Benge, for example, seems to be learning how to contribute in the majors the way he did in the minors early in his career. Mets hitting coaches advised Benge to close his stance a bit and the change seems to be working. The rookie is 8 for his last 24 in his last seven games.
“I feel like I can get in [swing] positions that would take me longer if I was more open," Benge said. “So it just kind of cuts down time.”
And Thursday’s starter Freddy Peralta, who had only finished the sixth inning once in his first six Mets starts, found a way to push through the mental block he admitted had been forming around that frame.
“One thing I know for sure is we are all preparing the right way here,” Peralta said after allowing one earned run in six innings Thursday. “… Unfortunately, things are not going our way. But I want to say that we are preparing to win some games and we are trying hard.”
Maybe that cloud of pressure Weaver admitted has settled in over the Mets can only be vanquished with drastic action. Maybe, and maybe soon, Cohen and/or Stearns will decide that firing Mendoza is their best chance to jettison it. Maybe a roster shakeup of some kind, perhaps via trade, will feel more likely to help. For now, they are not changing anything and will begin May in a state of prolonged crisis. Nothing has changed for their Mets, either.
