There was no slow-motion crash down the standings like last season. The New York Mets, baseball's most disappointing team a year ago, started 2026 terribly, played poorly in the middle of the summer, then showed enough of a glimmer of hope late to make you wonder what could have been. For the second straight year, the team with baseball's second-highest payroll will be watching from home in October.
The Mets were officially eliminated from postseason contention with Monday's loss to Pete Alonso's Baltimore Orioles. "You can't necessarily predict things and have things work out in a perfect manner sometimes," Alonso said about his former team after returning to Citi Field with the O's earlier this week (via MLB.com). "Sometimes you have a lot of talent and it just doesn't work out for whatever reason.
Just based on experience, I think in the future they're going to be fine." What went wrong? Francisco Lindor and Juan Soto both had multiple stints on the injured list. Clay Holmes broke his leg on a bad-luck comebacker.
Kodai Senga was again injured and ineffective (as a starter). The last generation of homegrown players -- Francisco Alvarez, Brett Baty, Mark Vientos -- again failed to take that next step in their careers and, in the case of Baty and Vientos, may have played their way out of Queens. The farm system took a step back as well.
On top of that, POBO David Stearns simply had one of the worst offseasons of any executive in recent memory. Just about every move could be (and was) defended at the time, but it is a results-based business, and the results are about as bad as it gets. Here are New York's most significant offseason pickups.
This is L after L after L. Although he was a fan favorite and a franchise icon, you needn't try hard to defend letting Alonso leave given his age (31), contract demands (five years and $155 million), and the aging curve for righty-hitting/righty-throwing first basemen (pretty bad). Replacing him with Polanco, who had never played first base and had been healthy and productive at the same time for about five months in the previous three seasons, was a colossal error before he even took the field.
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