Waking up on April 22nd and realizing the New York Mets have dropped their 12th straight game doesn’t feel real. It feels like a bad dream, one that keeps replaying night after night, with no end in sight.
But as the losses pile up, the bigger issue is no longer just the losing, it’s understanding why. And more importantly, who deserves the blame.
Let’s start with manager Carlos Mendoza. Yes, he deserves scrutiny for in-game decisions, lineups, bullpen usage, game management. That comes with the job. But the bigger question is this: are these truly his decisions?
At some point, you have to ask whether a manager at this level can consistently make questionable calls without influence. These are not inexperienced players. This is Major League Baseball. The idea that poor decisions are happening in a vacuum feels unlikely. Increasingly, it appears those calls may be coming from above, driven more by front office philosophy than dugout instinct.
Rewind to 2024. Mendoza took over a team searching for direction. It wasn’t immediate, but he eventually brought that group together and led them to Game 6 of the NLCS. That team had something you can’t quantify: grit, chemistry, and belief. They played for each other, and it showed.
Then came 2025. The Mets were strong early, one of the better teams in baseball through the first couple of months. And then, everything unraveled. Quietly, steadily, and without a clear explanation. It wasn’t just a slump. It was a collapse. And again, it’s hard to pin that entirely on the manager when the shift felt deeper than what happens between the lines.
That leads us to the present.
The front office made a clear decision: dismantle the heart and soul of the roster and replace it with talent. On paper, that sounds like progress. But baseball isn’t played on paper.
Chemistry matters. Identity matters. The players who grind out at-bats, who hustle on routine plays, who understand the moment, that’s what builds winning teams. That’s what carried the Mets in 2024. And that doesn’t get replaced overnight.
This 2026 team has talent. No one is denying that. But they lack identity. They lack cohesion. And most importantly, they lack connection, to each other, to the fans, and to the city they represent.
And then there’s the elephant in the room: analytics.
Sabermetrics have undeniably changed the game. They provide valuable insight and a different lens through which to evaluate performance. But they were never meant to replace feel, instinct, and experience, they were meant to complement them.
Numbers don’t capture everything.
They didn’t predict the Mets’ improbable 2024 postseason run. They didn’t predict Pete Alonso delivering in the biggest moments. They didn’t measure heart, urgency, or resilience. Because those things can’t be calculated.
Yet it feels like decisions today are increasingly dictated by spreadsheets instead of situations. Matchups instead of momentum. Projections instead of presence.
And that brings us back to Mendoza.
He was given a cohesive group in 2024 and found success. Now, in 2026, he’s been handed an entirely different roster, a restructured coaching staff, and what appears to be a top-down system heavily influenced by David Stearns and his analytical approach.
If this continues, and if the Mets decide to move on from Mendoza, the question becomes: what changes?
Will the next manager truly manage? Or will they simply execute decisions made in the front office?
Because here’s the reality:
You cannot win baseball games from a corporate office inside Citi Field.
You can build a talented roster. You can optimize matchups. You can analyze every angle. But if you strip away identity, chemistry, and the human element of the game, you’re left with exactly what we’re seeing now.
A team without a pulse.
And a fan base that sees right through it.
