Laura Albanese: Mets' inexplicable 11-game skid has reached cosmic proportions
The Mets' Luis Torrens reacts after striking out swinging during the 10th inning of a game against the Chicago Cubs on Sunday in Chicago. Credit: AP/Nam Y. Huh
CHICAGO — It’s the type of stretch that defies understanding and spits in the face of probability. It has fans on social media asking if the Mets are cursed, the implication being that this team is not just bad, it’s cosmically bad.
It’s not only that the team with the second-highest payroll in baseball dropped its 11th straight game on Sunday — 2-1 in 10 innings to the Cubs at Wrigley Field, if that matters at all — it’s the truly stunning myriad ways they’ve done it.
Sometimes their starting pitching fails. Sometimes it’s their defense. Their hitting has been consistently nonexistent, but on Sunday, for a little variety, it was closer Devin Williams who took the fall.
“Sometimes baseball is on our side and sometimes baseball is not on our side,” Francisco Lindor said. “This feeling sucks. It’s not a good feeling . . . We’re professionals and we’ve got to find a way out of it.”
You can call this last loss rock bottom, but the truth is there could be farther to fall.
The Mets entered the day hitting .203 and pitching to a 6.25 ERA during their losing streak. “When you play in one-run games,” as they did on Sunday, “you have to be perfect,” manager Carlos Mendoza said.
And the Mets this season have been the opposite of that. They are 7-15, tied with the Royals for MLB’s worst record, and are eight games behind NL East-leading Atlanta. They have gone 45-70 since mid-June of 2025.
Their loss was its own special kind of torment — almost as if it were specifically optimized to take a maximal mental toll.
Here is an incomplete list of insults the Mets suffered in the last two innings alone:
1. The offense no-showed again, but MJ Melendez’s fifth-inning homer meant they at least had a 1-0 lead going into the ninth. Williams struck out three in the inning, but with a runner on first and one out, he left a fastball middle-middle to none other than former Met Michael Conforto, who tied it with a double to right.
2. With runners on second and third and two outs in the 10th, Luis Torrens, working with a 1-and-1 count, swung through two straight balls to strand them. The Mets went 1-for-9 with runners in scoring position.
3. With the winning run at third and one out in the bottom of the 10th, Mendoza made the poor decision to have Craig Kimbrel pitch to contact-hitting savant Nico Hoerner instead of issuing an intentional walk. Hoerner’s sacrifice fly was all the Cubs needed for the walk-off.
Afterward, Mendoza said there was no point in setting up the double play because Hoerner would take second and one of the Cubs’ best hitters was on deck, Michael Busch. Never mind that Busch is hitting .164 or that the Mets could have opted to walk the bases loaded and create a force situation at home.
4. The winning run was scored by former Mets prospect Pete Crow-Armstrong, because of course it was.
Players were asked about Mendoza’s job security and seemed disturbed by the reality that this could fall on their manager sooner rather than later.
“It’s absolutely on us,” Williams said. “He doesn’t swing the bat and he doesn’t throw a baseball . . . If we’re not getting the job done, somebody isn’t just going to magically flip a switch and we’re going to get it done.”
It’s true. There’s not a whole lot a manager can do when you’ve been outscored 62-19, as the Mets have during this losing streak.
Mendoza tried to shake things up on Sunday by having Tobias Myers as the opener for David Peterson, and though the two combined for 5 2⁄3 scoreless innings, it wasn’t enough.
Nothing is working, the team lacks cohesion and it’s getting late very, very early. They have a fairly cushy nine-game homestand coming up that includes visits from fellow dumpster fires Colorado and Washington, but even that’s not a guarantee.
What is a guarantee is that these players are going to be hearing it from fans irate that president of baseball operations David Stearns shipped off their favorite Mets in exchange for very poor early returns.
They have to “fight for each other, stick [up] for each other,” Lindor said. It’s “what Mendy has said from Day 1: protect the house. It’s going to get loud. It’s going to get very loud and ultimately everyone here knows it, and we’ve just got to stick together, stay within ourselves and fight.”
Somehow, through all that noise, this mishmash crew will have to attempt to find its identity and some semblance of consistency. But teams that lose 11 games in a row hardly ever make the playoffs, and that’s true no matter when that stretch occurs.
“Eleven losses is a lot, whether it’s April or at any point in the season,” Mendoza said. “Nobody is going to feel sorry for us. We’ve got to find a way.”
Finding a way, though, is a goal, not a solution. And right now, the Mets are utterly, thoroughly, cosmically lost.
Laura Albanese is the Mets beat writer for Newsday. She's been covering MLB since 2014 after starting at Newsday as an intern seven years earlier.
