No, The 2025 Mets Aren't Cooked
If you ignore all the positives, of course everything will look negative
Big news: my book is out! It’s called “Only in Queens: Stories from Life as a New York Mets Fan,” and it’s available on Amazon in paperback and e-book format. If you read this newsletter and enjoy submerging yourself in forgettable Mets seasons, I’m confident it’s the book for you, and I hope you’ll give it a look. Many thanks to Greg Prince for his write-up on Faith And Fear In Flushing (the spiritual forefather of this very newsletter).
Let’s try a thought experiment.
Pretend you fall and hit your head, and when you wake up it’s July 5, 2014. The Mets have just lost 5-3 to the Rangers. They are 38-49. They’re 2-7 over their last nine games.
Curtis Granderson is batting .235. David Wright has a .729 OPS. The season has had bright spots — Juan Lagares is breaking out, and Daniel Murphy is hitting like a star — but Travis d’Arnaud has a .621 OPS, and Ruben Tejada’s is .636. Wilmer Flores is not with the club right now; in his first stint of the season in the Majors, he batted .225 with a .553 OPS.
Now in this world of July 5, 2014, I appear next to you. “I’m going to tell you some secrets about the 2015 season,” I say. “I’ll give you these, then you tell me what you think.”
Here’s what I tell you:
Zack Wheeler will miss the 2015 season
Jon Niese’s best days are behind him
2014 is basically Jenrry Mejia’s final season
David Wright will play only 38 games in 2015
Eric Young Jr. will not record a hit as a Met in 2015
Juan Lagares’ OPS will drop to .647
Josh Edgin, one of the Mets’ best relievers in 2014, will not pitch in 2015; Carlos Torres, another, will see his ERA rise to 4.68; after a fantastic 2014 season, Vic Black will never throw another MLB pitch; after a 1.45 ERA in 2014, Buddy Carlyle’s ERA in 2015 will rise to 5.63
Rafael Montero, the team’s most exciting pitching prospect, will never develop into an MLB-caliber starter
Dillon Gee will make only seven starts in 2015, pitching to a 5.90 ERA
The Mets’ one major free agent signing in the offseason will not impact the team positively in 2015; besides that, their only key acquisitions will be left-handed relievers
I tell you all this, and then I say, “so what do you expect from the 2015 season?”
You probably say, “well, it sort of sounds like they’re screwed.”
Why did you say that?
Because I left out all the good parts!
I say this because I’ve seen the opinion floating around lately that the Mets aren’t just sunk for this season; they’re also done for 2025.
It goes roughly like this: the team’s core hasn’t proven it can win, Pete Alonso may not even be here next season, Francisco Lindor and Brandon Nimmo will be a year older, most of the pitching staff will turn over, Brett Baty and Mark Vientos still haven’t proven themselves, Kodai Senga hasn’t so much as thrown a pitch this season, I saw a black cat walk under a ladder yesterday…
But just as with the 2014 Mets, it’s easy to make the case that everything is bad if you ignore the good parts.
The farm system is strong. Jett Williams, Drew Gilbert, Luisangel Acuña, Blade Tidwell, and Mike Vasil could join the team this season, or at the very least by 2025; Ronny Mauricio should likewise return, and Christian Scott is already throwing well for the big league club. Francisco Alvarez should be back on the field in a few weeks. Whenever Senga comes back, who knows? Maybe he’ll dominate just like he did last season.
Brandon Nimmo has a .356 OBP despite horrendous batted-ball luck. Pete Alonso has 12 home runs, and has also been the victim of some batted-ball misfortune. For Francisco Lindor, it’s been an excruciating turnaround, but over his current five-game hitting streak — his first of the season — he’s batting .348 with an .897 OPS.
And before 2025, of course, there’s also free agency — Soto? Maybe. Others? Definitely.
Now obviously, this is not to say that everything will turn out rosy. It won’t. But things also won’t go universally wrong. Even projecting the rest of this season takes an enormous amount of low-confidence guessing. To predict next season — skipping over this year’s Trade Deadline and on-field developments, winter trade and free agent acquisitions, and whatever might happen in the Minors — is a completely pointless exercise. You just don’t know.
The Mets are in a skid right now, which isn’t fun. They’re 7-16 in May, and 2-7 over their last nine games (just like in July 2014!). But that won’t last. I’ll bet you good money that at some point, they’ll put together something like a 16-7 or 9-2 stretch, and all the talk about “next season is already a lost cause” will start to feel more than a little bit silly.
If you ignore everything that’s good, it’s easy — indeed, it’s definitional — to say that everything is bad. But there’s no sense in ignoring the good, even though the Mets sometimes make it easy. The 2025 Mets’ story is a long way from being written. All we know for sure is that we’ll be there, reading along.