The problem with losing 11 consecutive baseball games while representing the largest media market in the country is that, hours before Game No. 12, a reporter may ask you if the scrutiny feels magnified in New York.
“What scrutiny?” Marcus Semien — a 35-year-old second baseman less than a month into his first season in Queens — said, cracking a rueful smile.
That was a joke.
Mets fans are prone to catastrophizing — or, maybe more accurately, they are perpetually prepared for a catastrophe that seems to come to pass more often than not. But even by Mets’ standards, the 2026 season is off to a terrible start.
The Mets returned home Tuesday night from a disastrous road trip. Dispassionate prognosticators would tell you not to panic about anything in mid-April. Some amount of every losing streak can be attributed to the fact that the other team is trying too. But this team was supposed to be good if not great.
This year was supposed to erase the memory of recent suffering or at least make up for it. Instead, every game plays out like a study in futility. Nightly challenging optimists: How much longer can you hang on to the hope that they’re better than this?
Tuesday should have been a fresh start.
New homestand, soft spot of the schedule, once-in-a-generation hitter Juan Soto set to return from an injured list stint soon. With their budding ace, Nolan McLean, perfect through five innings and their largest lead in two weeks courtesy of a three-run shot from besieged star shortstop Francisco Lindor, the crowd seemed ready to forget and perhaps even forgive.
An hour and a half later, they’d turned maniacal.
A nightmare of a ninth inning saw Devin Williams — the once shut-down closer who failed miserably on the Yankees last season before being brought in to replace the beloved Edwin Díaz at the back of the bullpen — came into a tie game and left trailing by two with the bases loaded and no outs.
A journey man reliever brought in to stem the bleeding elicited vociferous M-V-P chants for every out he recorded from a crowd that seemed equal parts sarcastic and genuinely amazed that anyone on the club could do something worth applauding.
In the bottom of the ninth, the Mets were retired on 12 pitches to clinch their 12th loss and the worst record in baseball. No team has ever made the postseason in a year with a 12-game losing streak.
The losing streak finally ended on Wednesday with a 3-2 win over the Twins.
A fanbase is not a monolith. That said, many Mets faithful were, heading into the season, wary of how president of baseball operations David Stearns had gone about remaking a roster that had undeniably disappointed in 2025 but was full of homegrown heroes.
Or at least, homegrown guys who had nostalgia on their side. Some of that wariness, though, was paired with reasonable optimism. Before the season started, FanGraphs projected the Mets to win the second-most games in all of baseball, only to the behemoth Dodgers. They had a better than 80% chance to make the playoffs.
When Stearns first took over the team, coverage played up his New York roots. He had grown up a Mets fan, found success elsewhere and was heralded as something of a savior for his hometown team. His actions have distanced himself from that fanboy narrative — his roster construction technique tending toward risk-aversion to the exclusion of sentimental attachment to the franchise home run leader. Which would be fine, if it worked.
Stearns’ reputation is that of a wonk. A nerd. A shrewd evaluator of production divorced from aesthetics or nostalgia. As the chief baseball executive in Milwaukee, he built a perennial contender despite small market constraints.
The hope when he came to New York was that his acumen combined with owner Steve Cohen’s league-leading billions would turn the historically hapless franchise into a formidable force. They’d be something better than just the cross-town Yankees — they’d be the Dodgers East. It wasn’t a far-fetched dream. Money isn’t everything in baseball. But it helps.
And this is the other problem for the New York Mets.
They are not just bad, they are bad and expensive. They spent a lot of money to watch their playoff odds — down to 38.9% percent after the loss Tuesday — slashed in half by mid-April.
The Mets have, depending on exactly how you calculate it, either is the highest or second-highest payroll in baseball. They were the most expensive team last year, too, when they plummeted from first place in late July to missing the playoffs entirely. And they were the most expensive team in 2024, when they were 11 games under .500 on June 2 and made a miraculous run to the NLCS.
Those sort of wild swings in fortunes from far deeper into the marathon of the baseball season to its ultimate finish line is how players can still preach patience and Cohen can remain “concerned, but calm,” as he said before Tuesday’s game.
Cohen’s ability to remain calm is good for manager Carlos Mendoza’s job security and probably his own blood pressure. But even if he were to panic, there is little the owner could do with that emotion at this point.
A roster is largely set in the offseason and at the trade deadlines. The kind of ticky-tack moves made in mid-April — calling up a minor league pitcher, reorganizing the lineup — are made at the baseball operations level.
Steve Cohen is worth more than $20 billion, but if he’s learned anything since purchasing the team in November 2020, it’s that the Mets are a problem money can’t solve.
Finding the right rhetoric won’t stop the bleeding. But right now, the Mets organization is currently caught between claiming nobody feels the sting of these losses more acutely than they do — while conversely insisting they see each day as a new opportunity, conveniently divorced from the historical failure that preceded it.
Before the game, Mendoza insisted that second-guessing the process would be the greatest mistake they could make. Stay the course, essentially. Don’t let the losses rattle you.
At some point, though, after the process fails at least a dozen times, will you start to wonder whether it’s time to at least tweak something?
“That’s a good question,” Mendoza admitted when CNN Sports asked if it was time for a fundamental change. “That’s a good question.”
As the fans filed out into the unseasonably frigid New York night, one supporter in a blue wig carried a sign that read on one side “METS NATION BELIEVES” and on the other “STREAK ENDS TONIGHT.”
The latter was proven to be well-intentioned but wrong. So here’s another question: what about the former?
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