The New York Mets were eliminated from postseason contention with two weeks still left on the schedule. They sit at 69-83, 19.5 games behind Atlanta in the NL East, last place in the division.
They entered the season with one of the largest payrolls in the sport, north of $350 million by most accounting. Juan Soto and Francisco Lindor were supposed to make the postseason a formality.
Instead the Mets are watching the Brewers, who spend a fraction of that, run away with the National League.
How It Fell Apart
A 12-game losing streak in April did most of the damage. Seasons rarely recover from that kind of early hole, because the math of climbing back requires a stretch of dominance that no team can schedule.
Then the injuries arrived. Lindor and Soto, two players who pride themselves on being in the lineup every day, both missed significant time. When your entire roster construction depends on two stars carrying a supporting cast, losing them at the same time is fatal.
Money Is Not A Strategy
This season should end the argument that payroll alone wins baseball games. The Mets and Phillies have nearly $700 million in combined payroll and only one of them is going to the playoffs comfortably.
What high-spending teams buy is margin for error at the top of the roster. What they cannot buy is depth, because depth comes from a farm system, and farm systems take years and get traded away when a front office is chasing a window.
The Brewers built a 95-win team by developing players. The Mets bought two superstars and hoped.
The Awkward Part Of The Offseason
New York’s usual solution is to spend its way out of the problem. This winter that option gets complicated fast.
The collective bargaining agreement expires December 1, and a lockout is widely expected. Free agency opens five days after the World Series, which leaves roughly three weeks for the Mets to conduct business before the sport potentially freezes.
A team that needs to rebuild a pitching staff and a bench does not want a three-week window. That kind of compressed market favors teams making one big signing, not teams needing six moves.
What They Should Actually Do
Stop buying stars and start buying innings. The Mets have two of the best position players in baseball under contract. What they lack is a rotation that survives 162 games and a roster that functions when one of them is hurt.
That is an unglamorous shopping list, and it is the correct one.
The Silver Lining
Soto and Lindor are still here, still in their primes, still capable of carrying a team. The core is not the problem.
The Mets do not need a teardown. They need a front office willing to spend on the boring parts of a roster instead of the parts that sell jerseys. Whether this ownership group has that discipline is the actual question facing the franchise this winter.
A longtime sports reporter, Carlos Garcia has written about some of the biggest and most notable athletic events of the last 5 years. He has been credentialed to cover MLS, NBA and MLB games all over the United States. His work has been published on Fox Sports, Bleacher Report, AOL and the Washington Post.