Laura Albanese: The Mets have lost eight in a row and it's time to be very worried
Mets manager Carlos Mendoza looks on before a game against the Dodgers on Wednesday in Los Angeles, Calif. Credit: Getty Images/Luke Hales
LOS ANGELES – Shortly after they had dropped their seventh game in a row Tuesday, Francisco Lindor was asked if the Mets were feeling a sense of desperation.
“I don’t think anyone here is desperate,” he said temperately. “The urgency level is really high.”
It can be difficult to figure out what level of panic is appropriate this early in the season. The Mets Thursday left the West Coast bloody and battered by the behemoth Dodgers, having dropped eight straight games. You can say that they ran into the hacksaw pitching duo of Yoshinobu Yamamoto and Shohei Ohtani, sure. You can take a page out of owner Steve Cohen’s book and find solace in the “green shoots” he tweeted about Tuesday – signs of a resurgence.
Or you can take the blunt assessment of the man who has the most to lose in all this.
“It's hard to say we’re having good at-bats because we’re not,” manager Carlos Mendoza said. “It’s got nothing to do with effort, preparation, anything like that…It sucks going through it. Whether it’s early, the middle of the season, late, you know that at some point during the regular season over the 162, you’re going to face adversity. And here we are – pretty early, facing adversity. We’ve got to find a way to get through it.”
That’s the crux of it. Sure, it’s only mid-April, and yes, they’re trying to survive life without Juan Soto – at least for another week. But despite the changes in coaching staff and roster, this team somehow still is facing the question that plagued them through a cursed 2025 season: How can a group this talented look this bad?
Many of their at-bats are non-competitive. Players aren’t living up to the backs of their baseball cards. And after their 8-2 walloping by the Dodgers Wednesday, the clubhouse carried an all-too-familiar air of despondency and confusion.
That alone means it’s time to genuinely worry.
It’s not alarmist. It’s reality. While long losing streaks aren’t a death sentence, early ones like this can shape the tenor of the season, lead to drastic coaching changes, and influence in-season transactions. This isn’t just a blip in April. This is a borderline crisis.
If 2024 taught us the value of momentum, 2025 illustrated the all-consuming power of a spiral. It’s not that the players are bad (though the jury is certainly still deliberating on David Stearns’ roster construction); it’s that they can’t seem to collectively drag themselves out of this tarpit. Watching the Mets over this last stretch is like watching Odysseus and his crew trying to navigate past a destructive Siren song: The pull is too strong, and you’re not quite sure who’s going to be able to resist.
Tuesday, Mendoza noted that the offense was overly aggressive. Wednesday, he said they needed to be in attack mode. It sounds like a conflicting message, but it’s not, and the distinction can help identify where this lineup is going wrong.
“It’s different,” Mendoza said. Being properly aggressive entails “being on fastballs, taking your ‘A’ swing when you need to. Being aggressive doesn’t mean you have to get out of the strike zone. The conviction when we’re making swing decisions has got to be better.”
A funny thing can happen when athletes are scuffling. They can start to play in ways contrary to their makeup.
A guy like Lindor can be plagued by uncharacteristic mental mistakes – the most recent of which occurred on Wednesday, when he failed to charge Teoscar Hernandez’s grounder, leading to an infield single. That, in turn, ended up converting into an eighth-inning grand slam. A player like Bo Bichette – known specifically for his ability to hit well in two-strike counts and with runners in scoring position – can begin struggling with both. Bichette is hitting .093 with two strikes, compared to .253 last year (fourth-best in baseball). He’s hitting .200 with RISP, compared to an MLB-best .381 average in those situations last year.
Then there’s the rest of the lineup: Jorge Polanco has been playing hurt, and Mark Vientos, Brett Baty, Carson Benge and Marcus Semien have all had long hitless streaks. Jared Young, who started off hot, will be shelved for six to eight weeks as he undergoes surgery on his meniscus. Tommy Pham and MJ Melendez are fine players, but they weren’t part of the original plan; now, they’re being tasked to be a significant part of this offense.
If the Mets don’t get out of this mental rut, it’s going to fall on Mendoza. The signs were there at the end of last season, when they gutted his entire coaching staff. Firing him, though, likely isn’t the panacea so many people think it will be.
Ultimately, this comes down to the players – many of them seasoned veterans who don’t necessarily rely on a manager to tell them how to approach a game they’ve been playing all their lives.
The urgency is there. But maybe having a certain kind of desperation isn’t the worst idea.
Things are as bad as they seem. It’s time to play like it.
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.
