Roger Rubin: Mets looking at another prime Juan Soto season wasted
The Mets' Juan Soto singles during the sixth inning against the Philadelphia Phillies at Citi Field on Saturday. Credit: Jim McIsaac
There’s the way things were supposed to be and the way they are. That gap often is wide when it comes to the Mets. It’s especially true in this season — Juan Soto’s second in Queens — as things have gone so far off course that the club almost certainly will not be able to find its way back.
The Mets are supposed to be a playoff-bound $380 million behemoth with Soto — a superstar in his prime — the unstoppable force and key to the lineup. That’s not exactly what we’re getting.
Instead, the Mets are in the NL East basement and 13 games under .500 after snapping their seven-game losing streak with a 6-2 win over Philadelphia before 37,338 at Citi Field on Saturday.
And Soto? He is still a superstar in his prime, but he’s the lone standout for an offense that ranks among the worst in baseball, scoring a hair over four runs per game.
Soto was 2-for-3 on Saturday with a run-scoring triple, a single and a walk. His slash line reads .299/.399/.567.
Statistically — and there are always outliers — a player is most productive in his age 26-30 seasons. This is the second of Soto’s prime years, and the second in which a great individual season is going to waste.
Asked if all the dialogue about the team not meeting expectations is obscuring people’s view of Soto’s great season, Mets interim manager Andy Green replied: “It’s a spectacular season. He’s the best player in baseball. It’s special what he does in the batter’s box . . . Every at-bat from him is just must-watch TV because he’s just that good.”
The 2025 Mets had the best record in baseball on June 12 (45-24) and then cratered to miss out on the postseason. Soto finished with 43 home runs, 105 RBIs and a league-leading 38 stolen bases and finished third in the NL MVP voting.
Barring some sort of fantastic turnaround for this roster of injury-plagued and underperforming players (or both), the Mets will head home at the end of September while MVP votes for their superstar roll in.
Entering play Saturday, Soto ranked third in the National League in OPS (.950) and second in slugging percentage (.557).
At the end of Friday, which began with the dismissal of manager Carlos Mendoza and ended with a 2-1 loss to the Phillies, Soto searched for an answer when asked why a team with so much talent doesn’t win and replied, “I feel like it’s tough . . . We just haven’t been coming through in big situations, and that’s kind of the way the game goes. You’ve got to come through in the right moment, the right time.”
He also said: “I would say we’re all trying hard to win ballgames. At the end of the day, this is what they pay us for: to win ballgames out there, to help the team to go to the playoffs and get a championship for the city.”
That’s exactly what Mets owners Steve and Alex Cohen, along with the entire organization, were looking for when they ran a virtual campaign to land Soto when he became a free agent after helping the Yankees reach the 2024 World Series. They felt that the organization’s best chance to fulfill the aspiration of being a sustainable contender was to have Soto playing his best seasons in Queens.
That their record 15-year offer for $765 million was just a shade better than the Yankees’ of 16 years at $760 million didn’t hurt, either.
The interesting and odd thing is that the Mets’ vision for the near future was precisely what Soto said his was after he signed. He made it sound as if he assessed the landscape and felt the Mets had the brightest outlook among his suitors — including the Yankees.
“The Mets are a great organization, and what they’ve done in the past couple of years — showing the ability to keep winning, to keep growing a team, to try to grow a dynasty — it was one of the most important things to me,” Soto said at his introductory news conference. “What I was seeing from the other side was unbelievable. The past and the future this team has, it went a lot into my decision.”
Soto has been the player the Mets sought. They haven’t been the organization he was seeking. In retrospect, his description of the Mets more fits the Yankees’ organization.
The Mets’ 2025 implosion left them home while the Yankees were in the playoffs. As of Saturday, FanGraphs.com gave the Mets a 4.3% chance of making the postseason while the Yankees had a 98.9% chance and an AL-best 27.9% chance of reaching the World Series.
The Mets and Soto are going to have 13 more seasons together when this one is over. It would be a shame to let any more great Soto seasons go to waste.
Roger Rubin returned to Newsday in 2018 to write about high schools, colleges and baseball following 20 years at the Daily News. A Baseball Hall of Fame voter since 2011, he has covered 13 MLB postseasons and 14 NCAA Final Fours.
