What If An All-Time Great New York Mets Core Isn't A Championship Core?

Forbes

21 hours ago

The Mets spent the first four seasons of Steve Cohen's tenure making him look either way too optimistic or not optimistic enough for declaring on Nov. 10, 2020 — his first full day as the team's owner — that he '…would consider that slightly disappointing' if '…I don't win a World Series I the next three-to-five years.'
But the 12 months bridging Cohen's fourth and fifth seasons seemed to establish the Mets had built an acceptable alternative to the championship-or-bust standard of measuring the success of his first half-decade at the helm.
Winning a title this year would be great for the Mets, of course. But for 53 or so weeks from last June to this June, the Mets looked like something they'd never been in the previous six decades: A consistently good, mostly drama-free team that was redefining the Mets experience. The embarrassing episodes were gone, along with the excuses for coming up just short in pursuit of the best free agents. Home games were a communally happy experience instead of one in which 40,000 people were conditioned to expect the most cynical outcome possible.
But the last six weeks have been an awfully familiar throwback to the old days. The Mets enter tonight's game against the Braves (oh dear) in the midst of a seven-game losing streak — their second seven-game skid since June 13, when they blew a five-run lead against the Rays to begin an 18-31 swoon. Only the Rockies and Nationals have a worse record in that span.
The Mets, who led the NL East by 5 1/2 games following the games of June 12, are six games back of the Phillies entering today and just two games ahead of the Reds in the race for the final wild card spot.
The collapse has been total for the Mets, who should take the field tonight to Lloyd Christmas bellowing about pets' heads falling off. The Mets have scored the fewest runs (194) and allowed the third-most runs (259) since June 13.
The quintet of Pete Alonso, Francisco Lindor, Jeff McNeil, Brandon Nimmo and Juan Soto are batting a combined .230 with 39 homers and 126 RBIs over the past 49 games. The only starting pitcher to last six innings since June 7 is David Peterson. The only pitchers other than Peterson to even throw a pitch in the sixth inning since then are Clay Holmes, who has done it twice, and Griffin Canning, who did it once but is out for the season after suffering a torn Achilles on June 26.
The rotation problems aren't unique to the Mets. David Stearns pivoted from the durable and unspectacular Jose Quintana and Luis Severino to Canning, Holmes and Frankie Montas, but his moves wouldn't look any better if he'd decided to ask Cohen to open up the checkbook for some combination of Corbin Burnes, Roki Sasaki and Blake Snell.
The real concern for the Mets in the short- and long-term is their position player core — a core that, sans Soto, has been intact for the entire rollercoaster ride of the Cohen era.
The Mets have rarely had a quartet as accomplished as Nimmo, Lindor, McNeil and Alonso — who rank 14th, 16th, 17th and 18th in franchise history per Baseball-Reference WAR — on the field at the same time over the last six-plus decades.
Alonso, McNeil and Nimmo are triumphs of scouting and development. Alonso is one homer away from breaking a tie with Darryl Strawberry atop the all-time franchise list. The stories of McNeil, who battled injuries throughout his minor league career before winning the 2022 major league batting title, and Nimmo, a raw Wyoming product who played 564 games in the bushes before reaching the bigs for good in 2017, are particularly rewarding for an organization that previously struggled to graduate everyday players to the big leagues.
Lindor's emergence from his mistake-filled first season into a captain candidate might be an even bigger long-term win for the franchise because he serves as a reminder the Cohens will be far more patient and supportive owners than the Wilpons ever were. The $765 million helped, for sure, but Soto didn't have to worry about getting thrown under the bus the first time he struggled or committed a public relations error.
But is the Alonso-Lindor-McNeil-Nimmo the core that can lead the Mets into an era of sustained championship contention?
They have been the constants over the last four-plus seasons, a stretch in which the Mets have gone 405-361 — the 12th-best record in the majors — while matching euphoric highs with excruciating lows. A 2021 season in which the Mets led the NL East into August but finished 77-85 was followed by a 101-win 2022 in which the Mets were knocked out of the wild card round by the Padres. The Mets went 75-87 and began retooling in 2023 before coming back from 11 games under .500 last season to reach the NLCS.
The last 14 months have been especially extreme for the Mets, who led baseball with a 110-62 record from June 3, 2024 through this June 12. But that stretch of .640 baseball has been bookended by spans in which the Mets went 42-66 (.389), a 99-loss pace over a 162-game season. Was Jose Iglesias really that big an addition and subtraction? And if so, what does that say about the core?
This stumble hasn't been as sudden as the 2007 and 2008 downturns, but the expanded playoff field would make missing the playoffs the greatest collapse in team history and erase any progress the Mets have made in reshaping their reputation as entertaining foils for their biggest and more successful rivals.
Even the most token of efforts by Derek Jeter to make an 'appearance' at Yankees Old-Timers Day Saturday included a dig at the Mets. The Braves are in the midst of their worst season in almost a decade, but generations of Atlanta stars — some with Mets ties! — will nonetheless cackle with delight if the Braves continue their mastery of the Mets over the next two weeks. The Phillies making the World Series while the Mets don't even qualify for the tournament might inspire a third Chase Utley-themed episode of 'It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia.'
Maybe, in an age of reboots and updates, this is the modern telling of the 1999 team, which suffered eight-game and seven-game losing streaks but made it to game six of the NLCS. Perhaps this drama really is embedded in the Mets' DNA and another deep playoff run is on the horizon. The Mets might not be any different than anyone else during an era in which there are no great teams. And all this fretting about the core will look really silly if the Mets take the long-awaited third parade down the Canyon of Heroes this year or next.
And if none of this happens? Then the Mets will be much closer to coming to grips with the possibility that one of the great cores in team history may not be the one that gets the franchise to the next level.