August 5, 2026
August 5, 2026
The Mets’ 2025 Season Became a Historic Collapse
No team in baseball fell further than the New York Mets in 2025. The Mets’ 2025 season opened with the sport’s best record. It opened with a roster remade around a $765 million commitment to Juan Soto. It opened with the swagger that comes from owning first place deep into summer. Then it all came apart. By the time the final out fell in Miami on September 28, New York had authored one of the most spectacular collapses the game has ever seen. The Mets finished 83-79. They missed October entirely.
Steve Cohen’s front office spent the winter chasing a championship, not just a playoff berth. The headline move landed on December 11. The Mets signed Juan Soto to a 15-year, $765 million contract, the largest deal in professional sports history. Pete Alonso returned on a two-year pact after testing free agency. The rotation added arms in Frankie Montas, Griffin Canning, and a re-signed Sean Manaea. Clay Holmes arrived to bolster a bullpen that had carried the 2024 team to a surprise National League Championship Series appearance. Manager Carlos Mendoza, entering his second season, inherited a roster with almost no excuses left. Expectations in Queens had rarely been higher. For months, the Mets lived up to every bit of them.
Nothing about the start suggested disaster was coming. New York won 21 of its first 31 games and ripped off a perfect homestand. By June 12, the club owned a 45-24 record, the best mark in the majors. It marked the second-most wins through 70 games in franchise history, trailing only the 1986 World Series champions. A 5.5-game lead over the Philadelphia Phillies gave the Mets a 96.2 percent chance to make the playoffs, according to ESPN’s model. Kodai Senga anchored the rotation with a 1.47 ERA. Soto and Francisco Lindor powered a lineup that punished mistakes. Through the season’s first ten weeks, the Mets’ 2025 season looked like a coronation. It would not look that way again.
Everything turned on a single play. Chasing a wayward throw from Alonso at first base on June 12, Senga tore his hamstring. He hit the injured list, taking his 1.47 ERA and the rotation’s stability with him. He returned nearly a month later, but he was a diminished pitcher. He struggled routinely to work deep into games. The bullpen, already thin, absorbed the extra innings and buckled under the strain. New York got swept by the Tampa Bay Rays. Then it got swept by the rival Atlanta Braves, dropping seven straight games. Philadelphia seized the division lead on June 20.
The bottom fell out completely against the Pittsburgh Pirates. From June 27 through June 29, the Mets were outscored 30-4, the most lopsided series defeat in franchise history. A team that had looked unbeatable seven weeks earlier now looked lost. The warning signs were impossible to ignore. Griffin Canning’s season-ending Achilles tear during that same stretch only deepened the wound.
David Stearns worked the phones hard as August approached. He added relievers Ryan Helsley and Tyler Rogers along with outfielder Cedric Mullins, hoping to steady a roster that was hemorrhaging games. The moves cost the Mets meaningful young talent, including pitchers Blade Tidwell and Jose Butto. It was a bet that a fortified bullpen could still rescue a playoff spot. For stretches, it worked. New York clawed back within four games of Philadelphia in late August behind a sweep of the Phillies at Citi Field.
Amid the chaos, one storyline offered genuine hope. Rookie Nolan McLean debuted on August 16. He won each of his first four career starts, a feat few pitchers in franchise history had matched. His emergence gave a battered rotation a badly needed jolt. Still, the Mets limped to an 11-17 August, even while setting franchise records for runs and home runs that same month.
Every game in September carried the weight of the entire season. The Mets lost eight straight to open the month. Then Alonso’s walk-off homer against Texas snapped the skid. Philadelphia clinched the division the very next day. New York clawed into a wild card position, lost it, and reclaimed it with a five-run comeback at Wrigley Field. Then it surrendered the spot again in the final week. Cincinnati and New York finished tied at 83-79. The Reds owned the tiebreaker after winning the season series four games to two. A 4-0 shutout loss to the Miami Marlins on September 28 ended it for good. The collapse was complete: a team that started 45-24 finished 38-55 the rest of the way.
Individual brilliance never disappeared, even as the team around it crumbled. Soto joined the 30-30 club on September 9 and set a new career high with 43 home runs. He delivered exactly the kind of season the Mets paid for, even as the team collapsed around him. Lindor followed him into the 30-30 club on September 23. It made this just the second Mets team ever with two 30-30 players, joining Darryl Strawberry and Howard Johnson from 1987. Alonso broke Strawberry’s all-time franchise home run record with his 253rd blast on August 12. It was a milestone that reinforced why the Mets had valued him enough to bring him back. On July 19, the franchise paused to honor its history. It retired David Wright’s No. 5 and inducted him into the Mets Hall of Fame, a rare moment of unambiguous joy in an otherwise punishing year.
History will remember the Mets’ 2025 season for how spectacularly it broke apart. New York became just the third team in the wild card era to start 45-24 or better and still miss the postseason. It joined the 2002 Red Sox and the 2003 Mariners in that dubious company. The bullpen chaos was historic in its own right. The Mets used a record 46 different pitchers over the course of the year, and the team went winless in every game it trailed after the eighth inning. No other club in baseball matched that ignominy. For a franchise with its own history of painful September collapses, 2025 carved out a new chapter. It demanded an accounting from a front office that had bet nearly a billion dollars on a championship. Both Alonso and closer Edwin Diaz departed in free agency that winter, closing the book on the era Soto’s arrival was supposed to define. The Mets’ 2025 season proved that no lead, no payroll, and no early-summer swagger guarantees anything in October. That lesson will hang over Citi Field until this roster proves otherwise.
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