Philadelphia – “Back that Azz Up” of Juvenile quietly purred the speakers of the visit club -house while the media members had registered.
The 1999 inflatable anthem was a melody unfortunately disjointed at the moment, a cruel joke of the Playlist Shuffle Gods. While the starting launcher Mets, Clay Holmes, was preparing to lead the post-mortem of his evening, Francisco Lindor, the club’s de facto captain, was walking through the room and disabled music. Silence – the thick and suffocating type that oozes in a baseball locker room after a particularly discouraging loss – filled the void.
Advertisement
Wednesday, for the third consecutive night, the dishes were beaten 11-3 by the philliesnow pending division champions. The Mits had arrived in Philadelphia on Monday with a deficit of seven games in the NL East and a chance. Now the gap in the division is at an all-buttressing 10 games. No matter what’s going on Thursday in the final of the seriesThe dishes will return home discouraged, discombobubbles, empty -handed.
But more scary for New Yorkers is that their grip On the third point of the national league was cut at only two games on the sudden rise of the Giants of San Francisco and the Reds of Cincinnati.
“No one is happy,” said the Pets skipper Carlos Mendoza, to journalists after the fifth consecutive defeat of the team. “But we have to continue.”
This is not the first demoralizing slippage of this season of dishes upside down. Far from it. This is the fifth sequence of club defeats at least four games, their third at least five. Everyone wearing blue and orange continues to express their confidence in the team’s ability to run things. It is reasonable. There is too much celebrity, too much talent, to abandon all faith.
Advertisement
But do not twist it: the dishes are in shock at the moment. They are on the rise, without paddles and lack time.
Their disappearance on Wednesday moved via a well -processed path. The trembling start -up, this time from Holmes, dug an early hole. The programming could not evoke races against the opposing starter, a Cristopher Sanchez brilliantly locked up, which launched six heats of ball in a turn.
(Get more news from New York: Flow of the Mets Team))
Mendoza was notably aggressive with his lift enclosure, pulling Holmes for the Gregory Soto lift after only 76 throws. But once again, an implosion of lifter in the middle rounds extended the deficit, and the dishes put an end to the night to licked their injuries, trapped in a mist of frustration.
Advertisement
“No matter how much we have talent,” said Lindor. “We also play big league teams on the other side, and they also have talent.”
Lindor is right: baseball, even for the most stacked teams, can be a night -round game. However, the dishes have a particularly impressive list, a well -paid stars load, a list that should be able to overcome the randomness with capacity. This talent – and the money required to bring it together – have created supersonic expectations entering this season. Expectations that at this stage, the 2025 dishes failed to meet.
“We are super talented. We always believe that we have what it takes,” said Holmes after the match. “Moments like these can be difficult because there is certainly a lot of noise. A large part of the game, you know, where it can simply affect, perhaps, you know, what you are trying to do.”
The noise, for this club, has never been stronger. Their grip on a place in the playoffs has decreased lately. Their schedule is imposing. The Rangers of Texas heated to the Red will be in Queens this weekend, when the former Ace of the Jacob Degrom Mets will make its Triumphant return to Citi Field. After that, the Padres de San Diego come to town, with the hero of 2024 Mets José Iglesias in a trailer, fighting for their own lives in playoffs.
Advertisement
The worst case – On October on vacation – is starting to feel possible. Ample time for a turnaround. But these dishes, at present, seem terribly ill -equipped to manage the task.
It is an austere juxtaposition of the team of last year, which, at this stage of the calendar, was an unstoppable freight train, a baseball circus thriving on the grain, moxy and self -confidence. These dishes eliminated the Brewers on the road in a magical way in the Joker before attacking the more classified phillies with a catchy NLDS victory. The energy around this team, even when she finally wobbled dodgers in the NLCS, was undoubtedly.
There was a handful of these moments this season. A few weeks ago, the healthy house scan against the phillies comes to mind. A version of this boastful still exists. But it is currently manifested in a sort of unfounded superiority complex, which gives off a Yankees-Esque atmosphere. The incapacity of dishes to escape this funk feels rooted, a little, in their unwavering faith in their own quality.
The starting pitch, or its absence, is an even more important problem and a dynamic that has defined the food season. The rotation was the largest swirling subject of the club in spring training. Then, New York’s beginners delivered a stellar first two months of the season, calculating concerns. But as time warmed up, the rotation collapsed. Since July 1, the rotation of the food has an ERA of 4.81, the seventh worst mark in MLB. A August infusion quality of the recruit Nolan McLean provided a boonBut he cannot launch every night.
Advertisement
For all the money spent on players and infrastructure, for all the power of the stars acquired and developed, for all the beliefs still professed, the dishes look at a truth that they can no longer avoid. Something should change, and soon. Otherwise, this season will be remembered as an extremely expensive empty promise, a waste of luck, which had to have epic proportions.
The owner of the dishes, Steve Cohen, and his endless wealth should keep the club in the running for a long time. The future, no matter how this season is going, is brilliant in Queens. But baseball is a capricious and unpredictable thing.
And the dishes waste an opportunity as golden as Cohen’s chests.
