LOS ANGELES — The New York Mets reconfigured their coaching staff, parted with core members of their franchise and altered every part of their roster in the offseason, all in an effort to distance themselves from the stench of last year’s collapse.
And yet, a fetor remains.
On Monday night, at a sold-out Dodger Stadium, a floundering, Juan Soto-less Mets offense mustered only one baserunner through the first seven innings and was ultimately shut out for a second consecutive game. The Mets have lost six straight, during which they’ve scored only nine runs.
“At some point, during the regular season of 162, you’re going to face adversity, and here we are — pretty early, facing adversity,” Mets manager Carlos Mendoza said after a 4-0 loss to the first-place Los Angeles Dodgers, his team 7-10. “We just got to find a way to get through it.”
Last year, when the Mets went from 18 games above .500 on July 27 to out of the playoffs on Sept. 28, it was their pitching that faltered. Early this year, it’s the offense. The Mets have already been shut out a major league-leading four times this season and have suffered back-to-back shutouts for the first time since August 2024, a notable development for a lineup that features four new regulars.
One of those new regulars, Luis Robert Jr., has performed thus far, but Bo Bichette, Jorge Polanco and Marcus Semien have combined to slash just .207/.264/.293. In the midst of that, their two leaders have been absent. Francisco Lindor is batting .176 with noo home runs and has had several mystifying mental lapses on the field. Soto, meanwhile, has been nursing a calf strain since April 3 and isn’t expected back until the end of the month.
“We’re trying to hold it down for him,” Semien said. “It didn’t go well for us tonight and has not been going well, but all we can do is work hard and show up tomorrow ready to go.”
The Mets went 1-5 on their recent homestand, dropping two of three to the Arizona Diamondbacks before being swept by the Athletics. They flew out West hoping to find their footing against the two-time defending champs, then saw the series opener turn on one play.
With two on, one out and the Mets trailing 1-0 in the bottom of the third, Lindor fielded a Freddie Freeman grounder to the right side of second base and flipped behind him to Semien as he darted in the other direction toward the bag. Semien caught the feed and stepped on the base but bobbled the transfer, eliminating any hopes of an inning-ending double play. Three pitches later, Andy Pages, one of baseball’s hottest hitters, sent a David Peterson curveball 364 feet to give the Dodgers a 4-0 lead.
“If we turn that double play, it’s probably a spectacular double play,” Semien said. “And it’s one that we ended up needing bad and it didn’t happen.”
It made the difference because the Mets produced almost nothing against 25-year-old left-hander Justin Wrobleski, who retired the first 13 batters and faced the minimum through seven innings. The Mets added only two singles over the next two frames and have been held scoreless for 20 consecutive innings, the longest active streak in the majors. Afterward, Mendoza lamented the amount of ground ball outs. Over the past two games, the Mets have generated 22 of them.
The challenges will only get tougher.
On Tuesday, the Mets will face Yoshinobu Yamamoto, who finished third in National League Cy Young Award voting last year. On Wednesday, it’ll be Shohei Ohtani.
“We got to keep going,” Mendoza said. “The back of their baseball card would say that they’ll come out of it. We just got to continue to push those guys and continue to work with them. You’re going to go through stretches when it’s hard, and right now we’re in the middle of that stretch. We got to just ride this storm and keep going.”
