Broken Citi

 The Mets were 15-14 as April ended. They're 22-30 now. So something clearly happened somewhere down the line.

I go back to the mid-April stretch where the Mets triumphed over the Royals, Pirates and Dodgers. And the way things have set now, really only the Pirates series makes sense. Because the Royals overcame early stumbles and are now one of the best teams in the league, the Dodgers' rotation needed to come into its own, and now that it has they're better, and the Pirates, even with Skenes, are still not accomplishing much. So what I can gather is that everything lined up in that section of April for the Mets to be better than those teams, and when the window closed there really wasn't much left for the Mets to excel at.

And I wanna make this clear: it's not my intention to be salty towards the Mets. I try and be critical of all teams, even the ones I like, and I've been probably more critical of the Mets because they've tried so much that hadn't worked. I still like this team more than most Philly residents, and I enjoy a lot of their players. But when the team isn't working, I'm not gonna stand here and pretend that it is.

So...the Mets have won 7 games this month, their marquee star they're paying hundreds of millions to is hitting .209, every great performance from earlier this season has trailed off and they might have to hire their fourth manager since the 2020s began extremely soon.

The main issue is that the Mets assembled this offensive core of Brandon Nimmo, Pete Alonso, Francisco Lindor, Jeff McNeil and Starling Marte, and out of all of them, Marte's the only one hitting over .250. Brandon Nimmo is still having a solid enough year, but by his standard it's several steps down. He's hitting .216 with 7 homers and a team-leading 29 RBIs. Pete Alonso has 12 homers, but there seems to be less of an exclamation point to his power hitting this year. I don't have much doubt that he'll finish with over 35 homers, but going into free agency this isn't the most lethal version of Alonso we've witnessed. McNeil, meanwhile, has rarely felt this ineffective, and is struggling both offensively and defensively. The moment Luis Guillorme is elsewhere, no less. And Lindor not only isn't hitting, he's beginning to embarrass himself, with several multi-strikeout days and games where his inefficiency feels like a foregone conclusion.

The people that have stepped up for this Mets team have been the replacement level guys, many of which could just be gone by the deadline. Sean Manaea's had a great season, but aren't there supposed to be younger players doing better? Harrison Bader's heated up, but wasn't he a contingency outfielder? I think the only person doing what he was signed to do might be J.D. Martinez, and even then he's a month behind everybody else.

The fact that the Mets seem this dire and we're not even 2 months into the season is not a good sign for the future of the Steve Cohen regime. This schtick didn't work for Chaim Bloom, and it may not work here.

Coming Tomorrow- It's so weird that a young team like the Twins not only has multiple veterans, but ones that are still very crucial to the team's success.