Alden Gonzalez
Multiple Authors
LOS ANGELES — The New York Mets reconfigured their teaching employees, parted with core members of their franchise and altered each a part of their roster in the offseason, all in an effort to distance themselves from the stench of final 12 months’s collapse.
And but, a fetor stays.
On Monday night time, at a sold-out Dodger Stadium, a floundering, Juan Soto-less Mets offense mustered just one baserunner via the primary seven innings and was finally shut out for a second consecutive sport. The Mets have misplaced six straight, throughout which they’ve scored solely 9 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 supervisor Carlos Mendoza mentioned after a 4-0 loss to the first-place Los Angeles Dodgers, his crew 7-10. “We just got to find a way to get through it.”
Last 12 months, when the Mets went from 18 video games above .500 on July 27 to out of the playoffs on Sept. 28, it was their pitching that faltered. Early this 12 months, it is the offense. The Mets have already been shut out a significant league-leading 4 instances this season and have suffered back-to-back shutouts for the primary time since August 2024, a notable growth for a lineup that options 4 new regulars.
One of these new regulars, Luis Robert Jr., has carried out so far, however Bo Bichette, Jorge Polanco and Marcus Semien have mixed to slash simply .207/.264/.293. In the midst of that, their two leaders have been absent. Francisco Lindor is batting .176 with noo dwelling runs and has had a number of mystifying psychological lapses on the sector. Soto, in the meantime, has been nursing a calf pressure since April 3 and is not anticipated again till the tip of the month.
“We’re trying to hold it down for him,” Semien mentioned. “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 latest homestand, dropping two of three to the Arizona Diamondbacks earlier than being swept by the Athletics. They flew out West hoping to seek out their footing towards the two-time defending champs, then noticed the sequence opener activate one play.
With two on, one out and the Mets trailing 1-0 in the underside of the third, Lindor fielded a Freddie Freeman grounder to the correct aspect of second base and flipped behind him to Semien as he darted in the opposite course towards the bag. Semien caught the feed and stepped on the bottom however bobbled the switch, eliminating any hopes of an inning-ending double play. Three pitches later, Andy Pages, one in every of baseball’s hottest hitters, despatched a David Peterson curveball 364 ft to provide the Dodgers a 4-0 lead.
“If we turn that double play, it’s probably a spectacular double play,” Semien mentioned. “And it’s one that we ended up needing bad and it didn’t happen.”
It made the distinction as a result of the Mets produced nearly nothing towards 25-year-old left-hander Justin Wrobleski, who retired the primary 13 batters and confronted the minimal via seven innings. The Mets added solely two singles over the subsequent two frames and have been held scoreless for 20 consecutive innings, the longest energetic streak in the majors. Afterward, Mendoza lamented the quantity of floor ball outs. Over the previous two video games, the Mets have generated 22 of them.
The challenges will solely get harder.
On Tuesday, the Mets will face Yoshinobu Yamamoto, who completed third in National League Cy Young Award voting final 12 months. On Wednesday, it will be Shohei Ohtani.
“We got to keep going,” Mendoza mentioned. “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.”
