If you wanted to draw up a nightmare season for David Stearns, it would pretty much look exactly like this. We keep reminding ourselves that it’s still incredibly early, but you can’t help but worry that this will be a lost season when your team loses eight games in a row by the middle of April. And even with the lineup being the team’s biggest problem right now, it felt all too fitting that Devin Williams had his first terrible outing as a Met in the team’s series finale in Los Angeles, turning a game that would’ve involved Edwin Díaz coming in for a save opportunity against the Mets into a blowout that no longer required his services.
Not every player who Stearns jettisoned is off to a hot start, but of the five new faces that were in the Mets’ lineup on Opening Day, only Luis Robert Jr. is hitting above league average so far this season. The rotation has major question marks after David Peterson’s recent run of bad starts and Kodai Senga’s particularly awful start his last time out. And after emphasizing run prevention early in the offseason as the team said goodbye to Pete Alonso, Brandon Nimmo, and Jeff McNeil, the Mets’ defense looks anything but sharp as there are several players learning new positions on the job.
Things can’t get much worse than they are right now, but there’s no optimism about this team at the moment.