New York isn’t only a baseball place, but it is still some big baseball place, one that waits all winter and then into the spring for next season to arrive, no matter how last season ended, and it sure didn’t end great for either the Mets or the Yankees. The Mets suffered one of the worst slow-motion collapses in their history. The Yankees won 94 games, but kept getting rolled by the Blue Jays until it happened again in October and they were gone.
The Yankees decided they liked their team just fine, and essentially stayed with it, apparently thinking they could run back the things they liked about their ’25 team while the things they didn’t would just magically disappear. David Stearns, the Mets’ head of baseball operations? In so many crucial areas, Stearns decided to back up a truck, once the truck found parking at Citi Field with Uncle Steve’s heart’s desire — his new casino — going up.
And now we get a dreary baseball April like the one we’ve witnessed so far, the only really good news being that our two teams have played roughly the equivalent of two games of an NFL season.
The Mets, with or without Juan Soto, continue to be what they have been since they were 45-24 last June when they still had the best record in their league, which means one of the worst teams in the sport. This is the old line from Bill Parcells about you are what your record says you are, and the Mets record since last June 12 tells us that only the Rockies have been demonstrably worse since, over a period moving up on 120 games. You want to know the company the Mets are keeping in the group right above the Rockies in the misery standings of baseball?
White Sox. Nationals. Twins. Since their high-water mark last June, the Mets’ record through Friday’s loss at Wrigley Field was 45-68.
Newcomer Bo Bichette has struck out 22 times through his first 20 games for the Mets. (AP Photo/Erin Hooley)
And the Yankees, who truly were covered as being halfway to the Canyon of Heroes after a 7-1 start? They were one bust-out closer for the Angels — that would be Jordan Romano, who should now qualify for his own bobblehead night at Yankee Stadium — away from getting swept at home this past week by Mike Trout and them. If you watched the games, you know just how close the Yankees were to having a rather historic 9-game April losing streak, saved only by a couple of nightmare 9th innings from the Angels.
The Red Sox have already had stretches where they looked as if they had all the trouble in the world. But by the time the Angels left town, the Red Sox were a grand total of two games behind the Yankees in the loss column. It’s evident that Gerrit Cole, their ace, will be back sooner rather than later. The Yankees better hope that in addition to ringing up some scoreless innings, Cole can also hit left-handed pitching, or at least give them some stick at third base or shortstop or center field. Or catcher. Or second base.
The Yankees will hit, of course. But it may be more than somewhat foolish at this point to buy into the front-office belief that they are going to hit and score the way they did last season around Aaron Judge. Or believe that they have enough bullpen any more than the Mets do. The Yankees have already been swept by the Rays, nearly got good and swept by the Angels, and lost two of three to the West Sacramento A’s.
And guess what? As bad as the Mets have looked without Soto — and with what they’re getting from Stearns’ replacements for Brandon Nimmo and Jeff McNeil and Pete Alonso — ask yourself a question:
What would their record look like if they did have Soto playing all of their games, which is something he almost always does? And what would the Yankees record look like if No. 99 had missed 11 games in April the way Soto has?
We know full well from Stearns and Brian Cashman, just by their offseason action and inaction, what their vision was for their teams. Cashman clearly convinced himself that the Yankees just had a bad match-up with the Blue Jays last season, culminating with the way they got bounced all over Canada in Games 1 and 2 of their division series. And we’ve gone over this before, but Stearns was just as convinced that the run the Mets made in 2024, all the way to Game 6 of the National League Championship Series, was one of the happier accidents in Mets history.
So he let Alonso walk. He traded Nimmo and McNeil and then got rolled by the Dodgers on Edwin Diaz, selling his fan base on run prevention along the way. Is what we’ve seen from Stearns’ team — it’s not anybody else’s — a small sample? Absolutely. But it is also absolutely fair to wonder how much stick the Mets are going to have when Soto is back.
Soto is just as important to the Mets as Judge is to the Yankees. But the Mets have to make sure that even when they do have Soto back they haven’t dug themselves too much of a hole in the NL East. They climbed out of a similar hole in ’24 after starting 22-33. This team has done nothing to make even the most passionate of Mets fans believe it is as tough and resilient as that team was over the last 100 games or so of that season.
No one was quite sure what we would be getting from these Mets. It was different with the Yankees, because they did win 94 a year ago and knew they were getting Cole and Carlos Rodon back before they were too deep into the season. Still: It is a good thing they did have Judge on the field and again swinging for the fences against the Angels, who left town with a 10-10 record against the Yankees 10-9. Or they would have lost all four games.
In a bad news week for New York baseball, the really good news is still how much ball is left to be played, because that is always the blue-sky way of looking at things after a stumbling and bumbling start like this for both teams. The Yankees weren’t as good as they looked at 7-1, nor as bad as they looked losing eight of their next 11. The Mets were in first place a blink ago before Soto got hurt, as suddenly as they ended up in last.
It was the noted baseball columnist, T.S. Eliot, who once wrote that “April is the cruelest month.” It sure looked that way around here after the week we just had. Next week has to be better. The Royals are at the Stadium right now and they always make the Yankees feel better about everything. Long season. You don’t believe me? Google it.
HOPING FOR A HEALTHY TROUT, BALL SHOULD HAVE BEEN SUSPENDED & PENALTY STROKES FOR CBS AT MASTERS …
Mike Trout would have been Mickey Mantle if he’d been a Yankee.
Or a reasonable facsimile thereof.
It is why this past week was such a joy of baseball — even for Yankee fans — to have Trout remind us of what he is like on a ballfield when he is healthy.
Because there was a time when we talked about him with wonder, the way people do now with Ohtani and Judge.
Maybe this will be the year when he finally makes it back to the postseason, for only the second time in his career.
Imagine if LeBron had only made it to the NBA’s postseason once in his career.
May he stay on the field this time.
For the whole time.
I’m starting to worry that Juan Soto might be underpaid.
We hear a lot about the Monster of Madison Square Garden and the place being the mecca.
But a year ago, the Knicks had nine playoff games at home and managed to win just four of them.
That was a dirty play from LaMelo Ball on Bam Adebayo the other night, one hundred percent.
And even if the refs missed it in real time, the league should have suspended Ball for a game after the fact, for swiping at the leg of the other team’s best player and basically putting him out of the season.
I hope Giannis ends up with Coach Riley next season.
There, I said it.
I can’t even tell the St. John’s players who aren’t here any longer without a program.
The amazing thing about the Masters is that we can have all the Sunday drama that we did have last Sunday, all the plot twists and turns, all that movement at the top of the leaderboard — and the winner still came out of the last twosome, the way it almost always does.
By the way?
I still believe CBS should have gotten a two-stroke penalty for a lost ball on the 72nd hole.
Rory’s ball.
By the way?
They also managed to miss Cameron Young’s second shot on the same hole.
There is a terrific book out, called “Final Draft,” a collection of the journalism of David Carr, the late media critic for the Times, and one of the truly great — and truly original — columnists I ever read.
In case you were wondering, my money’s on Pope Leo.
Finally today:
Happy b-day to Alex Lupica, a second April birthday for one of the Lupica boys.
He has grown into being such a wonderful husband and father, the way he has always been such a wonderful brother, and son.
In addition to all that, he’s the executive producer in the family.
His middle name is Bene, in honor of my late father, and his grandfather.
It means good.
Alex is.