NEW YORK — As the numb, shivering remnants of the crowd shuffled home Tuesday night, the scoreboard operator put one player’s image on the massive scoreboard at Citi Field. Pictured next to the March/April schedule, a tale of woe for the New York Mets, was Juan Soto. He was not smiling.
The Mets have lost a dozen games in a row, none more ghastly than this one, a gobsmacking 5-3 flop against the Minnesota Twins. No team has ever had a 12-game losing streak and reached the playoffs. Then again, no team has ever paid a player as much as the Mets are paying Soto.
On Wednesday, Soto will return to the roster after missing 15 games with a right calf strain. The Mets won their first three without him, then have lost the rest. They have hit .217 in Soto’s absence, with nine home runs. Only one team in MLB, the Boston Red Sox, has hit fewer.
“He’s going to help us a lot,” said Francisco Lindor, whose three-run homer gave the Mets their only runs Tuesday. “He’s a guy every lineup wished they had. We can’t wait for him to come back and do his thing. At the end of the day, I just hope everyone doesn’t put all the pressure on him, because that would be a little unfair. But I know he is going to help us tons. It’s one of the top three hitters in the league.”
Lindor is right. It’s more than a little unfair to expect Soto to help a team that can’t help itself. But Soto is a $765 million man with a $765 million mandate. Owner Steve Cohen signed him to win the World Series that has eluded this franchise for 40 years.
Before the game, Cohen described himself as “concerned, calm and focused” — which beats indifferent, panicked and distracted, but doesn’t really say a whole lot. Like everyone else, Cohen is eager to see how the lineup responds once Soto returns. It can’t get much worse, anyway.
“I didn’t think we were going to be having that much of a hard time scoring runs without him,” the embattled manager, Carlos Mendoza, said after the loss. “But again, as I said before the game, it’s hard to put a lot on Soto. But it’s going to be good to have him in the lineup.”
If the best players regularly led their teams to championships, Ty Cobb, Ted Williams, Barry Bonds and Ken Griffey Jr. would have done it many times. None ever did. In the late 1990s, when Griffey came to realize that the Seattle Mariners were missing their window to win with him, he would explain the team’s struggles with three words: “I bat third.” It was a cryptic but deceptively simple point.
In baseball, all you can do is wait your turn. Eight times out of nine, somebody else gets to hit. Soto could have bashed four homers Tuesday, and if no one did anything else, the Mets would still have lost.
Soto, of course, is familiar with the World Series. Winning was part of his appeal to Cohen. Before coming to Flushing, Soto helped carry the Washington Nationals to a title in 2019, the San Diego Padres to a championship series in 2022 and the New York Yankees to a pennant in 2024. With the Mets, he goes home for October.
Last season was a typical Cooperstown-quality season for Soto (43 homers, 38 steals, .921 OPS) with a typical Metsian outcome, a playoff spot squandered down the stretch. Now the Mets are threatening to make that “Family Guy” clip come true: With a week left in April, is the season over already?
“You cannot get complacent or be happy with what’s going on,” Mendoza said before the game. “But at the same time, like, ‘Hey, man, breathe a little bit here.’ Everybody talks about how tough New York can be. Here we are. But you just have to embrace it.”
Soto embraced the biggest pile of cash ever given to an MLB player. Now he can embrace the superhuman demands of that contract by doing what is impossible in baseball, by design. He has to elevate the team by himself.
The Mets seem alarmingly dependent on him. The Twins gutted their bullpen at the trade deadline last summer, but three relievers spun four perfect innings Tuesday. The Mets sent 23 batters to the plate after Lindor’s home run. They managed a single and two walks and made 20 outs.
Nolan McLean was perfect for five innings but wobbled in the sixth and seventh, letting the Twins tie the score and eventually forcing Devin Williams into it. In his last three outings, Williams has allowed a grand slam in Los Angeles, blown a save in Chicago and lost in New York — a coast-to-coast calamity.
“Honestly, I’d say all three outings were something different, you know?” said Williams, whose ERA is 9.95. “Today I didn’t have command. Couldn’t throw my changeup for a strike. It’s tough to be one-dimensional.”
Only the Mets could take their most thrilling moment of the decade, get rid of the hero and sign the guy who lost the game. But Pete Alonso’s triumphant homer off Williams in the 2024 first-round clincher in Milwaukee seems like a long time ago.
Williams also started poorly for the Yankees last April but showed enough for his old boss, Mets president of baseball operations David Stearns, to sign him for three years and $51 million as part of a major overhaul.
Five newcomers — Bo Bichette, Jorge Polanco, Luis Robert Jr., Marcus Semien and top prospect Carson Benge — took spots in the lineup. They have combined to hit .204, and Polanco is out with a wrist contusion.
“We have a lot of veterans in here, and we’ve been through this marathon a lot of times,” Semien said. “It’s not fun what has happened, but we know that the way to get out of it is to move forward. If you’re not optimistic, this is the wrong business to be in.”
For fans with long memories, optimism is a lot to ask. The Mets have tried a splashy makeover before, under very similar circumstances. After a deep postseason run in 2000 — when they won the NL pennant — the Mets missed the playoffs in 2001. They responded by trading for Roberto Alomar, Jeromy Burnitz and Mo Vaughn, and rearranging some of the pitching staff.
It didn’t work. The 2002 Mets crashed to last place, but at least they waited a while to fall apart. That team entered August with a winning record, but lost 12 in a row later that month and soon cost the manager, Bobby Valentine, his job.
For all that has happened since then, the Mets haven’t had another 12-game losing streak until right now.
Good luck, Juan Soto.