Approximately five minutes after the Mets’ 2025 season ended, I was given the unfortunate task of asking the rest of the MMO team for their raw, emotional reactions to the Mets missing the playoffs. If you want to commiserate, this one’s for you. Here are our unfiltered emotions, and what we think were the biggest reasons the Mets didn’t make it.

Christian De Block

I am at a loss for words. Genuinely speechless. Missing the playoffs after the start they had is completely unacceptable and embarrassing. There are a whole list of reasons as to why the 2025 New York Mets significantly underperformed. The biggest reason was their rotation. Their inability to provide innings over the final three/four months not only hurt them, but it also forced the bullpen to be overworked. Serious changes will need to be made across the board this winter.

Johnluke Chaparro

Devastated. Annoyed. Numb. It felt throughout the season that there was this lack of cohesion somewhere. Something didn’t feel right, which was the opposite during most of 2024. They had so much time to iron out a lot of some of these issues, but they either kept the same approach or made changes too late and it ended up costing them. The effectiveness of the pitching faltered and the lack of hits with runners in scoring position is what did them in. Something happened around June 13th where the team wasn’t really a team and it ended up permeating into what we have in front of us.

The hitting and pitching coaches, namely Eric Chavez, Jeremy Barnes, Jeremy Hefner and company need to be examined and see what went wrong. You cannot have this much talent and have the majority of the players on the team regress or come through short in key situations like they did this season. How on earth do we have guys who are elite level players looking like fools in most situations? I am writing this still in shock and cannot believe that 7 months of baseball is over in a flash. David Stearns (and Steve Cohen) need to make meaningful changes to this team, both on the field and in other ways as well. I still believe in Carlos Mendoza and his ability to manage this team but the other positions, need to be looked at. This is just all of jumble of stuff, trying to figure out what exactly went wrong and I know my fellow colleagues feel the same way because how on earth does this happen? Why?

Brandyn Pokrass

…sigh. After being on top of the world in the first half of the year, it feels like this was somewhat inevitable. Yet, I didn’t want to believe it. From the All-Star break on, the pitching imploded. Massive losing streaks unfolded. The lineup disappeared for weeks at a time. This collapse happened for a variety of different reasons, and there is not just one area to blame. All areas of the team have a role in what occurred. The team needs some big changes over the winter, but the team simply just needs to execute better over the course of the whole season. I am very fascinated to see the course that the Mets chart from here.

Mathias Altman-Kurosaki

Calling this season a disappointment would be an understatement. I really wanted to believe that the seven-game losing streak in June was just an aberration, but then they had another seven-game losing streak. Then they had an eight-game losing streak. They got what they deserved for months of poor play, and to make matters worse, they wasted some great individual performances (Soto, Alonso, Diaz, and Lindor). I have no clue what to expect this offseason, but they need to be aggressive in trying to fix the pitching staff above all, and I’m not talking about trying to go for another reclamation project. The coaching staff could probably use some changes too, but 90% of this season’s failures are on the players. I guess there’s always next year.

Mojo Hill

I’m definitely surprised the Mets ended up actually blowing it, given all their talent and the expanded playoff format. It seems like only a few weeks ago there were still talks about what kind of magical run it would take to win the division from the Phillies. Now, that was always a long shot, but for them to not even make it to October is a huge gut punch. The pitching, which was strong early in the year, fell apart spectacularly. I also think Carlos Mendoza pushed quite a few of the wrong buttons — not that he was in the easiest position to start with.

I also think the new playoff format is really dumb. The Mets would have been out of it already under the older, more fair format. That just emphasizes how far they fell. I think MLB should still have a Game 163, too, where the Mets would have still had a chance. Regardless, it was a failed season leaving a lot of lingering agony about who’s to blame, who will still be here next year and what’s next.

Michelle Ioannou

There’s only one word that comes to my mind – unbelievable. It’s entirely unbelievable to me that this team did not make the postseason. Am I a fool that the Mets still manage to somehow surprise me and let me down? Maybe. But it’s truly unbelievable to me that the 2025 Mets aren’t in the postseason. If I had to pick just one “reason” I’d have to say pitching. It just wasn’t where it should’ve been; where we expected it to be.

Allison Waxman

Numb. Gutted. Disappointed. It was there and then it was gone. The Mets had so many opportunities to work out the kinks and right the ship, but couldn’t come through. Even in Game 162. This one stings a bit more just because of the hope instilled after 2024 even though it ended with an exit in the NLCS — it seems near impossible to say they didn’t make the playoffs. Because they should have. On paper, this is a playoff team. A pain like no other, somehow worse than ’07.

Matthew Tutrone

The 2025 disaster of a season largely comes down to bad luck and a bad approach. The bad luck was on display all year, from the injuries that derailed the strong start by the pitching staff, to the countless hard-hit outs and highlight reel plays opponents made seemingly every day.

The bad approach falls entirely on the offense. Despite having some impressive individual stats from the top of the lineup, the lineup as a whole didn’t get the job done far too many times. There were roughly a dozen games where one single would’ve turned a loss into a win. All year we watched games that they should’ve won, but just didn’t. There’s nothing you can do about bad luck, but the approach needs to be addressed this offseason, and that means changes to the roster and coaching staff. Eric Chavez and Jeremy Barnes absolutely need to be the first ones to go. I think some of the surplus young players need to be traded for veteran depth pieces. Mendoza has to bear some blame for the sloppy play down the stretch as well, but I think calls for his firing go too far.

Nick Kalantzopoulos

Definitely gutted. It’s tough to describe why a difference of one win (I haven’t forgotten about that one game Mike Sarbaugh) should lead to this much more of a sinking feeling. This has been a bad team for months, and a basically .500 team overall (to that point btw it’s tough to say they “collapsed” simply in this Marlins series. .500 teams tend to lose a series on the road against another .500 team). The only reason they were in contention this long was because no one else took it from them and frankly most seasons, six teams in each league shouldn’t warrant a playoff berth anyway. MLB cheapened its playoffs by adding two extra teams and this year is another year that proves that.

That all being said, while the 2025 Mets wouldn’t have been a better team if they had won one more game or the Reds lost one more game and then they proceeded to get trounced by the Dodgers in 2, it would have FELT different. There is much more honor in losing in a crapshoot playoff series than missing the playoffs entirely, with a payroll this high. And only missing the playoffs entirely would have made this season a complete disaster which it has become.

Now comes the off-season which will have a million questions like any other year. We will head into the off-season knowing full well that winning the off-season never means you will win the regular season, and that just because a team spends a lot of money on the exact players its fans want them to sign, it doesn’t mean it will work out. But alas, it’s a lesson we also seem to forget every year as well.

Kai Chang

This was bleak. How did it slip away like that? It was right in their hands. This cannot happen. The team is only getting older, and maybe this just isn’t the right core. I still believe in Lindor, Soto, and Nimmo, but something is clearly off internally. There’s no way a roster with this much talent failed to complete step 1.

I know Jose Iglesias has been a scrub all year, but honestly, for the Mets, the spark felt gone after that first losing streak in June. Unacceptable. I don’t even care how many wins they finished with, the issue is that they never truly made a real run. In ’24 they were painfully average to start the year, then made a miracle run. In ’25, if they’d caught fire late and fallen short, it would’ve felt different. This year, they seemed lifeless. It’s time to weed out the guys who just weren’t good enough. Some players’ performances were just pitiful.

Now comes the offseason. $100 mil is coming off the books. Diaz needs to be re-signed. The identity of this team, especially in ‘24 and ‘25, was that once the ninth inning hit, the game was over.

The higher-ups need to take a long, hard look at everything — coaching staff, front office, players — and ask themselves a long, hard question: is this team built to win, or are we just fooling ourselves?

David Melendi

I am stunned. I thought this team would win 90 in its sleep. And even when it became clear that wouldn’t happen I thought they had the talent to beat any team in the playoff field when they got in.

I blame the starting pitching the most. Senga, Manaea and Peterson were all awful in the second half. Stearns had a bad trade deadline. I like Mendoza but he made a bunch of questionable moves. Pulling Edwin Diaz against the Nats in September will gnaw at me. Also I thought they kept Francisco Alvarez in Triple-A way longer than necessary. Lots of blame to go around.

Eitan Hain

Sad. That’s the word that hangs over everything when thinking about the 2025 Mets. Not anger, not outrage, not even disbelief — just sadness. Sad for the team, sure, but mostly sad for us — the fans. We packed Citi Field in record numbers this year, nearly 3.2 million strong, all believing this was going to be different. We bought the hype. We trusted the talent. And in the end, we were left with yet another soul‑crushing collapse. This wasn’t supposed to be “LOL Mets” anymore. There’s plenty of blame to go around, and no one gets to walk away from this unscathed.

The front office, after having a near‑flawless first season, had a number of misses that doomed the team. There are very few people who are bigger advocates of David Stearns and his group than I am, but having good process only takes you so far. You need results. While signing Soto and betting on Clay Holmes to be a starter and bringing back Pete Alonso were all strong moves, the list of misses is too long to ignore. The deadline didn’t help Stearns’ case. Ryan Helsley, Tyler Rogers, Gregory Soto, and Cedric Mullins combined for –0.3 bWAR after being acquired at the trade deadline. In a vacuum that lack of production is not insurmountable, but their inability to help the team — combined with worsening production from the starting pitchers David Peterson, Kodai Senga, and Sean Manaea — made for a deadly combination.

The coaching staff deserves scrutiny too. The same issues kept cropping up — starters falling apart the second or third time through the order, an inability to come back when trailing after eight innings (the Mets were the only team all year that never won a game when trailing after the 8th), and a general lack of preparedness that was obvious to anyone watching. These weren’t one‑off problems; they were systemic. The lack of attention to detail was apparent from day one — Luisangel Acuña’s throwing error on Opening Day, which led to an unearned run, was a fitting omen for what was to come.

And finally, there are the players. Yes, it’s the job of the front office and coaches to set them up for success, but at some point talent has to execute. In the second half of the season, too often they simply didn’t. Whether it was failures with runners in scoring position, starters unable to provide length, the bullpen blowing games before Díaz could shut the door, or simply being unable to convert grounders into double plays (they ranked 29th in that regard) — this team was bad at the little things. They were the best the best in preventing stolen bases and ranked 4th in “good defensive plays,” yet they were 20th overall in defensive value — the spectacular plays were never the issue; it was the mundane, simple plays that hampered them. And the cherry on top was Sunday afternoon in Miami. For all the talent and headlines, this team shrank when the moment demanded they rise.

So here we are again. Another September collapse. Another offseason of what‑ifs. Another sad chapter in a franchise history already overloaded with them. The difference this time is the weight of expectation. This team wasn’t supposed to be a plucky underdog. This was supposed to be a legitimate contender. And maybe that’s what hurts the most. We showed up. In record numbers. We bought in. We believed.

And now, we’re left with nothing but that familiar ache in the chest. That dull, sinking feeling that maybe we’re not done with “LOL Mets” after all.

There will be exit interviews and the front office will make changes and gear up for 2026, but we — the fans — will carry this with us. Because hope, cruel as it is, doesn’t just fade. It lingers. And the pain of another failure feels heavier when you thought you’d finally escaped the past.
The 2025 Mets didn’t just lose. They let us down. Again.