Mets are a mess and everyone has a fix-it plan now

It's gotten to the point where the Mets' problems aren't just a bad week anymore, they're a full-blown genre. Every insider with a byline has a theory on how David Stearns fixes this thing before the trade deadline, and Jon Heyman decided one column wasn't enough. He dropped a 10-point recovery plan and, less than 12 hours later, a follow-up column zeroing in on the four names everyone in Queens is arguing about: Francisco Lindor, Luke Weaver, Clay Holmes and Francisco Alvarez.

Jon Heyman

@JonHeyman

t.co/pkuHus82i6 My 10-point plan to put the Mets on the road to recovery

That the Mets need multiple recovery plans tells you where the season has gone. Clay Holmes, brought over as a starter, has spent time on the 60-day injured list with a fractured fibula, which complicates any pitch that he's part of the solution rather than a subplot. Luke Weaver has quietly been excellent out of the bullpen this year, and reports have floated the idea that he's actually a sell-high candidate at the deadline, which is its own kind of insane sentence to type about a team currently drowning. Alvarez, meanwhile, is a guy the organization was ready to write off as a bust before a meniscus injury and a subsequent hot stretch since returning muddied that narrative just enough to make the front office's decision harder.

And then there's the defense, which is its own five-alarm fire independent of who's hurt or who's getting shopped. Jomboy Media put together a breakdown of just how bad it's gotten, the kind of clip where every replay makes you wince a little more than the last one.

Jomboy Media

@JomboyMedia

The Mets defense is in shambles

That clip is the whole season in miniature. It's not one bad throw or one blown coverage, it's a pattern, and patterns are what get coaches and executives fired. When a team's defense becomes a recurring bit on a baseball media account, that's usually a sign the losses have stopped being random noise and started being structural.

Jon Heyman

@JonHeyman

t.co/pkuHus82i6 Column: What the Mets should do with Lindor, Weaver, Holmes, Alvarez and much more about how they can best undo this alltime mess

Lindor is the name that changes everything, mostly because he isn't going anywhere. He's the face of the roster and the richest contract on the books, so any "recovery plan" that touches him is really about how the Mets build around him, not whether they move him. That's what makes this stretch so strange: the star is fine, the record isn't, and the fixes being proposed are all about the supporting cast falling apart around a guy who's still doing his job.

With the deadline closing in, the Mets are staring down the kind of decision that defines a front office's next 3 years. Sell off Weaver and Holmes for prospects and lean into a reset, or convince yourself Alvarez's recent surge and a defensive course-correction are enough to salvage 2026? Either way, it says something that it now takes two separate Heyman columns just to lay out the options.