There's bad baseball, and then there's whatever the Mets have been serving up the last two days. Two straight shutouts, an offense that looks like it's putting in overtime to get back to the clubhouse, and a fan base that's running out of polite ways to say this team has quit on itself. NjTank99, the unofficial pulse-check of Mets Twitter, has been live-tweeting the corpse.
It started early in the series, with Tank zeroing in on the at-bats themselves — no battle, no plan, just guys waving at pitches and jogging back to the dugout. The complaint isn't just that the Mets are losing. It's HOW they're losing.
Tank diagnosing the at-bats: no fight, no grit, quick innings on a loop.
The Mets will be no hit at least 3 times this year this is the worst htting approach ever they dont care just going through the motions and quick innings no fight no grit no heart.
By the time the second shutout was unfolding, even the more even-keel Barstool guys had noticed. Steven Cheah, who is not exactly a hair-on-fire poster, more or less shrugged and said the quiet part: this isn't great. Back-to-back goose eggs in May for a team with this payroll is the kind of thing that gets a coaching staff put on the clock.
Even the calm takes are sounding alarms about the back-to-back shutouts.
Back to back shutouts certainly isn’t ideal
From there, Tank just kept turning the dial up. Ibanez was a target. Peterson was a target. Vientos and Tyrone Taylor caught strays. The defense got dragged for being a glove-shaped traffic cone at first base. The hitting coach got named. The analytics nerds got named. The first base coach got compared, unfavorably and with extreme prejudice, to the previous first base coach. By the middle of the game, it stopped being a rant and started being a manifesto.
The thesis statement of the entire weekend, in one line.
This is the most heartless gutless team in sports history
And because no Mets meltdown is complete without invoking the ghosts of ownerships past, Tank went there too — openly pining for Fred Wilpon to walk back through the door and start cleaning house, starting with David Stearns and Carlos Mendoza. That is the line you cross when you've truly given up on the present regime: asking for the guy whose name was synonymous with Mets dysfunction to come back, because at least HE would fire people.
Begging for the Wilpon era back is the Mets-fan version of nuking the site from orbit.
I rather Fred Wilpon own the Mets he would fire sterns
Is any of this fair? Probably not entirely. Is firing the manager in early May going to fix a lineup that can't string two hits together? Almost certainly not. But that's not really the point. Two shutouts in a row, no pulse at the plate, and the loudest fan in the room is calling for everyone's head — that's the temperature. The Mets need to score a run before this becomes the only story they have.