Blue Notes: How a $357 Million Team Finished Last

In jazz, a blue note is the one that’s a little flat on purpose. It’s the sound of something that hurts and still belongs in the song.

The 2026 Mets were a whole album of them.

They finished 74-88, dead last in the NL East, their first last-place finish since 2003. They were eliminated on Sept. 14 and lost the finale to Washington, 6-4. The one bright spot on the last day: Francisco Lindor hit his 300th career home run.

The bill for all that: a $357 million payroll, second in baseball only to the Dodgers. By Spotrac’s estimate, the luxury-tax number was even higher, around $370 million, with a tax bill north of $100 million. That works out to roughly $5 million per win. That’s a lot of money to finish fifth.

Rather than walk through all 162, I want to find the three things that actually broke. Anyone can pile on after a season like this. The useful question is what they fix first.

1. April broke the season, and the injuries broke April

The Mets went 10-21 in April, the worst record in baseball, and lost 12 straight, their longest skid since 2002. By May 22 they were 22-29. The season was basically over before Memorial Day.

Then look at the injury list:

• Juan Soto, right calf (April 3)
• Jorge Polanco, right wrist, on top of a nagging left Achilles (IL April 18)
• Francisco Lindor, left calf (April 22), out more than two months
• Luis Robert Jr., herniated disc in his lower back (April 30), out almost three months
• Clay Holmes, broken fibula on a comebacker (mid-May)
• Marcus Semien, hip flexor (late June)

Your two best players and two of your big offseason additions all went down before May was out. No roster survives that. But the injuries weren’t the whole story, because the replacements didn’t just fall short. They collapsed.

That’s a depth problem, and depth is a front-office problem. When you build a $357 million roster that falls apart after a handful of injuries, you put the money in the wrong places.

2. The veteran bets didn’t pay

The winter plan was to buy proven production. Here’s the final tally:

Player	2026 final line	2027 salary
Kodai Senga	0-9, 7.34 ERA in 31 games (8 starts)	$15M
Jorge Polanco	.148/.201/.230 in 37 games	$20M
Marcus Semien	.215/.280/.340, 15 HR	$26M
Luis Robert Jr.	.223, 10 HR in 58 games	Claimed by Baltimore (Aug. 31)
Bo Bichette	.260/.312/.390, 18 HR	Opt-out decision

Bichette did stay on the field for 160 games, which counts for something. But a .702 OPS on a $42-million-a-year deal isn’t what the Mets were buying.

You can survive one of those. You can’t survive five.

There’s an old lesson in finance: concentration kills you. The Mets put a lot of money into players in their 30s coming off good-not-great years, and those bets all failed together. Semien will be 36 on Opening Day. Polanco’s Achilles is a real worry at his age. And about $61 million of that group is still owed in 2027 (Semien, Polanco and Senga alone). That money is gone before Stearns spends a dollar in free agency.

3. The dugout didn’t hold

Carlos Mendoza got fired on June 26 with the team at 34-47. Across three seasons he finished 206-199 with a playoff run in 2024 that nobody will forget. I don’t think Mendoza lost this team by himself. Managers don’t make calf strains.

But when you’re 13 games under .500 at the end of June, the manager goes. That’s how the business works. Andy Green, then the Mets’ senior VP of baseball development, took over and went 40-41. The Mets played winning ball after the deadline with a stripped-down roster, and that earned him the full-time job on Sept. 22. I wrote about what that hire means here.

What actually went right

This isn’t all funeral music.

• Soto was Soto when healthy: .275/.393/.515 with 27 homers in 111 games, around two calf strains. The problem was the other 51 games.
• Nolan McLean is a real front-line arm: 12-10, 3.16 ERA, 194 strikeouts in 179.2 innings over 31 starts. He’s the best news of the year.
• Carson Benge did more than hold his own as a rookie: .282/.346/.430, 20 HR in 156 games, and the best WAR on the team by Baseball-Reference’s count. Christian Scott (3.85 ERA, 134 K in 110 innings) gave you more reasons for hope.
• The deadline sell-off brought back 12 prospects, including Jefferson Rojas from the Cubs, now the Mets’ No. 1 prospect.

The core under 27 is better than it was a year ago. The veterans paid to support that core were the problem.

The takeaway

This wasn’t a spending problem. Cohen spent. It was an allocation problem: money tied up in aging, injury-prone veterans with no depth behind them. Stearns has to answer for that.

The fix is simple to say and hard to do. Spend on youth and the upper end, like an ace, instead of expensive veterans in the middle. Build a bench that can survive a Soto calf strain. And figure out the Bichette decision before a possible Dec. 1 lockout freezes everything.

That’s the offseason. I’ll be tracking every piece of it on the Offseason Tracker.