Everything else broke the Mets’ way on Sunday afternoon. The Cincinnati Reds, who entered the 2025 regular-season finale level in the win column but ahead of New York via the tiebreaker, lost to the Milwaukee Brewers.
But as the Mets have done all season, they threw it away with a whimper — and now their season is over much earlier than expected.
The Miami Marlins scored four runs in the bottom of the fourth inning against a Frankenstein-esque collection of pitchers doled out by manager Carlos Mendoza, and extinguished New York’s postseason hopes with a 4-0 victory at loanDepot Park.
With the result, the Reds backed their way into the postseason. They will travel to Los Angeles to face the Dodgers in the best-of-three Wild Card Series, which begins on Tuesday night.
Consider this the latest spectacular collapse in Mets lore, and one of the more notable nosedives that Major League Baseball has seen in the last 25 years. After starting the year 45-24, the Mets went 38-55, meaning they played like a 98-loss team for the last three-and-a-half months of the season.
They become just the third team in the Wild Card era to win 45 of their first 69 games and miss the postseason, joining the 2002 Boston Red Sox and 2003 Seattle Mariners.
Both teams won 93 games in their respective seasons, while the Mets finished with 10 fewer following their disastrous summer. They finished with a disappointingly mediocre 83-79 record despite having baseball’s highest payroll and a litany of stars.
The Marlins continued their historical trend of derailing Mets seasons at the death, doing so by scorching reliever Ryne Stanek and ultimately unraveling a bullpen game that saw Sean Manaea, Huascar Brazoban, and Brooks Raley get the first 10 outs of the afternoon.
After Raley gave up a single and was promptly pulled after just 10 pitches, Stanek yielded an RBI double to Eric Waganman on a hanging slider. He did the same to Brian Navaretto, who ripped another two-bagger that scored Waganman to make it 2-0.
Mendoza turned to Tyler Rogers, who is not a strikeout pitcher, and it backfired further. Javier Sanoja tripled down the left-field line, and Xavier Edwards blooped a single to make it a four-run game.
For as much as Mendoza’s pitching plan backfired, the Mets’ bats came up lame with everything on the line as they mustered just five hits.
They were limited for the first half of the afternoon by Edward Cabrera, who allowed two hits in five innings, but finally got something going in the fifth when they loaded the bases with two outs. Pete Alonso scorched the first pitch he saw 116 mph off the bat to left field — the hardest hit ball by any Met this season — but it was right at Sanoja, and a golden chance was squandered.
The Mets put two men on in the eighth in one last gasp, but Francisco Alvarez swung at ball four on a full-count breaking ball and proceeded to break his bat over his knee — quite similar to the collective back of his team snapping. They went 0-for-8 with runners in scoring position on Sunday, leaving 10 men on base.
