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Try it freeThe Sports Pope told no lies.
Legendary New York radio host Mike Francesa has seen a thing or two in his days watching Mets baseball, and he put it bluntly when talking about the Mets missing the playoffs.
The Mets lost 4-0 to the Marlins on Sunday despite the Brewers giving the Mets a gift by winning a meaningless game (for them) over the Reds.
“And what did the Mets do with that? They did exactly what you knew the Mets would do,” Francesa said on his eponymous podcast. “This is such a colossal failure. This is one of the great colossal gutless collapses that we have seen from a team with talent in a very long time.”
The Mets, whose roster was among the most expensive in all of baseball with a $340 million payroll, had the best record in MLB through mid-June before falling apart and somehow missing the playoffs.
“There are bad teams. That’s not them — they aren’t a bad team. There are a gutless bunch of underachievers. That’s what they are to the core, and they should be ashamed,” Francesa said.
“I never thought they would be this gutless. I never thought that they would not figure it out to this extent. I never thought their pitching would dissolve as badly as it did, but not just their pitching. But they were a top-heavy lineup all year. They became a bad defensive team. They became a bad situational team. And they became a bunch of gutless bums.”
The Mets posted a horrific 38-55 record after June 12. Even still, they had a six-game lead over the Reds for the final playoff spot, as of Sept. 1, but they still fell off.
The Post’s Mike Vaccaro explained why the Mets’ brain trust of David Stearns and Carlos Mendoza are on the clock in New York after an embarrassing collapse.
“The bottom line is this is not the time to look at what the Mets have going forward. It’s about answering the question of why this group was such a gutless collection of underachievers,” Francesa added. “And this didn’t play out over a week or two weeks. This wasn’t a team that just hit the skids late. This was a slow drip that started in late June and never ever got solved.”
They now have the offseason to figure out how to fix this and what went wrong.
Among those questions is whether the Mets will re-sign Pete Alonso, who will opt out of his contract.
“Alonso had a terrific year. And let me say this about Alonso. I don’t know if we just saw him play his last game as a Met or not. I don’t know what the future’s going to hold for him. But I will tell you this, he’s a hell of a baseball player,” Francesa gushed about Alonso, who ended the year second in the league in RBIs, hitting .272 with 38 home runs and 128 RBIs.
“He cares. He shows up every day. He’s a terrific teammate. He battled to the end. He got a hit in his last at bat and he’s yelling, ‘Let’s go to the dugout as he goes to first base.’ This guy is a gamer. He answered every critic. From the big home run he hit last year, right through every at-bat year when he was treated terribly in the off-season, he responded in a huge way. If the Mets don’t want him, somebody’s going to get a really good baseball player. A really, really good baseball player and a good teammate and I think a winning player. “