The New York Mets lost to the Chicago Cubs 12-4 on Friday, their ninth straight defeat and a run that has dragged them to 7-13 on the season. Chicago seized control almost immediately, building a 4-0 lead in the first inning on Moisés Ballesteros' three-run home run, then putting the game away late when Ian Happ hit a two-run homer in the eighth before the Cubs finished it with a double play in the ninth.
The loss gave the Mets their longest losing streak since 2004, when they dropped 11 straight on the way to a 71-91 finish. It also deepened the pressure on a club carrying a $352 million payroll and a roster built for a far different start. New York has now lost nine in a row after also enduring eight-game slides in 2018 and again in September 2025, a pattern that has turned each bad week into a bigger issue than the last.
The Mets did at least show a brief response after falling behind, cutting Chicago's lead to 4-3 in the second inning. But the rally never held, and the Cubs kept control from there. That has been the story of the Mets' season so far, with Juan Soto missing 11 games because of a calf injury and the lineup unable to consistently make up the difference.
The frustration was already public before Friday's first pitch. Team owner Steve Cohen wrote on X that he saw “green shoots tonight” and told fans to hang in there, saying the club would turn this around. The message fit the scale of the disappointment: this is not a rebuilding team, but one that entered the season with high expectations after a series of trades and free-agency losses led to a roster stocked with expensive additions.
There is still no hiding the gap between expectation and result. The Mets were supposed to be a contender with the sport's most expensive payroll, yet they now head deeper into a road trip with two more games against the Cubs before returning home to face the Minnesota Twins. The next stretch will say less about whether the Mets can talk themselves out of this and more about whether they can finally play like the team the money was meant to buy.
