The New York Mets lost 12-4 to the Chicago Cubs on Friday night, and the defeat stretched their losing streak to nine games. Chicago was in front 4-0 after the first inning, when Moisés Ballesteros hit a three-run homer, and the Mets never fully recovered. They fell to 7-13, a record that has turned a season built on expectation into a long early grind.
The loss came in a cubs game that the Mets desperately needed to stop the bleeding. They cut the deficit to 4-3 in the second inning, but Ian Happ’s two-run homer in the bottom of the eighth pushed the Cubs to 12 runs, and Chicago finished it with a double play in the top of the ninth. It was the Mets’ ninth straight defeat, their longest skid since 2004, when they lost 11 in a row on the way to a 71-91 finish.
That comparison hangs over a club carrying baseball’s most expensive roster at $352 million. The Mets entered the season with high expectations after a winter of trades and free-agent losses reshaped the team, but the early results have been brutal. Juan Soto has missed 11 games with a calf injury, and his $61.9 million salary is a major piece of the payroll math that has made this slide so hard to ignore.
The streak began with two losses to the Arizona Diamondbacks, and it has included sweeps by the Athletics and Dodgers, along with Thursday’s series-opening loss to the Cubs. The current run is not even the franchise’s worst; the Mets lost 17 straight in 1961. But the timing is what stings now, because every night the pressure rises on a club that was built to contend and is instead trying to survive April.
Owner Steve Cohen tried to steady the mood Tuesday on X, saying he saw “green shoots” and telling fans, “Hang in there fans, we will turn this around!” Friday’s result did little to support that optimism. The Mets have two more games against the Cubs before heading home for a series against the Minnesota Twins, and anything short of a quick response will only deepen the questions around a roster that was supposed to look far different from this.