NEW YORK (BLOOMBERG) -- The New York Mets can’t stop losing, and New Yorkers are looking for someone to blame.
Scapegoat No. 1? For many fans, it’s New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani. Social media posts and videos have swirled in recent days alleging that the democratic socialist placed a curse on the team when he embraced Mr. and Mrs. Met at Citi Field on April 9. The Mets have now dropped 12 games in a row, their longest stretch of losses in more than two decades.
“There’s a lot of baseball left to be played, I am still keeping the faith as I know many Mets fans are across the city,” Mamdani said at an unrelated press conference on Wednesday. “I will accept being addressed as Mayor Mambino for the day,” he added, referring to the Curse of the Bambino — which Boston Red Sox fans long blamed for an 86-year World Series title drought.
“I will keep my fingers crossed as every Mets fan does. This is part and parcel of what it means to be the mayor, and you take it in stride,” Mamdani said.
With the losses in Queens piling up, hopes for this season are fading before the cherry blossoms even fall from the trees at Flushing Meadows Corona Park. No team has ever lost 12 games in a row during the regular season and gone on to make the playoffs. The Mets now post a woeful 7-16 record, placing them last in the National League East and 8.5 games behind the division-leading Atlanta Braves.
For Mets fans who had sensed a possible end to the losing streak, Tuesday’s ninth-inning capitulation to the Minnesota Twins was especially crushing. (Mets closer Devin Williams — signed to a deal worth about $50 million in the offseason — entered a tie game and gave up two runs without recording an out.)
This agonizing April has been a lackluster showing for a team with one of the largest payrolls in the majors, carrying roughly $360 million in 2026. It’s almost habitual for fans of baseball — a sport steeped in more than a century of tradition and superstition — to blame higher powers. However, there are more tangible factors at play.
The Mets’ bullpen has been especially ineffective during the losing streak — but there again, so has its anemic offense, which has been without injured slugger Juan Soto, who signed a 15-year, $765 million contract after the 2024 season. The team has been outscored 67-22 during the 12-game skid and has the third-lowest batting average in the National League.
The early-season strife has been compounded by fans’ doubts about an offseason shakeup of the roster that saw homegrown slugger Pete Alonso depart for the Baltimore Orioles, closer Edwin Diaz sign with the hated Los Angeles Dodgers and outfielder Brandon Nimmo traded to the Texas Rangers.
Being a Mets fan has never been easy. While the franchise owns two of the most memorable World Series victories in baseball history — its 1969 ‘Miracle’ season and the 1986 triumph over the star-crossed Bill Buckner and the Red Sox — it also has a long backlog of playoff defeats and late-season collapses. Now, it’s adding an early-season torment for the ages to its roster of indignities.
The losing streak has become an embarrassing quagmire for the Mets’ billionaire owner, Point72 Asset Management founder Steve Cohen. Last September, Cohen apologized to fans after the team narrowly missed the postseason. At the time, he vowed to do a postmortem analysis to figure out why the team underperformed.
Since purchasing the team for a then-record $2.4 billion in 2020, Cohen — a lifelong Mets fan — has become one of the biggest spenders in American sports.
April is usually the most hopeful time in the baseball season. Despair typically takes time to set in, to harden into the listless torpor of a middling team fighting through the year’s hottest months. It’s the time when teams work out the kinks, shake off the rust and figure out just how good they might be — and how to improve.
The Mets, however, might already be beyond hope — months before the leaves drop once again, and October, and a long offseason of searching for answers, arrives.
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