Carlos Mendoza took the fall for the Mets’ disastrous season.
The Mets fired their manager on Friday, per The Post’s Joel Sherman and Jon Heyman, with the team sitting 14 games below .500 following their sixth straight loss on Thursday in what will likely be a second straight season without playoff baseball.
Andy Green will be the interim manager.
There is plenty of blame to go around for this Mets’ mess, with President of Baseball Operations David Stearns certainly worth of being on the hot seat, but it’s the manager who exits first with this roughly $320-plus million roster currently possession the NL East’s worst record at 34-37.
Last year’s second-half collapse negated all the goodwill Mendoza built from this first season in 2024, and a 10-21 start that included a 12-game losing streak firmly placed Mendoza on the hot seat.
Stearns backed his manager on May 1 while some wondered about Mendoza’s future.
“We know our record is not what we want, and we know we are capable of more,” Stearns told MLB.com. “We don’t view this as a manager problem, and we don’t intend to make a change.”
The Mets responded by winning 11 of their next 16 games, and a four-game win streak to end May had the team sitting at 26-33 entering May.
A five-game losing streak from June 18-24 in which the Mets allowed 50 runs dropped them a season-high 12 games below .500 and led to David Peterson being traded, and Mendoza departed soon after.
The Mets will now hope that their new manager can have same the galvanizing effect that Don Mattingly has had in Philadelphia this year, with their rivals taking off after he replaced Rob Thomson.
For Mendoza, this firing ends an up-and-down two-and-a-half-year run.
Mendoza’s tenure began with him looking like he could be the team’s skipper for the next decade or so before the failures of the last year and a half caught up to him.
He unexpectedly led the team to the NLCS in his rookie season in 2024, upsetting the Phillies along the way in one of the team’s best moments since the 2015 World Series run.
The 2025 season, with newcomer Juan Soto, began in epic fashion with a 45-24 record through June 12 before the Mets collapsed and somehow did not finish with a top-six NL record.
They finished 38-55 to finish 83-79, losing two of three in the season-ending series against the woeful Marlins to allow the Reds to claim the final wild-card spot.
Mendoza received a retooled roster this offseason featuring Bo Bichette, Marcus Semien and Freddy Peralta with Pete Alonso and Brandon Nimmo exiting, and the team had high hopes.
Bichette has not hit as expected, Peralta has pitched like a back-end starter instead of an ace and Francisco Lindor has spent most of the year on the injured list, among other team issues.
The Mets are now all but set to be sellers this summer.
Green is now the fourth manager under owner Steve Cohen, joining Luis Rojas, Buck Showalter and Mendoza, with no skipper yet to last three seasons under the big-spending owner.
