As the sun rises on another baseball season, the New York Mets enter 2024 after a disappointing 2023 season. Buck Showalter led the Mets through a season that failed to meet almost every expectation, as the team fell from 101 wins in 2022 to just 75 in 2023. Showalter would be shown the door after the finale of that disappointing campaign, and owner Steve Cohen would also show GM Billy Eppler the door. In their places, Cohen would hire Carlos Mendoza and David Stearns.
Few truly know how this Mets club will perform this season, especially in a National League where the team lost out on Shohei Ohtani and Yoshinobu Yamamoto to the Los Angeles Dodgers. To accompany this, Kodai Senga will also miss the first month of action.
What Else Changed?
The Mets did make a series of solid moves this offseason. Early in the offseason, the team signed Luis Severino away from the crosstown rival New York Yankees. Just after the New Year, the team signed Harrison Bader away from Cincinnati to reunite him with star slugger and former University of Florida teammate Pete Alonso.
Speaking of Alonso, the Mets signed a one-year extension to avoid arbitration with the 2019 NL Rookie of the Year. Alonso’s contract will be a point of contention as we navigate the 2024 season. Just last week, the Mets closed out their 2024 offseason moves by finally bringing in J.D. Martinez. Martinez left the Dodgers after the team secured Ohtani. Martinez will not be ready for Opening Day but will see action once he is ready, likely within the next few weeks.
Pitching
Kodai Senga’s injury will leave Jose Quintana to lead the charge for the Mets into 2024 when he takes the hill against Milwaukee on Friday afternoon. Severino and Tylor Megill will follow to close out the Mets’ opening series of 2024. Edwin Diaz, who didn’t get to play at all in 2023 following a freak injury at the World Baseball Classic, will bring the sounds of Timmy Trumpet back to Flushing this spring and summer.
The rest of the rotation surely leaves something to be desired. The trades of Justin Verlander and Max Scherzer left two big holes in a starting rotation that was deemed fit to bring the Mets a deep playoff run in 2023, and in 2024, Sean Manaea and Adrian Houser will join the Mets' starting rotation.
Hitting
Bader and Martinez join Alonso, Jeff McNeil, Francisco Lindor, and the rest of the stalwart Mets cast from 2022 and 2023. There is legitimate power up and down this lineup, with Alonso having briefly pursued the chance to hit 60 home runs in 2023. Martinez joins from a season in which he had just hit 33 home runs for the Dodgers. Jett Williams, Drew Gilbert, and Luisangel Acuna are on their way, and their first games with the club are set to happen by 2025, if not this season.
Time will tell if this Mets lineup will have to be aiding the lackluster pitching in rallying the team out of deficits the team faces in contests during the 2024 season, something they failed to do for most of 2023, especially after the team fell below .500 in June and never climbed back out.
2024 Schedule Analysis
The season commences with contests against Stearns’s former employers, the Brewers, and then the Detroit Tigers come to town right after. The first four of thirteen games against division rival Atlanta Braves await the following week, then the Mets’ first west coast trip of the season happens not long after that.
The Mets will not start their season series against fellow NL East clubs in the Philadelphia Phillies and Miami Marlins until May and won’t meet the Washington Nationals for the first time until June 3rd. Six days later, the Mets and Phillies will meet for the MLB’s second London Series. The Mets will meet the Yankees for a total of four games, split between two in late June and two in late July.
The team’s longest road trips will be spent between August and early September, as the team will only spend 10 days home at Citi Field for the month of August. After the close of their season series against their NL East rivals, the last being Atlanta between September 24th and 25th, the Mets will close in Milwaukee against the Brewers between September 27th and 29th.
New York Mets 2024 Final Predictions
Given the circumstances surrounding this Mets team, assigning anything above 85 wins for this club is hard. It is just as hard to say that the team will fail to win less than 70 games.
2023 saw the Marlins and Arizona Diamondbacks secure Wild Card slots with 84 wins, and if the Mets can meet that upper-bound win total, they can sneak into a Wild Card. Because the Diamondbacks took their 84-win Wild Card appearance and turned it into a World Series run, anything is possible for these Mets.
New York Mets final 2024 Prediction:
83-79 - Missing the Playoffs
Tune in after the season, and I will re-analyze these predictions with data from the 2024 season.
