The New York Mets are no strangers to the players-only meeting. Astute readers will remember the fellas coming together for one such meeting in May 2024, when the team was 11 games under .500 and the season seemed to be slipping away. Those Mets ended up winning 89 games and making the playoffs, so clearly a lot of important issues were ironed out during that meeting. Perhaps it was the memory of that meeting’s effectiveness that brought the players together for another confab before Sunday’s series finale against the Pirates.

“At least they have the Pirates coming up,” typed one unnamed Defector staffer into our workplace communication platform on June 23. The next day, the Mets lost to the Braves, despite the best efforts of Dicky Lovelady, to continue a slump had seen them lose 10 of 11 games. Two consecutive wins against the Braves followed, which set up the Mets to cruise into a potentially healing three-game series against the crap-filled Pirates.

They dropped their first two games against the Pirates by a combined score of 18-3. Not what you want! The players-only meeting followed the second loss, after which a few players gave reporters a debrief. “We collectively, as a group, decided to start talking to each other,” said Francisco Lindor. “And that’s what good teams do. We all rely on each other, we all bounce ideas from each other. It was just a team thing.”

“We just decided we wanted to talk,” said Brandon Nimmo. “One person says it and you all get behind it. That’s the way this team works. It’s made up of very, very good people. So if somebody wants to talk about things, then we’re all behind each other to do that.”

We’re all adults here, and do not need to pretend that a struggling baseball team taking some time to “bounce ideas” off each other following another terrible loss is always going to have an immediate effect on future results. Players-only meetings are mostly about timing, and in this case it was wise of the Mets to have one before the last of a three-game set against one of the worst teams in baseball. Despite how the first two games went, the odds were with the third going the Mets’ way, which would have allowed them to assign all sorts of meaning to their frank conversations with each other and start believing that a corner had been turned. That is not what happened. Instead, the Mets put together the worst-case scenario: a loss so putrid and dispiriting that it raises questions about whether Saturday’s meeting was in fact focused on strategies for playing even worse baseball.

The game started with Mets starter Frankie Montas giving up five runs in the first inning. Ke’Bryan Hayes blooped a two-out, two-strike single into center field to plate the first two runs. Oneil Cruz followed that up with one of his patented cruise-missile homers, which put two more runs across. The dreaded Tommy Pham then finished things up with a solo shot. Montas steadied himself slightly, but ended up leaving the game after four innings with his team trailing 6–0.

Ah, but what of Dicky Lovelady? The delightfully named middle reliever, who was cruelly optioned to Triple-A after making his Mets debut against the Braves last week, was brought on in relief of Montas. Perhaps the presence of this fine fellow, who held his own in his only previous appearance and whose very name brings a smile to faces across the globe, could break the Mets out of the funk. With his second pitch, Lovelady surrendered a dong to Bryan Reynolds.

Ah, well.

The Pirates would go on to win the game 12–1, making this one of the most gruesome three-game series in the Mets’ recent history. They were outscored 30–4 by a team that came into the weekend scoring the second-fewest runs per game in the NL and was at the very bottom of the league in home runs. The Pirates have now played 85 games, and the 30 runs they scored this weekend against the Mets accounts for more than 10 percent of their total runs this season.

The Mets have now lost 13 of their last 16 while struggling to survive injuries to pitchers Kodai Senga, Tylor Megill, and Griffin Canning, as well as slumps afflicting Francisco Lindor and Pete Alonso. The good news is that Juan Soto is starting to hit, and the Mets somehow remain just 1.5 games behind the Phillies for the division lead.

Where do they go from here, though? The players-only meeting has already come and gone, which means it might be time for more drastic measures. What’s that? Am I hearing that it’s time for … a reset?

“It’s a tough stretch for sure,” said Lindor after the game. “Hopefully getting the day off, the mental day off, and getting away from the field, we can come back and get back on the horse.”

Hopefully a day off will do the trick. If things don’t turn around soon, it might be time for the Mets to enter the most difficult stage of losing, in which demands are made for guys to start “looking at themselves in the mirror” and “asking what they can do to better help the team.”