Mets drop 10th straight, worst start in 43 years deepens crisis

Carson Kelly turned one swing into another bruise for the Mets, launching a tiebreaking three-run homer in the sixth inning and lifting the Chicago Cubs to a 4-2 win at Wrigley Field. The blow gave Chicago its fourth straight victory and pushed New York deeper into a spiral that has quickly become about far more than one bad week.

The loss was the Mets’ 10th in a row, their first double-digit skid since 2004, when they dropped 11 straight. Their franchise record remains 17 consecutive losses, set in 1962, the club’s first season. The collapse is especially stark because New York had been 7-4 before the run began, only to fall to 7-14 after Saturday’s defeat.

This is the kind of breakdown that exposes an organization’s wider vulnerabilities. The Mets reached April carrying one of the highest payrolls in baseball history, listed at $370 million, and only 20 games into a 162-game season they are already buried under expectations that were built around contention, not damage control. Carlos Mendoza now faces a mounting test of authority as the team’s margin for error disappears in mid-April.

Chicago added to the pressure with a lineup that kept producing at different points of the order, and Kelly’s pinch-hit homer was the swing that settled the afternoon. The Cubs improved to 11-9, while the Mets absorbed a second straight heavy blow after a 12-4 loss in the series opener the day before. For New York, the numbers now tell a harsher story than any one box score: a wealthy roster, a fast-growing losing streak and a season already drifting toward crisis.