The Gap Nobody Sees
The Mets are hitting like a .246 BA team. They're being credited as a .237 BA team. That nine-point gap, confirmed across 140 games and thousands of batted balls by Statcast's expected batting average model, represents one of baseball's quieter ongoing thefts. New York sits at 63-77, and the easy narrative is that they're simply bad. The harder, more accurate narrative is that they're bad and cursed, which is a particularly joyless combination.
While the Giants have claimed the pole position on the MLB luck index at -64, the Mets' score of -31 makes them the fifth-most cursed team in baseball this season. San Francisco's misery is loud. New York's is the kind that doesn't even get you sympathy.
The Batted-Ball Tax
Statcast's expected metrics tell a story of a Mets offense consistently punished for the quality of its contact. Their actual wOBA of .305 trails their expected wOBA of .318, a gap of 13 points that has persisted stubbornly through most of the season. Their expected slugging of .408 dwarfs their actual .384. These are not small discrepancies explained away by a bad week. Over 140 games, this is a lineup making harder contact than its results suggest, watching line drives find gloves and hard grounders die in shifts.
To be clear, even the expected numbers aren't good. An xwOBA of .318 is not keeping any pitching staff awake at night. But the Mets are an average-bad offense being taxed into a genuinely poor one.
The Pitching Illusion
Here's where the curse gets selective. The Mets' pitching staff has an ERA of 4.27 against an xERA of 4.27. That delta is 0.00. Zero. The pitching has been exactly as mediocre as it deserves to be, no more, no less. Every earned run is accounted for. Every hit allowed was, statistically speaking, earned.
So the curse lives almost entirely on one side of the ball. The Mets aren't losing because their pitchers are getting unlucky. They're losing because their hitters are.
Death by One Run
The Mets are 16-21 in one-run games, a .432 winning percentage that drags well below their overall .450 mark. In a sport where one-run outcomes are famously noisy and driven by sequencing, bullpen timing, and the odd bloop single, going five games under .500 in these contests has a tangible impact on the standings. Their Pythagorean win percentage of .462, derived from their 577 runs scored and 627 allowed, suggests they should be sitting closer to 64.7 wins rather than 63. That's almost two wins swallowed by variance.
Curiously, they're 10-7 in extra innings. The baseball gods give with one hand.
Honestly, They're Also Just Bad
None of this should obscure the fundamentals. A run differential of -50 through 140 games is not the mark of a team that fate alone has wronged. The Mets are being outscored by roughly a third of a run per game, and even their expected metrics, the ones that strip out the bad luck, still paint a team that belongs in the bottom half of the league. Their injury burden score of 5, relatively light by major league standards, means they can't lean on a decimated roster as an excuse either.
The Mets are a below-average team. They are also a below-average team that should be two wins better than their record, with an offense performing a tier below its contact quality. Both things are true.
What Regression Looks Like
If the remaining 22 games see the Mets' batted-ball luck normalize, the most visible shift would be in slugging percentage. Closing even half of that .024 SLG gap means a handful of extra-base hits per week that are currently dying on warning tracks or in outfielder gloves. Translated to runs, that's roughly 10-15 additional runs over the final stretch, potentially flipping two or three of those one-run losses.
That doesn't save the season. It might save them from 80 losses. In Queens, in September, you take what the variance gives back.