“Only the places remain, in the end, in the very end, this is what she thinks to herself, on the verge of tears, only the places continue, as ruins, as moss, they go on, a tarpaulin that smacks against a metal pole, empty rooms that open behind scaffolding, a slab of concrete split open by grasses.”

—“Painting Time,” Maylis de KerangalPerhaps the pendulum is swinging again around June 12.That date has been the fulcrum of the last two Mets seasons: the day the club’s Grimace Era started in 2024’s magical comeback, and the day Kodai Senga’s injury snowballed into a months-long collapse in 2025. You know the way these things have played out, but it’s still worth elucidating the chasm in team and individual performance over the last two years for these Mets.From June 12, 2024, through June 12, 2025, no team in baseball was better than the Mets. In fact, no team was all that close. New York’s 106-60 regular-season record in that span is seven games better than second-place Detroit. (It was 7 1/2 games better than the Dodgers, 15 games better than the Yankees and 17 games better than the Phillies.)From June 13, 2025, through June 12, 2026 (this past Friday), just four teams were worse than the Mets. New York played an even 162 games in those 365 days, going 69-93 — an unfathomable 35-game plummet from the prior year’s pace. The only teams behind them during that span were the Giants, Angels, Twins and Rockies.How did this happen? Yes, president of baseball operations David Stearns deserves a lot of the blame: His moves to shore up the Mets’ rotation entering 2025 worked for a time but not long enough. His moves to shore up the bullpen at the deadline flopped. He failed multiple times to acquire an everyday center fielder. And his replacements for departing members of the team’s core have been injured and/or underperformed.There has also been a fair amount of internal regression. And sure, you probably didn’t expect Francisco Lindor to be precisely that good for a longer stretch of time or for Sean Manaea to actually be Chris Sale in perpetuity. But the magnitude of statistical falls across the roster has been eye-opening.Let’s look at seven of the biggest and try our best not to grimace.(All stats, including the WAR, courtesy of FanGraphs.)Francisco Lindor