NEW YORK — The New York Mets firing of Carlos Mendoza as manager on Friday isn’t some kind of desperate measure to save their season.Sure, the Mets’ remaining leaders are likely to frame the situation as such.But at the exact midpoint of the Mets’ schedule, their season is over.With 81 games left, the Mets (34-47) are 9 1/2 games behind for the National League’s final wild card.The Mets desperately wanted to win with Mendoza. The organization’s top leaders thought of him as a great person, a great baseball person. Mendoza held no MLB managerial experience before landing the Mets job in late 2023. David Stearns, upon taking over as president of baseball operations in September 2023, felt so confident about Mendoza that he hired him away from the New York Yankees’ coaching staff as his manager.Despite moving on from him after a two-and-a-half-year rollercoaster ride, such respect and belief from the Mets’ decision-makers in Mendoza likely still exists. That’s not an attempt at making things sound nice for all involved with the decision. That’s a statement explaining a sobering reality around the Mets’ mess.Firing Mendoza is an acknowledgement of organizational failure.The Mets prolonged Mendoza’s fate. They could have fired him after the slow and painful collapse at the end of last season. (Instead, they changed nearly his entire coaching staff.) They could have fired him during a 12-game losing streak in mid-April. They could have fired him when the lousy Colorado Rockies swept them in late April. They kept choosing against firing Mendoza because of how much they believed in him. In their collective view, a lot more had to go wrong before making such a move.