Some seasons unravel quietly. For the New York Mets, the slide was loud and felt like a slow-motion collapse that everybody saw coming but nobody could stop. By the time October arrived, the biggest truth of the year was impossible to ignore: the Mets needed more starting pitching, and they needed it months ago.

The rotation simply wasn’t built to withstand injuries, regression, and the uneven performances that piled up. The breaking point came in June, when the team’s summer downturn began and never truly leveled out. A major part of that story was Kodai Senga, whose season went from dominant to disrupted in a matter of weeks.

Senga’s Electric Start and Sudden Fall

For the first half of the year, Senga was everything the Mets hoped he’d be. He carried a 1.39 ERA into mid-June, carving

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