Ex-Mets GM has brutally simple explanation for extended skid — and it’s not what you think

Here’s a painful irony that former Mets general manager Steve Phillips laid out on MLB Network on Friday: the players who care the most, might be the biggest obstacle standing in the way.

The conversation started with reliever Luke Weaver’s emotionally honest postgame audio, which set the table for everything that followed.

Weaver described a team where the freedom to play day-to-day baseball has been “suffocated” by the weight of wanting to succeed.

Phillips took that thread and pulled it all the way through.

“It’s not about coming up big. It’s just like simplifying it and just doing what you have to do,” Phillips said in a clip shared on X/Twitter.

Phillips draws a direct line from this mindset to something baseball fans recognize instantly: the postseason extra-innings moment where every hitter is swinging for the fences.

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That mentality works as a fantasy. In practice, it blows up at-bat after at-bat.

Phillips is emphatic about this in the episode. A relief pitcher appearing in 70 games doesn’t need to throw a perfect game every time he takes the mound. A starter doesn’t need to throw a shutout. Everyone just needs to do their job.

The moment players elevate the stakes of every single action: treating each pitch or at-bat as a potential turning point in the season.

Despite their win on Friday, the Mets are in genuinely historic bad-streak territory right now. And as Phillips notes, when you watch the team, “it seems like anything that can go wrong is going wrong.”