Lots of blame to go around as always. But maybe an attempt to prioritize the reasons why the (reasonably) high hopes of March/April turned into a second half collapse from a perch which was never all that high to begin with [10 G over .500 in mid-June] So with the idea that these are reasons rather than excuses (since every team had their issues as well and more than half of them finished with better records than us) throw out your candidate for 2021's biggest culprit. I'll kick it off with the starters. Everyone Knew that the Mets would have good starting pitching this year ... and for a while there, close to half a season, they did. But ultimately a year which had, not just a best-case scenario, but a realistic chance of getting 90+ starts from deGrom, Syndergaard, Carrasco, and David Peterson (remember him?) instead got a grand total of 41 JdG - realistic expectation of 30 starts, got 15 Peterson - call it no more than 25 since it would be his first full year, got 15 Carrasco - again I topped him off short of a full season due to past issues, but still got only 11 Thor - conservatively expected 12, maybe even 15, but effectively got none even though technically two And of course it's not just the ones those guys missed -- especially since neither Carrasco not Peterson were very good -- but of how many of those phantom starts not taken by the core group had to be covered by call-ups & backups. As it turned out we got better than expected results from Megill, but garbage and/or no-shows from Eickoff (4), Lucchesi (8), and Yamamoto (1). And then there were the 'bullpen' games as the likes of Loup, Castro, Drew Smith, Gsellman, Trevor Williams, and Sean Reid-Foley (among others) all started at various times.