ESPN’s latest update on the Francisco Lindor-Juan Soto situation has only made the Mets’ internal mess look messier.
What had already become a strange storyline around two of New York’s biggest names got another layer this week, and it still doesn’t offer a clean explanation for why the tension exists in the first place. The cause of the rift remains unclear.
Maybe it was something small, maybe it was something deeper, maybe it was a little of both. But the reporting does point to one thing: this wasn’t a one-day issue, and it wasn’t confined to the present.
A little over a month ago, Steve Cohen said he believed Lindor and Soto were in a better relationship now. That comment mattered because it was the first public sign that the two weren’t exactly on the same page in 2025.
ESPN’s update suggests the disconnect goes back further than that. Per the report, they apparently were not exactly close as recently as this past June.
That leaves Juan Soto in an awkward spot. Freddy Peralta’s involvement in the mediation has changed the way some people view him, but Soto denying that a meeting happened makes him the one left standing out. When one person says it didn’t happen and others say it did, it doesn’t leave much room for doubt.
Carlos Mendoza also comes out of this looking worse. If a starting pitcher who was on the way out months into his tenure was the one helping resolve a problem that began later, that’s not exactly a great sign for the manager’s grip on the clubhouse.
Mendoza earned respect in 2024, but this lingering issue suggests he did not have enough control in 2025 to stop it from growing. He’s not responsible for Lindor and Soto not getting along, but he does take heat for not shutting it down before it kept festering.
David Stearns is in a different position, but the criticism lands too. He isn’t in the room, yet his silence on the situation has become part of the frustration.
The Mets have already fallen short two out of three times with him, and the one time they didn’t, luck played a major role. His distance from the locker room and his refusal to address the issue publicly only add to the sense that accountability is hard to find.
Lindor doesn’t escape cleanly either. He at least acknowledged that the meeting happened, which puts him on firmer ground than Soto in that specific exchange. Still, his name has already come up in other rumored and known feuds, including with Brandon Nimmo and Jeff McNeil, and that history doesn’t help his image now.
If anyone seems positioned to know how this all started, it might be David Peterson, the previous longest-tenured Mets player. At this point, he may be the one who could write the book on it.
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