The New York Mets are in a free fall, and the weight of their struggles is becoming almost unbearable. After Thursday's 5-4 loss to the Washington Nationals—their 17th defeat in the last 20 games—pitcher Luke Weaver didn't mince words about the team's suffocating mindset.

"This pursuit of perfection is just an ultimate pressurized failure mindset," Weaver reflected after the game. "Everybody wants to be the hero because we care and we want to win really, really bad. I just don't think success lives in that realm. The freedom of which we play day to day is just kind of being suffocated."

The loss came in heartbreaking fashion. With the score tied at 4-4 in the eighth inning, Weaver surrendered a go-ahead, two-run homer to CJ Abrams—a 403-foot blast to right-center that silenced the crowd. The Mets had rallied from a 3-0 deficit, taking the lead on MJ Melendez's three-run homer in the third and Mark Vientos' RBI double in the sixth. But once again, a lead slipped away. It was the 10th time this season the Mets have lost a game in which they were ahead.

At 10-21, New York owns the worst record in Major League Baseball. Their .323 winning percentage through April is historically poor—the fourth-lowest in franchise history, trailing only the dreadful starts of 1962 (3-13), 1964 (2-10), and 1981 (4-10). For a team that underwent a major offseason makeover—with Pete Alonso, Brandon Nimmo, and Edwin Díaz departing, and stars like Bo Bichette and Marcus Semien arriving—the results have been nothing short of devastating.

"There's moments that feel really close, and then there's just one mistake that magnifies our situation," Weaver admitted. "I sit there and feel the weight of the world, like I let the team down. We keep saying, 'It'll come. This is the law of averages.' But those words just don't hold the same weight when you continue to lose day after day."

For Mets fans, the season is quickly becoming a test of patience. The talent is there, but the pressure to be perfect is suffocating the very freedom that makes baseball beautiful. As Weaver put it, success simply doesn't live in that pressurized realm. The question now is whether the Mets can find a way to breathe again before the season slips completely away.