For the ninth time in franchise history, the New York Mets have completed 108 games, or two-thirds of a regulation schedule, with a playoff spot in hand. In six of the eight previous instances when they led either the NL East or the NL Wild Card race at this juncture (1986, 1988, 1999, 2000, 2006, 2015), they went on to the postseason. The two times they didn’t were 1985, when they could have used a future format, and 2007, when they could have used a rescue squad and trampoline.
I heard James McCann [1] mention the other night that the season is 162 games long. It came up after a loss, a.k.a. only one game out of 162. Players on teams that have just won never mention the length of a season, probably because they’re not asked what’s wrong with the team. The Mets get asked a lot lately what’s wrong. Nobody has a really great answer, but they all have a helluva handle on how many games make up the schedule.
At the two-thirds mark of the current season, we can hope sweet precedent prevails, but project only that one-third of the season remains. We base that calculation on James McCann and mathematics. No matter how you wave your probabilities and your playoff odds, we can project nothing else at this time. The precincts that have reported — approximately 67% of them — tell us only what has happened to date. The 108 games that have been played aren’t necessarily an indicator of the 54 to come. Each component of that final third is so new that not a blessed thing has happened in them. Not a cursed thing, either. Steve Kornacki at the Big Board would be handy to have around here to counsel patience and urge us to wait for all the results to be counted.
Which is what I guess James McCann was doing when he invoked the magic 162. Right now, in the wake of another underwhelming defeat [2] at the hands of the Marlins, all a Met or a Mets fan who wishes to walk around under something other than a cloud of doom can do is point out there are definitely games yet to be played. And that none of them has yet been lost.
The most recent game, however, has been lost, 4-2 at Miami on Thursday afternoon. It was lost on leaky defense, imperfect relief pitching (abetted by an iffy ball four call) and, most ostentatiously, invisible offense when the bats most needed to show themselves. The Mets put all the runners you could have wanted on base — 8 hits! 8 walks! 2 opposition errors! — and hardly any of them across the plate. When you counted up the tops of the innings and how each of them ended, fifteen Mets in toto lingered on base. For all we know, they’re still there.
Except for Javy Baez [3]. He struck out five times and thus avoided all charges of loitering on first, second and/or third. He also engineered a spiffy 6-4-5-6 double play in the field, lest “STRUCK OUT FIVE TIMES” be the extent of the man’s Thursday epitaph for those tempted to bury him altogether not one week since his acquisition.
After nearly three months of unmitigated use of the delightful adjective “first-place,” we’ve received a notice that we may have to return it to the library. The Phillies apparently put their names on a waiting list and they may get to lay their philthy mitts on our favorite descriptor next. How convenient that we could get to drop it off in person this weekend. While the Mets were resisting the last-minute urge to put multiple runs on the board in South Florida — 3 LOB in the 9th, though it seemed like more — the Phillies burst from behind in Washington in their ninth inning to pull out a fifth straight victory and pull to within a half-game of us. I didn’t watch any postgame Zooms from Nationals Park, but I’m gonna assume nobody in the visitors’ clubhouse was helpfully stressing the presence of 162 games in a baseball season.
Our next three are indeed in Philadelphia; it’ll be an opportunity for somebody. Then three at home against the newly useless Nationals. Then thirteen completely outstanding precincts appear on our electoral map: games against the Dodgers and Giants, in New York and in California, versus (due respect to Milwaukee) the two best teams in the National League. Those baker’s dozen dates, August 13 through August 26, have been lurking all year long, with L.A. and San Fran having piled up wins after dark and us having gotten as far as we have without having to play them once. Well, we’ll soon play them a lot. A lot. In a row. Gosh, it would have been nice to have taken advantage of these four with the Marlins, just as it would have been swell to have made the most of those seven with the Pirates just before and after the All-Star break, which was right about when our stagnation commenced to devouring our momentum.
Ah, but those games were also outstanding precincts in their time, except they didn’t daunt so much as beckon. A lot of lip-licking went for naught. We didn’t know the Pirates weren’t going to be pushovers or that the Fish wouldn’t flop. We might have suspected, but the odds said we would roll up Ws more than we’d absorb Ls. Instead, we the first-place Mets lost seven of eleven to those last-place denizens, providing another modicum of proof that you don’t know what’s going to happen until you actually play the games.
Admittedly, “the Mets lost to lousy teams, therefore you can’t say for sure they’ll lose to better teams” doesn’t exactly inspire confidence that we’re primed for a step up in class just as our guys have forgotten how to drive in or, for that matter, optimally prevent runs. But it does have counterintuitiveness going for it. At the moment, we don’t have a lot else to bank on, except that after going 21-27 in our last 48, and 2-6 in our last eight, we’re 0-0 in our next 54.
We haven’t lost the games we haven’t yet played. Somebody unfurl me a blank bed sheet and toss me a can of spray paint. That baby’s going up on a banner.