A Tide Receding

After a one-day respite, the Mets were back to doing nothing in particular, this time against the Dodgers. They showed little discipline at the plate, ran the bases poorly, and generally played the role of GENERIC OPPONENT, standing around looking poleaxed while the Dodgers bunched hits and played solid defense and loped off with the victory without breaking much of a sweat. The final score was just 4-1, but having been stupid enough to watch and/or listen to the whole thing, I can report that it felt like the Dodgers’ side of the equation was missing a zero, or possibly two.

If you can still bear to keep track, the Mets’ 13-game ride through Baseball Hell has started off 1-6. So if you’d like a silver lining, here it is: The stretch that will end the Mets’ season is more than half over. They’ll be beaten some more in L.A., fly across the country, have a guaranteed loss-free Monday (sucker — it’s an off-day!), and then be beaten by the Giants. After that, things will matter even less than they do now, and then it will be winter and a season that looked promising for a while, or at least diverting, will have curdled into another one you’re glad is over.

* * *

In times like this I turn for comfort to baseball cards, which have long sustained me when … wait, I’ve just been handed a report.

Oh. Oh no.

Baseball is parting ways with Topps after 2025 to strike an exclusive deal with Fanatics. Yeah, they’re giving the boot to the company that’s been synonymous with baseball cards, and with baseball, since the freaking Truman administration.

When I became a baseball fan in 1976, it was Topps cards that supercharged my fandom: Each of those little cardboard rectangles was a miniature baseball history lesson, filled with stats and personal information and intriguing facts about long-gone players and years and ballclubs. Now, all that will be gone — or at least it’s pretty seriously endangered right now. The best outcome might be hoping Fanatics buys whatever’s left of Topps and keeps the brand alive as a loss leader for retro fans like me. That thin sliver of hope — the scenario in which you’re thrown a bone by twentysomething MBAs who took a seminar in reputational capital — is the closest one can get to being a Pollyanna in these benighted days.

Here’s a strange, slightly ironic postscript: In 1976 Topps assigned the Mets the colors maize and sky blue, a palette more suitable to the University of Michigan than any outfit that played in Flushing. I knew those colors were inaccurate, but as a newcomer to baseball and baseball cards, they still imprinted themselves on my brain. Decades later, that color scheme yells out “Mets!” to me as loudly as the team’s actual one does.

Since then the flagship Topps set has become slick and shiny and crowned with foil instead of stained by gum, but Topps also honors its past with a nostalgic line. Topps Heritage began in 2001, with a look and feel that mimicked the 1952 design, and it’s advanced in sync with the company’s past ever since. That means this year’s Heritage cards channel the gleeful, faintly psychedelic Pop Art of the 1972 cards; next year the design will snap back to the staid, almost deliberately dull whiteness of ’73. When I read the Topps announcement, I did the math and needed a moment: 2025’s Heritage set, presumably the finale, will revisit the design from 1976. Barring some kind of corporate intervention, Topps will go out with a collector’s set mimicking the design from the year that I arrived and became a fan.

I don’t know whether to laugh or cry about that. Which is pretty much the way I feel about being a Mets fan these days.