In Lost in America, after Julie Hagerty as Linda Howard gambles away the family nest egg at the Desert Inn, her husband David — Albert Brooks — tries to convince the casino manager, played by Garry Marshall, that the house should really give them their money back. We’re not really Las Vegas people is the crux of David’s argument, putting aside the inconvenient fact that they are people in Las Vegas. Marshall’s character indulges Brooks’s for a while, right up to the point where David, an advertising agency veteran, excitedly suggests the casino would reap a public relations bounty by featuring the return of the Howards’ funds in an ad campaign, geared to positioning the Desert Inn as a “Christmas place to be”. With that, the casino manager expunges any trace of a smile from his face and announces, “We’re finished talking.”
I could hear Garry Marshall telling the Mets, and by extension me, the same thing during the first night of their visit to Boston. How many games are we behind Atlanta? How far out are we for the Wild Card? What if we come back here, sweep tomorrow, go to Milwaukee and stay hot, all while the Braves and Phillies begin to lose? Wait, hear me out, I have an idea that just might work!
“We’re finished talking.”
Fenway Park was the Mets’ Desert Inn, as close as they had to a definitive last stand in 2021. It was not a pennant race place to be for the team in gray pants (as opposed to the one in yellow shirts). It probably wasn’t going to be regardless of the outcome of the two-game Interleague set, but there had been, until summer was turning to fall, no indisputable expiration date to their status as a contender. You could still throw ditzy scenarios at the wall because the teams in front of them hadn’t completely escaped our sights and we hadn’t completely disintegrated. As recently as Sunday the Mets won a baseball game — against a team ahead of them no less! Sure, we’d been swept by St. Louis in alternately agonizing and embarrassing fashion the week before, and the Cardinals are suddenly unstoppable, but we took the finale from the Phillies, so if we could pass them, and just pull to within three of the Braves when we go to Atlanta, the Braves aren’t so great.
Yes, throw ideas at the wall, at least until the wall is 37 feet tall, as it is in left field at Fenway. Then just run into it. The Mets lost Tuesday night. They were demolished Wednesday night. Chris Sale. Kyle Schwarber. The Monster. The calendar. Everybody and everything took their measure [1], 12-5. Once the Mets had dutifully completed yet another 210+ minutes of meandering through their motions, there was no reason to check the Braves-Diamondbacks score unless motivated by bystander’s curiosity. What the Braves, the Cardinals, the Phillies do is no longer intrinsic to our agenda. Not that we have much of an agenda left. Even the perfunctory postgame media questions that have led with the polite supposition that “you’re not giving up, of course” morphed into courtesy nods toward the 73-79 Mets wanting to “finish strong” before getting real.
“The Mets,” Roger Angell has written, “offered almost innumerable late-summer chances to move up to the lead in their division, lost most of their crucial games.” Roger Angell wrote that in 1975. Roger Angell recently turned 101. Roger Angell is a strong finisher. The Mets weren’t in 1975 and I don’t suspect they will be now. Our record, if not dampened by rainouts, will fall somewhere between 73-89 and 83-79. It will take a heckuva strong finish to reach the nominal winner’s circle of 82-80 (where we landed in what Angell termed “disappointing” ’75). Connoisseurs of the unprecedented might want to keep an eye on 75-87, 76-86, 78-84, 80-82 and 81-81; each is a record the Mets have never put in the books. Or feel free to go on a 10-game winning streak and deliver us the most respectable line possible for our all-time ledger. A team that spent three months in first place ought to have a winning record. I didn’t think it would require a strong finish to ensure one.
The one number I’m proudest of here in the fourth week of September is not the 35 homers launched by Pete Alonso or the 1.00 ERA compiled by Aaron Loup, but 10. I’ve been to 10 games in 2021. The tenth was Sunday night, marking the 24th consecutive season — excepting ineligible 2020 — that I’ve reached double-digits in home attendance. I didn’t think I’d see as many as 10 games in 2021. I didn’t know if I’d see one game in 2021, what with the world being what it was last winter and not being a sure thing as we arrive in autumn. But there I was, in late June, at my first game of the season, and there I was again, in middish-September, taking in my tenth. Going to games in 2021 had become close enough to routine that I didn’t insist I had to write about it immediately thereafter.
Stephanie and I went on Sunday night because there was no game on Sunday afternoon, thanks to ESPN. I’d love to tell you we schlepped to Flushing simply to avoid A-Rod and Vasgersian, but we’ve gone on the final Sunday of the season every season in which the gates are opened since 2012. Often it coincides with the shuttering of the season or home slate. Usually it’s in daylight, sometimes with dinner in Jackson Heights afterward. In 2020, none of this was available to us. In 2021, no matter how miff-making our team has been, we were willing to let them miff us up close again. The Mets weren’t altogether out of it by Sunday, but they were spotted gathering at contention’s exit.
Still, we were on hand, because despite the hassles and indignities…
• young loud dolts on the LIRR giving off that “my dad’s got a dealership” energy;
• a 7 that had to wait around at 74th St. for hitchhikers to be cleared from the roof;
• digital tickets that wouldn’t load properly at the Rotunda’s doorstep;
• a QSR code masquerading as a magnetic schedule substitute and passed off as a premium;
• and a strained back that needed to be soldiered through (not mine, either; my wife, who insisted on going, is more of a Mets diehard than she is generally given credit for)
…we like going to the final Sunday game at Citi Field every year. We like our tradition. We like our team even when we can’t stand their results, though Sunday they did us a solid and won for us. They probably won for themselves, but let’s pretend they dedicated the win to the couple in 326.
After they schlocked up all over Fenway Wednesday night, I thought we might be best served had the Mets arranged to stay over in Boston, face a pitching simulator or some such marvel of virtuality in the wee hours, and register their remaining 258 outs with nobody else being bothered by their inevitable futility. Two-hundred fifty-eight outs are all that’s left to our 2021, give or take unforeseen oddities (never count out unforeseen oddities). The Mets are to play eight regulation-size games and two Manfred-minis between this Friday night and next Sunday afternoon, meaning a mere 86 innings remain in this thing you may not remember us looking forward to six months ago, but we did. There might be wins. There might be more wins than losses. There will be, however, no finishing strong, not when we’ve been effectively finished off in advance of the last three series.
Big talk from me about wanting these final games, innings and outs to be over and done with, but not in my heart. I’ll keep watching. I’ll keep listening. I’m going to a football game this Sunday afternoon — a good friend invited me, and there’s a bit of a tradition there, too — but I’m bringing a radio to sneak listens to a baseball game between downs. As if the Mets haven’t given us a surfeit of downs. Four nights later, I’m pretty sure I’ll be at my eleventh baseball game of the year, sans distractions in my ears.
I’ll let go of this season when there’s no more season to hold onto. The Mets don’t have to be good. They just have to be there.