Three series remain in advance of the All-Star break, a break that can’t come soon enough — or last long enough. I picture various Mets repairing to their country estates or wherever they live, clearing their heads at their pools or in front of their sizable video game consoles and then, properly relaxed, forgetting that they’re eventually due back at a ballpark near us. “We did plan to bring you Mets baseball tonight,” Gary Cohen will explain in the cold open from a vacant Citi Field on the appointed Friday night, “but it seems the players have opted to continue their vacations.”
Would any among us truly object?
In the Mets’ 81st game, marking the mathematical midpoint of their lost season, the 2023 Mets played one of their signature games. More like a scrawl. They executed certain elements of their craft adequately, they raised hope modestly, they dropped a couple of balls, they offered not quite enough resistance when challenged, they let a couple of chances wither, and they fell short by one run. These are not limited-edition outcomes handed to merely the first 15,000. Everybody gets to see the Mets do something like this most every night.
The 3-2 defeat [1] at the hands of the Brewers left the Mets’ record at 36-45, an easily multipliable mark if you’re still interested in their 162-game pace. Take 36-45, “times” it by two, as too many teachers said in elementary school (“times is not a verb,” I’d mutter in my head), and you’ve got the 72-90 Mets. For those who’ve already made the connection anecdotally, 72-90 was the final record of the 1992 Mets, known far and wide, thanks to the diligent work of Bob Klapisch and John Harper, as The Worst Team Money Could Buy. Except at the midpoint of 1992, the lavishly budgeted Mets were two games better than the 2023 Mets and within conceivable range of first place (the only playoff spot available in those two-division days).
If you want a numerical match for the 36-45 Mets of 2023, you can go back almost as far, to a season nobody wrote tell-all book about, because there wasn’t enough to tell. The 1994 Mets were 36-45 after 81 games, which wasn’t that season’s midpoint, because that season soon did what we wish this season would do: it went away. The owners and players reached an impasse, a strike was called, and the 1994 Mets lasted only 113 games. It was only two years removed from TWTMCB, but a Mets fan wasn’t actually aching for the 1994 Mets to take their leave. They were already an improvement over the Worst Team sequel — the 1993 Mets were 25-56 after 81 games — and they would play quite competently in what little second half there was, going 19-13 before bats and balls were stored for ’94.
Lousy first-half Mets teams have been known to morph into satisfying squads in select second halves. As recently as 2019, we gave up on the 37-44 Mets only to be charmed by their 49-32 turnaround and spirited samba along the periphery of Wild Card contention. Met history is dotted by, if not jammed with, such dramatic changes of direction for the better. A few abysmal half-years gave way to energizing stretch-run drives or at least a sense that the entire schedule wasn’t for naught. Another recent-past example comes from 2018, a season that saw the Mets with both a worse first-half record than 2023 (33-48) and a worse June than the current bunch’s 7-18 (5-21). We unanimously gave up on those Mets in advance of the second half, and we were not wrong in terms of the big seasonal picture, but somewhere along the way the 2018 Mets stopped performing as if weighed down by lead weights. In the second half, they went 44-37. Catch them in the right light, and you’d mistake them for a legitimate ballclub.
If you still dare to bottom-line 2023 through the prism of the Mets actually going somewhere rather than away, you know there’s only one acceptable answer in the historical precedent files. The 1973 Mets were 35-46 at their halfway juncture, separated from first place by five teams and twelve games. The 2023 Mets trail what passes for first place in their lives — the third bonus playoff position in the National League — by three fewer games, though they have just about everybody and their brother ahead of them. It is often noted that the 1973 Mets won their division with a tepid overall record, a reflection of the flaws of the NL East that year, but it is just as worth noting that in their second half (only 80 games due to a rainout that didn’t require a makeup), they went 47-33. Do the math and realize that’s a team that didn’t just put on a You Gotta Believable stretch drive. The 1973 Mets were playing at a 94-win clip for a full half-season.
Given that when we invoke the 1973 Mets, it is a highly singular invocation, with nobody asking, wait, which astounding comeback from last place to a pennant are we talking about again?, we know we’re in the land of long odds. All the 2023 Mets have going for them vis-à-vis a potential 50th-anniversary celebration for the ages is reputation. The 1973 Mets had too many good players to continue on as bad as they’d been for a half. Several of them were injured, a few had not yet found their groove, and leadership didn’t seem all it had been cracked up to be. Time healed the hurt, progression rather than regression toward the mean lifted the ailing averages (batting and earned run), and somebody instilled the notion that an incomplete schedule indicated room for improvement.
The 2023 Mets have too many good players to continue on as bad as they’ve been for a half. That’s the most generous/valid comparison to the 1973 Mets I can gin up to keep my chin up. I haven’t believed this edition has been outright bad. To me, it appears they’ve mostly fallen short of good. It’s a nuanced difference, but it gives me, if not a meaningful dose of it ain’t over…, then some sense that it won’t get any worse and might get marginally better, which, if they are going to return to the ballpark after the All-Star break, is the best to reasonably hope for if not excitedly expect. Not much of a rallying cry, I know, but the Mets will probably not go home and leave us alone, and it’s not our nature to wish they would.
On a more cheerful note, National League Town this week is devoted to remembering Mets who were good enough to be All-Stars as Mets yet somehow weren’t chosen, so we decided to retroactively make them All-Stars. If you’ve been a Mets fan for more than a minute, this is the podcast for you [2].