Another Decade, Another Hump

Although baseball has already conducted its winter meetings, winter insists on meeting the rest of us this evening at 10:47 PM Eastern Standard Time. We wish a scintillating solstice to all, yet we’ve got a bigger milestone to mark before the month is out.

That’s right: the Baseball Equinox is nigh! At 3:26 AM EST on Saturday, December 30, 2023, we will sit exactly between the final out of the 2023 Mets season and the scheduled first pitch of the 2024 Mets season. That’s 89 days, 9 hours and 44 minutes after Phillies shortstop Edmundo Sosa caught Pete Alonso’s two-out, ninth-inning pop fly to shallow left last October 1, and 89 days, 9 hours and 44 minutes before you’d figure Kodai Senga throws his first ghost fork to whatever leadoff hitter David Stearns hasn’t liberated from the Brewers by this March 28. Incumbent ace Senga is a best guess for Opening Day starter at Citi Field, but it’s only a guess. So much can happen and occasionally does. For example, you wouldn’t have hazarded a pre-Equinox projection that Tylor Megill rather than Jacob deGrom or Max Scherzer was going to be our Opening Night pitcher in Washington in 2022, nor that the Opener three years running from 2020 through 2022 would be postponed, once from a pandemic, once because too many of the Mets’ opponents tested positive for COVID, and once when a lockout took its sweet time unlocking itself.

If life in this decade has taught us anything, it’s that presumption can occupy too much roster space of the mind. If the Mets in this decade have taught us anything, it’s to presume nothing. The calculation of the Baseball Equinox is offered as a public service to make the coming of Spring a little more visible a little sooner, but whatever might happen on the far side of the BE is not to be written in indelible ink until it actually happens.

We also happen to have completed 40% of this decade’s baseball seasons, which isn’t any kind of a milestone, exactly, but it’s got me thinking about the Mets and the 2020s. Decades don’t usually get anybody’s attention unless one is winding down and the next one is looming. But why wait for the last gasps of 2029 to get a handle on this one?

From a Mets perspective, it could use a boost.

The four seasons of the 2020s to date have had one thing in common: none of them has felt great in the months that followed them. Three encompassed losing records; two saw first place slip away; the lone campaign that seemed to be rolling merrily along faded in frustration. We entered the 2020s with lofty expectations, failed to meet them, reset our sights even higher a couple of times, and fell to earth successively harder

Even if we allow that decades are arbitrary chronological constructs, this one has been dismal four Met years in…which is pretty much par for the Met course in terms of how our decades commence. Let’s give the first four Met years of the 1960s and their relentless 100+ losses per annum a break, given that for Met purposes the 1960s didn’t get going until 1962, and we were starting from scratch (making how the 1960s ended in Flushing even more remarkable). And let’s acknowledge that 1970 through 1973 represented a reasonably competent above-.500 quadrennium whose culmination, You Gotta Believe, couldn’t have been much more thrilling.

Since Wayne Garrett popped to Bert Campaneris to end the 1973 World Series, we haven’t been able to string together a strong four-year start to any Met decade. From 1980 through 2023, the Mets have contested twenty seasons that have ended in the numbers 0, 1, 2 or 3 — or 21, if we take the split seasons of 1981 into account. The Mets posted a winning record in four of them. There was one pennant in there, in 2000; one additional playoff spot, in 2022; one end-of-an-era shortfall, in 1990; and one that we’ll call, considering its September’s circumstances, a nice try, in 2001.

The early 1990s completely got away after 1990, with 1991 a cavalcade of misery a Mets fan couldn’t have imagined would be surpassed not once but twice over the next two years. The residual good vibes of 2000 all but disappeared until late in the 2001 season, at which point it was probably asking too much of the Mets to see to fruition their attempt at coming to their city’s emotional rescue — after which, 2002 was essentially 1992 redux, and 2003 was its own kind of pits.

And those were the decades, besides this one, that had at least one decent year within their four.

When I think of what might become of the 2020s, I try to remind myself that the 1980s went 0-for-4/0-for-5 out of the gate, yet when we think of the Mets of the 1980s, we don’t think at all about how bad the Mets of 1980, both 1981s, 1982 and 1983 were. The Mets of the 1980s as they exist in the popular imagination materialized nearly fully formed in 1984 and rode high right up to the doorstep of the 1990s. The Met version of the 1980s was the era that was ending when the 1990 Mets made one last charge at glory. It never occurred to us until August of 1991 that Excellence Again and Again, as the marketing theme went, wasn’t going to be a perpetual way of life, and it probably didn’t sink in until May of 1993 that a fan should take nothing for granted, certainly not an era’s ability to self-renew and extend itself indefinitely.

Decades are too long to wholly reflect the quality of a baseball franchise. Ten years leaves ample room for ups to overtake downs and vice-versa. If you invoke the Mets of the 1970s, you won’t evoke warm fuzzies for the best parts of 1970 through 1973. The decadesque definition of the ten years in progress fifty years ago got swallowed up by the rest of the 1970s, especially the Grant’s Tomb motif of its final three seasons. If a person wishes to define a team’s decade as “good” or “bad,” making a judgment 40% of the way in is why they put erasers on pencils.

Our 1990s plodded along until they could pull themselves up by their bootstraps circa 1997, and proceeded to give us a most compelling final act by 1999, though I don’t know whether the Mets of the 1990s stand more for the explosion wrought by the Grand Slam Single or the explosion wrought by Vince Coleman’s taste for parking lot firecrackers. The Mets who were withering at mid-decade in the 2000s discovered new life in the second half of what people insist on calling the Aughts (I preferred Ohs), but the life oozed right out of the party by 2009. As for the 2010s…

Ah, the Mets of the 2010s, the last decade before this one. That’s the one I find myself thinking about most vis-à-vis the 2020s, and not just because of adjacency. In dwelling on the early 2010s recently, I came to label the period when we were getting used to Citi Field the Hump Years. This was after the brief glory of 2006 morphed into the lingering bitterness from the collapses of 2007 and 2008, the culture shock of having Shea’d Goodbye, and the entire Metsian enterprise being hamstrung by the Madoff Affair — and before 2015 tickled our sadly neglected fancy. Rooting for non-winning Mets clubs through 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013 and 2014, we persevered in hopes that some year soon, we would get over the hump. The hump cast a mighty long shadow on our enthusiasm. Glints of happy distractions might speckle the landscape now and then, but the collective benefits from an intermittent array of individual accomplishments didn’t feel like it was making the slightest dent in that goddamn hump.

Yet we got over it, or around it, or did something indicating meaningful success had at last been achieved come October of 2015, and things got happy and stayed fairly happy for a year or two. Then they got largely unhappy for a couple of years. Then, in the latter stages of 2019, they verged on happy when we no longer dared expect happiness.

Then the 2010s were over and the 2020s were here and, as we approach the Baseball Equinox that precedes this decade’s fifth season, I’m in a Met headspace that feels familiar from ten or so years ago. I feel like we’re behind another hump, which was an object I would have presumed was consigned to my rearview mirror rather than my front windshield had I permitted myself to make presumptions.

2020 was sixty games in empty ballparks that I sort of wish hadn’t been bothered with. The Mets went 26-34.

2021 had the Mets in first place from May until August with the Mets hardly ever feeling like a first-place or playoff team. The Mets went 77-85.

2022 wiped away every scintilla of ennui from the previous two years as — under the guidance of a real manager and through the resources of a real owner — we romped to a tremendous start and built a monumental lead. We not only felt like a first-place team, we were a first-place team. But the Braves were as well, except more so, and the part where we went to the playoffs as a 101-61 Wild Card only rubbed it in more that we didn’t win our division. As a result, I have about as much affection for our participation in the 2022 postseason as I do for the sixty games in empty ballparks from 2020. Still, 101-61 wasn’t chopped liver, despite the pâté September and October turned into.

2023 disintegrated on contact. The real manager didn’t make it out in one piece. The real owner is still fine-tuning. The closer we get to 2024, the less it feels like the fun parts of 2022 ever happened. The Mets went 75-87. Spread it on a cracker.

The presence of Steve Cohen still gives me hope that humps can be scaled, traversed and ground to dust. The presence of David Stearns I will trust is a long-term positive in an endeavor where the terms seem shorter and shorter. I’m not invested in the new manager as of yet, but sure, why not him? A few core players and a couple of the youngsters form my contemporary rock; at least I have them. Everything and everybody else seems up for grabs. I’d like to be more stoked that once we pass 3:26 AM EST on December 30, we will be closer to the next season than the last season, but I’m nowhere near worked up over the coming of the next season. Fortunately, the next season has next season and the seasons after that to definitively alter my outlook.

The penultimate episode of National League Town for 2023 revisits 1973, because who the hell wants to revisit 2023?