The Eras Tour

I decided to go into the hot take business on May 30. It wasn’t all that hot a take, actually. What I removed from the oven of projection and prediction seemed pretty obvious and therefore lukewarm as regarded a team with a record of 22-33 and a DFA-bound reliever who had just flung his glove into the stands. And he was one of our more reliable relievers.

The 2024 Mets now wallow eleven games under .500. A couple of days ago, I looked up incidences of Mets teams that had fallen double-digits below the break-even mark and still carved out a winning record by season’s end. It has happened three times in franchise history: 1973, 2001 and 2019. I offer that tidbit for nothing more than trivia’s sake, given that there’s no way this team is going to be the fourth edition of the Mets to bounce back from below. Likewise, I am no longer concerning myself with the National League playoff picture, multiple Wild Card berths notwithstanding. The Mets aren’t a part of that snapshot as June approaches and won’t be the rest of the way. As a guy who analyzes returns until he can call elections accurately on social media likes to say, I’ve seen enough. Four months remain to 2024. Get out of it what you like, or just get out and do something else.

I was hoping to mathematically clinch a full-throated Met-a Culpa Saturday. Looked good for a while. The Mets were up four runs over the Phillies. Qualms developed over that lead not being bigger — before bigger qualms took over, given that the lead was shrinking; then disappearing; then converting itself into an insurmountable deficit — but the larger point reigned as long as it could. I not only wrote that there was no way the 2024 Mets could post a winning record, I truly believed it. And I was so, so, so wrong. With a Mets win on Saturday, I could have just stood here in my wrongness and been wrong and gotten used to it…gladly.

Gladly, Mr. President!

I don’t want to say “the champagne is still on ice,” because champagne is for a very specific baseball-type occasion, so let’s say, if you can conjure a vision of a quadrennial political convention, the balloons are still netted up against the ceiling waiting for one state’s delegation or another to put the vote count over the top. We’re gonna need at least a 149th ballot, so to speak, in order to strike up the band and release those balloons. When we do win for the 82nd time this year, rest assured I’m orchestrating a massive balloon drop, even if it takes place only within the arena of my headspace.

Happy days have been here again since roughly the dawn of June. They haven’t precluded the occasional miserable interlude, but better to be massively disappointed for an afternoon in the midst of a September playoff chase than having been compelled before summer to get out and do something else.

They’re coming, any day now…

Admittedly, by the time they lost on Saturday to the Phillies by two a game they’d led by four, statistical niceties like the Mets clinching the franchise’s 28th winning record in its 63 years of existence had drifted relatively far from my mind. My primary thoughts, fueled by regret for what might have been, were best expressed via postgame screams into a pillow.

It was great to meet next-gen speedy shortstop Luisangel Acuña and his burgeoning promise, but not at the day-to-day expense of current-gen speedy shortstop (and so much more) Francisco Lindor’s back, not to mention unsurpassed everyday value.

It was great to see Starling Marte drive in three runs, but not to see him go to first base in pain when he took a pitch off the arm.

It was great to watch Luis Severino inhabit his starting pitching role with such gusto, but not when that included facilitating Bryce Harper’s monster exit from The Cage with two not-so-harmless home runs.

It was great, in retrospect, that none among Danny Young, Reed Garrett or Ryne Stanek detached his glove from his hand and proceeded to fling in Jorge Lopez-style disgust as each helped allow the Phillie comeback to complete its appointed rounds, but let’s face it: that’s a pretty low bar for greatness.

It was great that J.D. Martinez got ahold of one, but the greatness evaporated when Cal Stevenson — already a problem in this game — leapt and reeled it in before it could leave Citizens Bank Park.

It was great to imagine we’d maintain or lengthen our lead on the Braves instead of winding up the night in one of those ties that has something to do with flat feet.

Yeah, it was all great until it wasn’t. Nevertheless, I feel pretty confident that when all is said and done on this season, we’re gonna have a winning record. I feel no hesitation stemming from my usual concern for tempting the wrath of the whatever from high atop the thing to declare that achieving one more win in 2024 amounts to a formality. We’re 81-67 with fourteen to go. Eighty-two and something will happen. (Excuse me while I go outside, turn around three times and spit.)

I’m also confident that having a winning record is not what the saying and doing of what remains to this season is all about. We long ago moved on to higher stakes than breaking the .500 barrier, and with higher stakes come heightened emotions. No wonder the pillows around the house are trying not to make eye contact with me in September.

When I absolutely gave up on this team in late May, just before being presented several months of lessons regarding the jumping of guns and to conclusions, I was a little more specific in my dissolution of optimism beyond the current season and its lack of prospects (and I don’t mean Acuña). What got me when the 2024 Mets bottomed out was how low the on-field enterprise had plummeted since the headiest days of 2022, which was and still is the season before last, yet whose standard for regular-season success was rapidly growing ever more unreachable. Put aside that they needed to win at least one more game that year. They won 101 as was. Forgive a fan who thought they’d stay in that range for a while.

But then came dismal 2023 and the fetid first third of 2024, and on May 30, it struck me 2022 really was a one-year wonder, and when are we going to revel in a multimonth run like that again? The answer came: in the second and third thirds of 2024.

Who knew?

Carlos Mendoza informed reporters after Saturday’s 6-4 loss Marte was gonna get x-rayed for that HBP, an eerie reminder (as if we needed one) that when Starling got hit in the hand two Septembers ago, the 2022 boulder was nudged irretrievably downhill. Yet it’s not as if the injury bug has remained a respectable distance from our fortunes already No Jeff McNeil. No Dedniel Nuñez. No Paul Blackburn. Still waiting on resolution for Kodai Senga’s possible return. And are you more concerned about your back or Lindor’s? Also, though we have every reason to be satisfied with the starting pitching we’ve been getting, it’s strange how most of our 2022 rotation is suddenly up and about. Jacob deGrom emerged from exile to pitch Friday night for Texas, followed by Acuña trade bait Max Scherzer Saturday. We saw an overly effective Chris Bassitt just this week in Toronto. And wasn’t that Taijuan Walker halting our momentum from out of the pen in Philly? As if Harper and Stevenson needed the help.

Either way, 2022 and whatever it had going for it is long gone from the Met present. So, blessedly, is the way 2023 unraveled. Though several current players span several recent seasons, 2024, generally for better rather than worse, feels disconnected to its immediate predecessors, which shouldn’t be surprising. The 2022 campaign didn’t feel like it had much to do with 2021; and 2021 didn’t at all build on whatever we saw in 2020; and 2020 blew off course from the gathering head of steam that defined 2019; and 2019 had almost nothing in common with 2018; and 2018’s best blips shook off the stench of 2017, while its worst created their own distinct and overwhelming bad odor; and 2017 killed the momentum of 2016; and 2016, despite the momentum there at the end, gave us a different breed of Mets from 2015, the last time we went to a World Series, which we probably didn’t think was gonna be the last for what was then the foreseeable future.

Maybe it wasn’t wholly unreasonable to believe we could foresee the future. Up to a decade ago, it was easy to broadly classify eras of Mets history. Nuance notwithstanding, you’d get in a rut or you’d get on a roll and, as a fan, you adjusted expectations and aspirations accordingly. The first thirtysome years were almost Biblical in their feast/famine precision.

Seven losing seasons from 1962 to 1968.
Seven of eight winning seasons from 1969 to 1976.
Seven losing seasons from 1977 to 1983.
Seven winning seasons from 1984 to 1990.
Six losing seasons from 1991 to 1996.
Five winning seasons from 1997 to 2001.
Three losing seasons from 2002 to 2004.
Four winning seasons from 2005 to 2008.
Six losing seasons from 2009 to 2014.

The winning eras were preferable to the losing eras — welcome to Human Nature 101. Is it a stretch to suggest that the losing eras at least let you know where you stood? You stood somewhere south of the first division and you strove vicariously to make the climb upward. You lived for that year that would turn it around. When it got turned around, you felt secure in your belief that you and the Mets had arrived and were going to stick around for seasons to come. The winning eras offered their own challenges, but you had the baseline of 82 wins, probably more, taken care of…until the edge of the cliff arrived without notice and you and the Mets fell off it again. Still, it was fun while it lasted, and it usually lasted a decent interval.

Once we get that 82nd win of 2024, may it pave the way for many more wins in what’s left of this season this month and what will be tacked on to this season next month. And may the years that follow treat 2024’s 82+ wins as useful precedent rather than one-off aberration.