It’s the time of year when someone asks you how you are, and you tell them the Mets have been rained out not only today but tomorrow, and they have to get out of Atlanta, which is about to be hit by a hurricane, which you care about in the abstract as a human being, but all you’re really thinking about is it was known the hurricane was coming, and neither the Braves nor MLB activated any kind of contingency rescheduling or relocating, thus once the Mets get to Milwaukee, assuming they get to Milwaukee, they will still have three games against the NL Central champion Brewers who swept them at the very beginning of this season, and then they have to fly back to (hopefully intact) Atlanta to play a Monday afternoon doubleheader to decide everything, unless some combination of wins and losses among the Mets, the Braves, and the Diamondbacks over the weekend makes the doubleheader moot in terms of playoff qualification, though playoff seeding is a whole other packet of seeds, in which case the commissioner gets involved, assuming someone wakes him, and you’ve got to think about the pitching you’d have to use and how much effort is worth exerting in advance of a trip to maybe San Diego or back to Milwaukee, and that’s already assuming too much, because…
I mean, fine. I’m fine. How are you?
Who are we kidding? This is how we are. This transcends fine. This also brings to mind Marsellus Wallace’s response to boxer Butch in the denouement to the pawn shop scene in Pulp Fiction when asked if he is OK: “Naw, man. I’m pretty fuckin’ far from OK.” Ultimately, however, this is how we want to be when it’s this time of year.
We left New York with a two-game lead on Sunday night [1], and it’s Thursday afternoon, and we have a one-game lead, but it’s not that simple. It’s never that simple in the final week of September when leads and deficits regarding something everybody wants are this slim. If your team isn’t involved, it’s fun to sit back and observe the chaos. Fifty-two weeks ago, the Mets and Marlins played to the essence of inconclusiveness [2] — the Marlins took a lead over the Mets in the top of the ninth right before the rains drenched Citi Field — and it remained unknown for days on end whether the Marlins, in a playoff race (no, really), would have to wing their way back to New York to finish a game that meant nothing of consequence to the Mets, who were about to fire their manager and had all but packed it in, anyway. No skin off our nose as fans whatever happened. Let the if-necessary chaos commence! It wasn’t and it didn’t [3], but generally if you have nothing to root for, you tend to root for whatever’s most interesting.
This season’s last lap is interesting enough. Holding off the Braves is challenge enough without inserting meteorology and Milwaukee into the middle of our series with them. Then again, if ever a team on a roll looked like it could use a quick reset after a single game, it might have been the Mets following Tuesday night’s loss [4] to the Braves, when the Mets lived down to every fear we lug around in our backpack of anxieties. It was just one game versus the hundred or so that have seen them rise from the dead and to within a couple of steps of the postseason, but it happened where it happened, and that gets everybody antsy with a capital “A” presented in a font that’s given us nightmares since the capital of Georgia was Chipper City.
Ancient history, of course, but go tell that to your backpack of anxieties. Better yet, as George Clooney advised in Up in the Air, set that backpack on fire. It ain’t 1999 or 2022 — swell seasons except for the Atlanta angle — if we don’t want it to be. My historical precedent of choice this final week has to be 1973. Also ancient history, but when we remember everything, we oughta remember everything. The connective tissue is multiple rainouts messing with a pennant race and a rejiggered schedule extended out to the Monday after was supposed to be all she wrote on Sunday. The first-place Mets hung around soggy Chicago through an off day Thursday and postponements Friday and Saturday and didn’t make it to Wrigley to play until they were saddled with back-to-back doubleheaders. They split one on Sunday and, with their magic number down to one, took the opener on Monday, compelling “wet grounds” to be declared for the nightcap. Chaos was on the verge of reigning then, too — Pittsburgh was playing and losing its own makeup contest [5] to the Padres at Three Rivers that Monday — but everything was deemed official once the Mets won the 161st game of their season. The similarity to 2024 is nobody saw the Mets coming in the summer of 1973, either. The difference, beyond the existence of Wild Cards, is when the Mets finished the regular season on a Monday fifty-one years ago, their first playoff game would be the following Saturday. A reasonably rested Tom Seaver beat the Cubs on October 1 and then faced the Reds on October 6.
Major League Baseball planned for exactly one off day between the end of this regular season and the beginning of this postseason. The Mets and Braves project to be busy Monday. Or not. Clinchings. Eliminations. Seedings. Weekend unknowns. We’ll see. We’ll sweat some of it, probably shouldn’t stress over some of the rest of it, including the time squeeze. In ’99, the Mets finished up with Pittsburgh at Shea on a Sunday afternoon, had no idea what Monday held when they jetted to Cincinnati on a hunch Sunday night (the Reds wound up winning their rain-delayed finale late), won a suddenly necessary play-in game Monday night, sprayed champagne, then flew off to Arizona to begin their first-ever NLDS by withstanding Randy Johnson and winning Game One Tuesday night. It can be done. The 1999 Mets had three Western road trips spanning mid-August to mid-September. They were travel-hardened. So are the 2024 Mets, who you’ll recall spent this August touching down in and taking off from cities all over the continent. They bonded on their June trip to London and came out better for it. I’m not worried about a kooky schedule getting the best of them.
I don’t worry about Milwaukee getting the best of them. That’s a good team, and Miller Park/Whatever It’s Called Now has been a low-key deathtrap for them when little is on the line, but we did clinch our ’22 berth there. I don’t put any stock in “the Brewers will have nothing to play for” in terms of playoff positioning, because that rarely seems to matter; the Mets will have something to play for, and it’s up to them to play well. I don’t even worry about the mythic curse Atlanta and neighboring Cobb County have on the Mets. We swallowed our one dose of bad mojo Tuesday and now, as a result of the rains, we are cleansed. The Mets have flown safely to Wisconsin. They will play. They will compete. I can’t definitively say they will win, but I’m not yammering on with nervous energy as a symptom of not thinking they will. And if they have to return to Atlanta, weather permitting, I anticipate an adrenaline rush like no other.
Yes, that’s how I am.