An Effort to Believe

It’s so much easier to give up. The Mets are losing. The Mets are going to lose. I know the Mets are going to lose. You know the Mets are going to lose. So let’s give up on the charade of rooting for them to stop losing and give in to the reality that a loss is nigh. Let’s stop pretending they can possibly win. Maybe it will hurt less if we pivot immediately to acceptance.

That it’s easier to give up then keep hoping doesn’t make the result you’re fully and reasonably expecting any less difficult to swallow. The season is about to end. The postseason is about to end. We’d earned our invitation only the other day, and now we’d have to grab our stuff and get the hell out. The party would go on without us. I hate how it continues to be fun for others in those Octobers we are forced to walk away from it. We can see it through the window, on the outside looking in. What did we even show up for in the first place?

Lose and go home. Sports can make “home” sounds like such a dreadful place.

If I make peace with the impending loss before it goes final, maybe I can say something clever or cynical to give me a moment’s respite from my sorrow. There’s nothing that will lessen the sorrow, but at least I can sound like I know what I’m talking about. I saw this coming. It was obvious. Changes need to be made. I could’ve told you that innings ago. They always do this to us, don’t they?

Your logic fights with your emotion. You understand they don’t always do this to us. The foundation of your rooting life is based on them doing things for us, not to us. You came along at the exact right moment, you tell yourself, when all you knew about the Mets was they won and you heard it was a miracle and you were too young to know it wasn’t the norm. You figured it out soon enough, but you had the miracle, and another almost-as-Amazin’ miracle a few short years later, and, after withstanding a lot of bleakness, a combination of dominance and miracle, where you knew you rooted for the best team in the world and they still did things only a team that found itself completely out of hope had to do to survive — and they did. Whenever somebody remarks at a particular interlude, “they always do this to us,” I think, “I guess you don’t remember or never heard of 1969 or 1973 or 1986.”

I also think, “Those are not recent examples.” I have others from later years, but the endings never quite make the point I wish them to. It was great while it lasted in 1988, 1999, 2000, 2006, 2015, 2016, and 2022, but go find a flag that fully satisfies. Besides, now we’re into fine points. The Mets are doing what they “always” do to us, and you’re kind of buying in.

What a ride to emerge in a playoff race. What a ride to keep racing. What a ride to pass who needed to be passed on the very last day. What a shock to be not so shocked that we’re in this postseason. It’s the Dayton portion of the tournament, but it counts. They make t-shirts for this. We won the first game. We didn’t hold on to the second game. We’re toe to toe, zero to zero, in the third game…until we aren’t.

And the only logical conclusion my emotion comes to is this would be a good time to give up. Not yet in the seventh. Not really in the eighth. But in the top of the ninth, logic and emotion stage an intervention and tell me it’s about to be over. Francisco Lindor, most valuable everything, works — and I mean works — a walk, because the man who saved the season on Monday isn’t going to help euthanize it on Thursday. He could have, I suppose. Keith Hernandez made the second out of the tenth inning of Game Six. Nobody’s beyond making an out. But Lindor didn’t.

Still, with one on and one out, Mark Vientos, who’s not Francisco Lindor (who is?), goes about striking out, and it hits me that I need to know what time it is. Every year when a Met season is about to end, I keep an eye on the clock so I can mark the time of departure from the season we’ve been living in. Come late December, I’ll take that data point and the announced first-pitch time for the next Opening Day and calculate the Baseball Equinox, that moment equidistant between Met seasons. It’s intended as a warming spot for the dead of winter, but it’s also very much a product of winter. Winter, I’d deduced, was coming as Vientos struck out.

Kept clicking the side of my phone. 9:43. 9:45. Somewhere in there Brandon Nimmo is up and fouling off pitches to dig an oh-and-two hole. Clicking the phone. Seeing the time. This is how I will ease myself into winter on October 3, 2024. What a task I have chosen for myself as the Mets get set to go away.

Then Nimmo singles and Lindor is on third and Alonso is up, which is just swell, because heading into the top of the ninth, I muttered in my head that this season would find a way to end either with Alonso on deck or Alonso making the last out. Not believing in Alonso was also easier than sticking with him. It wasn’t any less painful.

Pete got the count against All-Star closer Devin Williams to three-and-one, and I allowed myself to think maybe he could work a walk, load the bases, pass the baton, build a rally that would…I didn’t know if a rally was going to do any good, but it was better than making constant time checks.

He swings at the next pitch, and my first instinct is to be sorry he hasn’t walked. I hear Howie Rose begin to describe the fly ball Pete has launched before I ever see it, because the radio behind me is about twenty seconds ahead of the muted TV in front of me. The TV essentially exists in Game Three for replays. Howie isn’t telling me anything that indicates Pete made a bad decision to swing. The ball is gone. The Mets, down 2-0 since the seventh, are ahead, 3-2. Simultaneously, I let out a piercing scream, hug my wife, and worry aloud that The Game Is Not Over. This may have been dramatic and necessary and, as Howie called it in the moment, “memorable” (though that’s usually something we can confirm months and years later when it’s not presently going on), but it’s not yet definitive. The Mets lead by one in the ninth. The night before, the Mets led by two in the eighth. I’ve spent too much of the past two innings descending into a state of not believing to suddenly do a 180. At most, I’ve turned 135 degrees toward optimism. But, c’mon Mets, add another run.

Here came Jesse Winker and here came Starling Marte, and we had a tack-on run, and it was Mets 4 Brewers 2, and like Jose Quintana going six scoreless and Edwin Diaz somehow making everything stressful for an inning-and-two-thirds but not giving up a single run, it is huge. As huge as Lindor’s walk. As huge as Nimmo’s single. Maybe not as huge as Alonso’s homer, because we all know Alonso’s homer will be memorable, especially if the Mets win. They haven’t won yet. All kinds of Mets did all kinds of memorable things to get to and succeed in the seven postseasons spanning 1988 to 2022, but most of their memorability exists in the shadow of they always do this to us.

Also, because it’s October 3, the 4-2 score gnaws at me. The Dodgers led the Giants 4-2 on October 3, 1951, when Bobby Thomson came to bat with two men on in the bottom of the ninth at the Polo Grounds. The legend of what Bobby Thomson did next played a large role in making me a retroactive New York Giants fan. I did not want karmic payback from the ghost of Ralph Branca via a Coogan’s Bluff score of Brewers 5 Mets 4.

(Isn’t it astounding how much can go through your mind between innings and pitches?)

But we are winning. And David Peterson, starting pitcher, is coming on in relief in the bottom of the ninth, because Edwin Diaz is only human. Odd, I pause to consider, that we carried 13 pitchers into a three-game series in which we knew we’d use three starting pitchers, meaning we had nine relievers by trade plus one potentially superfluous starter, and it’s the starter who’s now taking on the most enormous bullpen assignment of 2024. I’m not arguing Peterson wasn’t the right choice. Among those Met relief pitchers who were presumably rested and conceivably ready, I wanted to see exactly none of them attempt to protect a two-run lead in this ballpark against this opponent. I’ve seen David Peterson pitch many effective innings this year. Just pitch one here.

He did, of course. He gave up a leadoff hit, but then struck out the next Brewer and induced a double play ball, more specifically a ball that transformed into double play material once it reached the glove of Francisco Lindor, the guy who’d been weaving wonder all week. He dashed from short to second, stepped on the bag, and threw that ball to the other weaver of wonder, Alonso. Mets 4 Brewers 2, October 3 still a helluva date.

I have absolutely no idea what time the last out was recorded, because it doesn’t matter. Winter was immediately postponed for the duration of the National League Division Series, which starts this afternoon in Philadelphia, Kodai Senga shocking the stuffing out of everybody by going for New York, Zack Wheeler no longer surprising anybody by looming in Phillies red. It’s a best-of-five, meaning no matter what happens across this weekend, postseason baseball will be played this coming week at Citi Field when the Mets and the series come home.

Sports can make “home” sound like such a beautiful place, too.

There is no question of believing or not believing this Saturday. The emotional clock has reset. I shall only believe from here on out, certainly until the next time I begin to give up. Hopefully that will be in some other year. Hopefully is how I will try do everything for however long this ride continues.