The distance from No. 11 to No. 10 on any list is both incremental and immense. Top Ten implies a level above all others. Therefore, with all due respect to all others, welcome to the Top Ten portion of MY FAVORITE SEASONS, FROM LEAST FAVORITE TO MOST FAVORITE, 1969-‘PRESENT’ (with 2024’s slotting TBD), where things are getting more serious, which is to say more favorite.
Or does it say something else? I’ll stand by “Favorite” as the unifying adjective of this series, as the idea when I kicked it off on the final day of 2023 — when 2023 encompassed all the present we knew about — was to work my way up from Met seasons I didn’t enjoy a ton (but I was determined to say something nice to say about each of them), through Met seasons that struck me as evocative blends of fun and futility, straight up to those seasons I clearly love more than any others. You know: the Top Ten.
Except maybe favorite isn’t the most operative word as we rise to the upper tier of this extended exercise in Met reflection. The seasons about to be entered here were, for me…what? Meaningful? Influential? Formative? Each of the above — but without the anger and regret and that informed other meaningful, influential and formative seasons further down the chart. With happiness the prevalent mode in each season remaining to be counted down, I guess ‘favorite’ still works, but it seems worth noting, as we eventually visit certain years that weren’t conventionally successful and find them ranking higher in my very personal esteem than years that earned banners, that favorite encompasses so much more than wins, losses and flags.
It’s the Mets. It’s never obvious.
That said, it is indeed Top Ten Time. On with the countdown, and an authentic banner year.
10. 2000
It is now slightly over a quarter-century since we heard the word “century” used more than any of us will likely ever hear it again. And forget about a future surge in “millennium” — it crested for the duration of our lifetimes and the lifetimes of dozens of generations ahead of us back then. Occasionally I see a business that carries the name “Millennium” in its title, and I think it must have served as a better short-term attention-getter than long.
Yet the century and millennium whose border we drifted across in 2000 (“but there was no Year Zero” protestations notwithstanding) are still here. Just as are the Mets, who were as much the focus of my existence 25 years ago as they’ve ever been.
You don’t essentially build your life around a team you don’t love, and you don’t do it in a season you don’t love. I loved the Mets in 2000, and I loved the 2000 Mets. Those might read as identical statements, but I believe there’s a delineation to be divined. Truly loving the Mets at any given moment indicates your fandom is turned up high, no matter who’s on the Mets. My fandom for this enterprise, this going concern, this (as Tony Soprano regularly referenced Sunday nights at nine) thing of ours was already ratcheted skyward as the previous century closed its books. I saw no reason to diminish my fervor when the chronological odometer flipped over.
The 2000 Mets as individuals coalescing into a unit was a slightly different story. Years After, as recently discussed in this space, can be a hard internal sell, because Years After are inherently Not The Same. The Year Before 2000 was a banner year in its own right, one that couldn’t help but end. Kenny Rogers made sure of that. So did John Olerud and Masato Yoshii and Orel Hershiser and Octavio Dotel and Roger Cedeño and Pat Mahomes (and Bobby Bonilla, when he said “sure” to a sweet deferral deal). A few players take off your uniform and put another on every year, even years you cherished. It takes a minute or more to embrace their replacements.
So hi, Todd Zeile; and hi, Mike Hampton, and hi, Derek Bell, and hi, whoever else wasn’t here last year. You will wear orange and blue and an uncomfortable quantity of black, and you will mesh in your own way with Mike and Robin and Fonzie and Al and Reeder and so on, but you’ll be a different group. You might be welcome as you join us, but you can’t blame us if we consider you to be strangers before you emotionally become some of our own.
Eventually, the 2000 Mets become a group to have and to hold and to root as hard for as we did the 1999 cast. They maintain the general standards that have been established here in recent seasons. They are quality players and quality people, from what we can tell, and drama can’t help but swirl about them. Bobby Valentine is still managing, so, yeah, it’s never dull. That’s mostly good.
Somewhere past the middle of the season, something quietly happens. The 2000 Mets grab hold of a playoff spot in the standings on July 27 and they never let go. That’s what the 2000 Mets do. They win more than they lose and, given the experience enough of them garnered in the late 1990s (whether as Mets or whatever they were before becoming Mets), you mostly trust them to keep on keeping on.
Given who I am, I do the same. “Act like you’ve been there before” is usually brandished as a cudgel toward any player who flips a bat and pumps a fist too excessively after whacking a ball clean out of sight. One of the pleasures of 2000 for me was having “been there” in 1999. The Mets were a playoff team working toward being a playoff team again. They legitimately worked at it. They were mature that way. Part of their innate likability was that they were a solid citizen of baseball. They weren’t leading the Wild Card pack and staying on the Braves’ divisional heels by luck or accident. Even if the soul of the team came off a little more muted than the ’99 version’s, they still had that Amazin’ something about them. It was just a year older.
Me, too. I’d lived and died (and resurrected repeatedly) as Mets fan in 1999. Now I’d landed in this new year/decade/century/millennium with an enhanced sense of knowing what I was doing as a fan. A fan in full. I’d ascended to a certain Peak Mets state of being. It wasn’t only that I went to a lot of games — though I did — and it wasn’t only that I hardly missed an inning — though I didn’t. The agency I nurtured and the commitment I forged were born of an incandescent passion. My Met light was never off. My Met heart never stopped beating. I can honestly say I didn’t go a waking hour without organically thinking about the Mets. Maybe that’s still the case, but it felt deeper then.
If everything was 162 games of smooth sailing, the mind might have wandered. Dissecting what it was really like to live then, no, nothing was a sure thing. There were losing streaks and there was frustration and there was doubt. There were the Mets being the Mets, which even in the best of times eludes serenity. But there really was an inner confidence to rooting for the 2000 Mets. It could go off the rails, but I’m gonna stay on board and trust whoever’s driving this train. I think it’s gonna be a OK. At least that’s how I opt to remember it.
It was pointed out amid the 1950s nostalgia infiltrating 1970s pop culture that, once you factored in segregation, McCarthyism, societal conformity and so many other issues that defined daily living way back when…well, they weren’t all happy days. Yet twenty years later, you could roll out select signifiers of a time gone by and convince yourself that back then was the time to be alive. I think that might be what 2000 has become for me Metwise. I fretted with every third out or fourth ball or whatever didn’t go in our favor, but those were the days, huh? Mike and Robin and, yes, Fonzie — plus Hampton and Zeile and this kid Timo Perez who joined the lineup in September and hit an inside-the-park homer in Philly. Look at him run! Timo Perez takes nothing for granted on the basepaths!
Those happy days were yours and mine. Certainly mine. We were a plucky powerhouse from March in Tokyo to October in Flushing. We did make the playoffs. We did win an NLDS while holding our breath for four games. We did win the pennant while roaring aloud for five games. We came back on the Braves one night with ten runs in the eighth inning. We — the team, the fans — made Shea shake. We did some incredible things. We did a slew of hypercompetent things. It added up to almost everything we wanted. I was there for almost all of it. I didn’t go to the World Series, and the Mets didn’t show up for quite as much of that intracity affair as we wished, but I know I saw them line up for it on TV.
With the exception of securing a world championship, we scaled the Apex Mountain of Metsdom. I use first-person plural when maybe I should use the singular here. Fine, I was on my version of Apex Mountain. Losing the Fall Classic to who we lost it to understandably dims the glow of the collective Metropolitan memory of 2000. I dig. But I dug too much of what preceded our Subway Series shortfall to toss it all into a hole in the ground. New York, New York? We were a helluva team having a helluva year.
One other, rarely mentioned upside to immersion in the Mets in the fall of 2000 that we couldn’t have realized in 2000: it wasn’t yet the fall of 2001. From a gut-level perspective, baseball — or anything — in New York would never feel the same after what happened downtown that following September. Knowing that makes me treasure the September and October before 2001 that much more.
As this list of Favorite Seasons stands (which is to say pending what I choose to do with 2024), you will not find any year above 2000’s slot that begins with the number ‘2’ in the Top Ten; it’s all Nineteen Something Something from here on out. I’m suddenly reminded of an early-ish email meme that went around on November 19, 1999, or 11/19/1999. None of us, it was advised, would ever again see “today’s date” expressed in all odd numbers, unless we lived to make 1/1/3111. It’s an intriguing triviality, though probably not one worth hanging around for.
The “failure” of any year after 2000 to crack my Top Ten likely reflects the way a lifetime fan — OK, this lifetime fan — has processed further maturity. In 2000, I was 37 years old. I’d experienced the Mets in the last year of the 1960s, all of the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, and now the first year of this new millennium. It might have been a coincidence of the calendar or a matter of the Mets declining in sync with me nearing my forties, that after 2000, nothing about my baseball team was going to impact me the way everything about my baseball team had impacted me already. “Everything I needed to know about being a Mets fan I learned from 1969 to 2000,” doesn’t quite sum it up, but maybe everything I was ever going to feel was never going to seem so revelatory again. Things can still be meaningful. They may not be as influential or formative.
I’m still rooting for the Mets. I’m still writing about the Mets. I’m still relishing the coming of another Mets season. I’m still capable of being uncommonly levitated by the Mets, as demonstrated by the events of not too many months ago. I don’t think everything I’ve been up to with my Mets has been an extended time-killing exercise from 2001 forward. Yet perhaps the belief that everything you’re experiencing has never transpired quite like this before can happen only in the first century you’re alive, and it takes a hearty sampling of your second century on the scene to confirm it.
Given its immediate era, its hallmark events, and my specific experience, what we used to anticipate as The Year 2000 turned out, in way-of-life terms, to be Peak Mets for me. Implicit in having reached a peak is that it’s inevitably and necessarily — but hopefully gently — downhill from there.
PREVIOUS ‘MY FAVORITE SEASONS’ INSTALLMENTS
Nos. 55-44: Lousy Seasons, Redeeming Features
Nos. 43-34: Lookin’ for the Lights (That Silver Lining)
Nos. 33-23: In the Middling Years
Nos. 22-21: Affection in Anonymity
No. 20: No Shirt, Sherlock
No. 19: Not So Heavy Next Time
No. 18: Honorably Discharged
No. 17: Taken Down in Paradise City
No. 16: Thin Degree of Separation
No. 15: We Good?
No. 14: This Thing Is On
No. 13: One of Those Teams
No. 12: (Weird) Dream Season
No. 11: Hold On for One More Year
“As this list of Favorite Seasons stands (which is to say pending what I choose to do with 2024), you will not find any year above 2000’s slot that begins with the number ‘2’ in the Top Ten; it’s all Nineteen Something Something from here on out.” and
“The “failure” of any year after 2000 to crack my Top Ten likely reflects the way a lifetime fan — OK, this lifetime fan — has processed further maturity. In 2000, I was 37 years old. I’d experienced the Mets in the last year of the 1960s, all of the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, and now the first year of this new millennium. It might have been a coincidence of the calendar or a matter of the Mets declining in sync with me nearing my forties, that after 2000, nothing about my baseball team was going to impact me the way everything about my baseball team had impacted me already.”
Very interesting statements. For me, recent seasons have been (mostly) more impactful because, as a fan who lives far from NY and enough in the country that cable tv isn’t even an option, the last 10 years or so when the internet and MLBTV have allowed me to follow the team day-by-day and see and feel the highs and lows on an ongoing basis have held, maybe not more meaning but at least more impact. Even seasons like 2023 and 2017 where the team so underperformed expectations were often more meaningful than earlier years, at least those of equivalent success. I could go back to when I was a kid listening to Kiner, Murphy and Nelson on my radio where even the suckage of the late 70’s still meant that for 2-3 hours of most days I could escape reality with the Mets – I could live and die with the team even when a win vs a loss meant nothing more than being 20 or 21 games under .500.
Very different when I don’t see games, local news carries nothing about the Mets and my main direct contact with the team was looking at the sports scores in the paper on days I chose to buy one.
Not to say later years will ever supplant a year where our shortstop decides to get in a fight in the playoffs or where I cut evening classes in grad school to watch a ball go through Bill Buckner’s legs. But for other years, times when I can follow the Mets day-by-day are better, even when seasons suck like in 2023 or 2017.
Glad Faith and Fear can be part of your long-distance living and dying (with more of the former to come, preferably).
When I think of 2000, I think of Piazza, Fonzie, Hampton, and Leiter. Yes, there were other standouts, but those are the first ones who come to mind. The best part was that Zeile three-run double off a Hentgen fastball to the right-center wall, the celebration of which almost caused a structural failure in the upper deck at Shea. Thank the heavens everything held up, including the final score and series in favor of the Mets. How satisfying was it for them to beat their much-resented, long-time rivals from St. Louis? A bit of payback for ’85 and ’87.
Zeile also set off a pivotal point in the World Series, but in the other direction. Through no fault of his own, his crushed line drive off a Pettitte curve had so much topspin that it hit the top of the left-field wall. Had that ball gone out, the Mets tally two runs on that play instead of zero (I wish Timo had sprinted the whole way), and perhaps win Game 1 of the WS without it going into extras, and maybe they win the whole Series. But I’m with you, Greg, let’s recall the good parts and focus on them.
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