Making New History

Flies who’ve watched Spring Training shake their buzzy little heads and remark on unfortunate colleagues dropping like Mets. Down goes Alvarez (hand). Down goes McNeil (oblique). Down already went Montas and Manaea and the backup infielder Madrigal who wasn’t hyped enough to be saddled with Jed Lowrie comparisons, so at least he’s got that going for him. Ronny Mauricio still isn’t playing from his baserunning mishap the winter league season from now two winters ago. A.J. Minter, Dedniel Nuñez and Starling Marte are working their way back into good health, which implies a starting point of less than good health. Brandon Nimmo has intermittently let us know he’s running on a leg that’s precisely 91.9% or somewhere south of a hundred, and now a sore knee may confine his early-season services to DH’ing. Jesse Winker appeared to something to his lower half on St. Patrick’s Day. Clay Holmes has been tabbed to start Opening Day because Kodai Senga won’t be quite ready (and David Peterson is lefthanded). Best shapes of Met lives may be in short supply.

But Spring is for Training, right? And enthusiasm. Some Springs inspire more enthusiasm than others. This one, despite the dings — especially the ding to Alvarez’s hamate bone — has maintained an incandescent glow of anticipation.

It might have something to do with the light that remains lit from the fall and summer that kept us going through winter.

13½. 2024
You can’t demand a season be one of the most spectacular you’ve believed ever lived through, let alone the most spectacular. It being spectacular while it’s going on, especially as it’s getting on, is a plenty robust goal. The 2024 Mets sprinted through the tape toward that one. Overcoming inertia, adversity, the Diamondbacks, the Braves, the Brewers, and the Phillies in style, they were that brand of winner that neither won it all nor needed to for us to appreciate them like crazy. After all we went through together, them and us, it might sound impossibly demanding for a Mets fan to process their season as anything less than one of their absolute, tippy-top greatest ever. When you are moved to dwell on that season once it’s history, hopefully it will take you somewhere special. That’s where thinking about the seasons we’ve lived through should take us. We all have our own processing mechanism for aligning seasons in our own grand scheme of things. Mine has culminated in a countdown that now requires a U-turn for nuanced context’s sake.

We’re going somewhere special. How special has its limits.

If a Met year is lousy, it doesn’t take long to decide just how lousy it was. If a Met year is good, some thought is required. Twenty Twenty-Four turned into a very good year for the Mets, so I had to think. Honestly, within the parameters of this exercise, it would have been easier had 2024 gone on its dismal way. It’s easy to take shots at lousy seasons. Age seems to give us license to come clean about the teams, players, and seasons of our youth. Dear Messrs. Kiner, Murphy and Nelson: I must lodge an official complaint regarding the product you were selling me as I came of baseball age in the 1970s, as it turns out the following young men whose prospects you touted amounted to very little relative to the rest of the National League… If we can drain the romance out of the Mets we idolized as kids, being harsh realists about the Mets who let us down as we, let’s say ripen, is a breeze.

Yet when I started this LEAST FAVORITE TO MOST FAVORITE series, I wanted to go easy on the recriminations. Yes, I had teams, players and seasons I wasn’t crazy about, but fish in a barrel are easy targets. The wording LEAST FAVORITE was chosen after careful deliberation. I didn’t want to scorn anew Met seasons that sucked long ago. I know which Tides washed out in the 1970s and I’ve probably identified them before. I set out, instead, to celebrate that Met seasons that sucked nevertheless had a little something going for them.

Met seasons that stop sucking in midstream are a different kettle of fish. So let’s get the present up to date. Let’s fit last season into MY FAVORITE SEASONS, FROM LEAST FAVORITE TO MOST FAVORITE, 1969-PRESENT. Let’s back up from where the countdown left off last and slot 2024 where I’ve decided it belongs. My countdown, my ranking. My fondness for 2024 is real. It’s also relative.

I’ve got 2024 at No. 13½ out of the 56 seasons I’ve experienced as a Mets fan. In traditional numbering, that’s No. 14, with everything I ranked No. 14 to No. 55 since I started this series at the very end of 2023 sliding down one notch, except I don’t want to revise the articles I’ve already written, so let’s call 2024 No. 13½, which actually works well to my way of thinking.

I dig 2024 carrying a “½” designation, given that there were times when the season seemed the absolute worst, and times when the season built toward feeling like the absolute best. Average those sensations out, and a “½” scans as appropriate. Plus, at its most unbelievable, the season had that Being John Malkovich 7½th floor sense of surreality surrounding it.

I appreciate that the only Met to eschew superstition and wear 13 during the franchise’s first nineteen seasons was Roger Craig, who switched to it in the summer of 1963 in order to change his luck amid an epic personal losing streak. Craig’s pitching had been so unlucky, he leaned into the supposedly unluckiest number available. When Craig found good fortune by getting traded to St. Louis ahead of their 1964 championship drive, his situationally lucky number went back into proverbial mothballs until the early 1980s — or maybe the likes of Herb Norman and Nick Torman really used mothballs to keep unselected numbers fresh.

Since 1981, 13 has graced the uniforms of a Met who is going to the Hall of Fame (Billy Wagner); a Met who is in the club’s Hall of Fame (Edgardo Alfonzo) and the Met who served as primary trade chip to acquire somebody who is in the latter Hall but also belongs in the former (Neil Allen, who took his digits to St. Louis so we could have Keith Hernandez). We won a 16-13 game in 1985 and a 13-12 game in 1963. There is something mighty Metsian about the number 13, and there was something mighty Metsian about the 2024 season.

I like where 13½ lands among MY FAVORITE SEASONS, right between 2005 at No. 14 and 2006 at No. 13. Those two consecutive seasons, representing the dawn and early maturation of FAFIF, have been a matched set in my mind ever since they transpired, and I was hesitant to break them up on my list, but I think 2005 me would understand. The first year we blogged, I bled pixels in hope those Mets would make an exhilarating, dramatic playoff run, a concept that still played well in the twentieth year of Faith and Fear. Playoffs are the aspiration of every fan every regular season, and the 2024 Mets became only the eleventh Met unit to reach that goal.

As for coming in just behind 2006, which came in just behind No. 12 2015, that says something, too. That says in all the years that have followed 2000, it takes a ton for me to discover myself rooting the way I did in the century preceding this one.

My patterns and norms and capacity for “oh wow!” took hold in 1969; established themselves deeply in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s; and, in their way, peaked with the coming of the new millennium. The Mets’ comprehensive imprinting on me was just about done by 2000. For anything else to expand my universe for the better — not just remind me of something great, but be something great — it had to land as pretty frigging amazing, let alone Amazin’. The last Met season of pure, unadulterated, soaking in it without having to think about it joy for me was 2006. The only year that elevated me higher since — once I fully got over the hesitation that infected my rooting system down the fetid stretch of 2007 and stuck around in residual form for multiple seasons — was 2015. I was into ’06 and ’15 and felt rewarded within those Met years like they had a 19 in front of them. Those were start-to-finish rides, respective bumpy final scenes notwithstanding, that soared for me for months and months. I know Beltran took strike three. I know Harvey was permitted to stay in a batter or two too long. I don’t usually think about those endings when I think about those seasons.

Twenty Twenty-Four backloaded its tonnage of thrills and chills to such a degree you’d assume the Dodgers negotiated the terms. The season delivered the goods, but they took their sweet time getting whey needed to be. My patience was tested in April and May and not necessarily sated amid the promise of June and July (impatience can be brandished as a shield against disappointment). If I’m being real, August didn’t begin to convince me until it was almost September…and September tended to undermine its most convincing arguments a little too forcefully.

But, eventually, 2024 won me over. When it did, that was genuine sweet time, some of the sweetest I’ve experienced since the millennium turned.

I just thought I’d throw all that out there upfront, because I’ve heard so many Mets fans of tenure tell me directly or otherwise that they thought 2024 was “the best” or something like that. Me gauging 2024 as a strong third among all seasons from 2001 forward seems a little stringent by comparison. Yet it’s where I am, and from where I am, that, I assure you, is high praise. Within this world I’ve created for FAVORITEs and rankings, 2024 “competes” within the 21st century. Framing it as No. 3 in the years following 2000 may do it more justice than calling it No. 13½ overall.

Despite any given season necessarily standing as a distinct organism, a fan’s response to that given season builds on the seasons that came before it. I have to figure my take on 2024, for quite a while, was the product of the two seasons that had most recently occurred. There was 2022, which I really loved until I didn’t, and there was 2023, which never gave me much of a chance to grow enamored of it. I wished to believe 2022 and its towering pile of regular-season wins represented the new normal. I clung to that perception for as long as I could into 2024, trying to rationalize 2023’s epic downturn from 101-61 to 75-87 as an aberration attributable to our closer getting a little too excited in the World Baseball Classic; the revolutionary pitch clock serving as perhaps too challenging a new trick for our pair of old-dog aces; and the losses-cutting strategy of the trade deadline, clever for the long-term, dispiriting for the dog days. Given a cleaner slate post-2023, surely we’d snap back into 2022 form.

But the first two months of 2024 grinded on like 2023 never ended. Different manager, different general manager, some different personnel, same case of the Mondays. From April 22, 2023, through May 29, 2024, the Mets compiled a record of 83-113. Only the Rockies, the White Sox and the A’s were worse over that span, and none of them had a relief pitcher fire a glove into the stands as exclamation point to their sustained stretch of lousiness. Whether Jorge Lopez said the Mets were the worst team in Major league Baseball or he was the worst teammate in Major League Baseball in the minutes between his fling and his release, the operative word was “worst”. That’s what watching the Mets felt like on the heels of 2023, with a third of 2024 gone. An old impulse of which I’m not proud had taken hold yet again. In every sputtering season since 2007 that goes south (and I turned cynical), a part of me is almost ready to sit back and see just how bad this team gets…which isn’t why I fell in love with baseball. But 2024 was leaving a lot to desire.

If I’d come into 2024 about when I came into 1969, late August/early September without knowing what came before, I imagine I might have been hooked for life, no questions asked. But I did experience the precursor (never mind the years before), and I wasn’t as spellbound by what 2024 showed signs of becoming when June began to erase May. Maybe even the most magical of Met seasons are incapable of imprinting on me more than lightly at this stage of my life.

Still, I don’t go in for the “long-suffering” Mets fan identifier. It’s baseball. We watch it and listen to it and live for it of our own volition. We don’t suffer. Maybe we endure without fulfillment. Maybe we decide to endure a little less heartily. After a little too much lousy baseball, my commitment to orthodox Metsopotamianism may have slid back toward conservative. If ever there was a year I was looking to not be much of a Mets fan anymore, 2024 shaped up through May as the one to pick. Every team I root for in other sports has had those eras where I realize I still like the team but I know relatively few of its players. Should they get hot, I’ll contract playoff fever. When that’s over, I’ll remember it was fun, but won’t follow their offseason breathlessly and it won’t tee me up for the season ahead. Of course other sports aren’t baseball and no team is the Mets.

Legendarily, the 2024 Mets shook off their malaise in the standings soon enough, but the residue of what immediately preceded it remained in my mind longer than maybe it should have. When they started winning, I wondered if winning was a true indicator of quality — if the Mets were suddenly winning baseball games, how hard could winning baseball games be? Twenty-Three stuck like gum to a shoe. Are we sure, absolutely sure, that the way we played over more than seven months bridging two seasons isn’t what we are? I wasn’t. And once I was mostly certain that the pervasive crumminess had been overcome, and Mets fans were jumping up and down at what 2024 was bringing like they were Edwin Diaz in the WBC, I couldn’t help but wonder, “Didn’t we just do this?”

The 2024 Mets, it’s been mentioned quite a bit, loved each other and cared for each other and played for each other. This didn’t strike me as unique. I saw players be into each other before, just not with as much choreography. Didn’t we spend the bulk of 2022 resolute that These Mets were better than and different from anything we’d ever seen? Weren’t we in love with the Mets of Mark Canha and Eduardo Escobar and Nick Plummer and Chris Bassitt and Max Scherzer and Timmy Trumpet? Weren’t they the team that was never out of a game, the team that would inevitably find a way to win? Come to think of it, didn’t that describe the shirt-torn, walkoff-heroic Mets of Dom Smith and Michael Conforto and J.D. Davis and all the young guns of 2019, who came on like gangbusters down a stretch that everybody thought was gonna be no more than a string? And weren’t we enthralled by the run to the Wild Card made by the eclectic 2016 Mets — Asdrubal Cabrera, T.J. Rivera, James Loney, Jose Reyes 2.0 and the no-notice rookie starting pitching duo of Seth Lugo and Robert Gsellman? And I know our summer of loving 2015, with its Tears of Joy homer and its Five Days in Flushing arc and Yoenis Cespedes’s neon-green compression sleeve and accompanying rally parakeet, not to mention Steven Matz’s Grandpa Bert and the exploits of Murph and Thor and Bartolo, wasn’t really a dream.

There had never been anything like the 2024 Mets? I get the concept of recency bias, but FOUR TIMES in the preceding decade there’d been something enough like the 2024 Mets to kind of make me roll my eyes at the apparently singular excitement building on their behalf. I was happy for those who created their own Grimace costumes. I was happy for the guy who carved an OMG sign and saw his work go viral. I was happy that Jose Iglesias was climbing two kinds of singles charts. I was happy that Sean Manaea made a mid-season adjustment and tested it out in Central Park over the All-Star break. I was happy to stop looking at several ex-Yankees (including the manager) as ex-Yankees and begin appreciating them as current Mets. I wasn’t disdainful that we brought in Jesse Winker and recast him from heel to face. I gathered satisfaction at the Mets’ rise over .500 and insertion in the playoff race. I applauded the palpable momentum. Satisfaction is satisfying, if not exhilarating.

In terms of ranking a season below popular perception, 2024 was not a 1969 or 1973 situation for me personally in which I don’t remember enough or I was preoccupied by other pursuits. I remember everything about 2024. I had no competing diversions in 2024. I lived through a frustrating first two months, then two-and-a-half months that were alternately promising and frustrating. It began to feel real in late August. By then, the fast-food mascot was entrenched and the wood-cut signs were old hat. I just wanted a baseball team that would succeed. I got that. I got some thrills, too. I don’t discount the thrills.

I’ve discovered across time I’m apparently a connoisseur of moments and games and stretches and seasons that “will never be forgotten” that get forgot. Over and over, we plow under what came before. I relish touring what’s come before — determining that what we dismiss as horrible could actually be pretty decent in its day, and, as necessary, learning the perceived best of times encompassed some dark nights. As long as my newspapers.com and stathead.com subscriptions are up to date, I can spend a very happy evening foraging down a Mets history rabbit hole. All things being equal, I prefer getting caught up in the history more than trying to comment on the contemporary…though I like doing the contemporary because every Mets game brings new history. I understand Mets history. I understand Mets wins and Mets losses. Mets vibes can be to taste.

When I was a kid, I didn’t exactly aspire to be the Sign Man, but I saw going to Shea Stadium and holding up placards attesting to how THERE ARE NO WORDS as vaguely aspirational. That’s the kind of a fan I’d like to be. But maybe less showy…and with loads of words. I’m long past the stage of life where I’m going to pretend I want to dress up like Grimace. That’s not for me. Aren’t they hot in there? I think I was operating on a wavelength of my own as last season became what it became. Everybody else listened to the 2024 Mets on their flagship station (WOMG?). I tuned in one of the staticky affiliates. I heard what I heard. The stakes of the season faded in and out for me, as if I was trying to tune it in from another town on my car radio. The signal didn’t truly begin to come in clearly until mid- to late August. It was full-on 50,000 watts as September wound down.

So it took me quite a while to catch up to where it seemed everybody else in Metsopotamia was. They were over the moon. I kept my feet on the ground, wary of reaching for the stars. Hanging in there with the Mets hanging in there was sufficient for me. Relearning to trust them — Wild Card or no Wild Card, they had risen above just plain sucking — might have to be my reward. Other people’s ecstasy that THIS season was SO special left me with little more than a contact high. Into my sixth decade as a fan and my seventh decade overall, I think I lacked the performativeness to vault in a lunar direction. Grimace and OMG and all that stuff…for me, that was what Oakland’s twenty-game winning streak in Moneyball was to Billy Beane: “This kind of thing, it’s fun for the fans.”

When the Mets approached the World Series in 2015, I thought to myself that I wished for another world championship for all the Mets fans who’ve never had one. A third one for me, too, but I believe I cherished it more as an opportunity for them to experience what I already had twice. Maybe that’s what 2024 was for, to test the theory. Others were loving this more than I was? That was OK, I guessed.

I’m a fan, though, right? Have been, forever, inclusive to this moment. For my birthday this past December, my wife gave me a personalized beach towel that proclaims I’m the “#1 FAN” of the Mets. Stephanie was drawn to this MLB Shop item because adjacent to several iterations of our team’s logo is the year of the franchise’s birth, 1962, same as mine. As a curio, it works. It flatters me every time I walk by where I’ve hung it. I just wonder, despite a lifetime (at least since I was six) operating as the de facto biggest Mets fan anybody knew, if I still deserved the title the towel bestowed on me. I mean, I don’t even have a Grimace costume. Rooting like hell so everyone sees you and hears you is a younger fan’s game.

Then again, you’re only as young as you feel. For the bulk of 2024’s ascent, I was delighted about the Mets. I got a kick out of the Mets. Such adult phrasing. My father got a kick out of things. To realize this was how I was relating to the Mets even as they giddily imploded Win Probability graphs (more like win improbability, amirite?) suggests a bit of remove from the vibe shift that shook up Flushing. Yet Casey Kasem’s wisdom about staying grounded is eternal. Maybe because I didn’t go bananas over the Mets as they approached, turned, and tentatively backtracked from various corners, I was ready for the onslaught of emotion when it hit in earnest. My date with Met destiny was a night in early September when the Mets didn’t blow a game to the Red Sox. There was a half-inning, the top of the eighth, when an out wasn’t made, and it set up a run for the opponent, and the entire house of cards that had been building for more than three months emitted an impending tumbling-down sense of doom.

Then Jose Butto induced a ground ball, and Jose Iglesias picked it up, and Francisco Lindor received Iglesias’s toss to convert an out at second, and Lindor sent the ball next to Pete Alonso at first to complete the 4-6-3 double play that kept the Mets ahead of Boston, 3-2. In the next half-inning, Lindor was in the middle of a rally that produced four insurance runs, and a half-inning after that, the Mets nailed down their sixth of an eventual nine wins in a row. I didn’t know about the seventh, eighth and ninth wins yet. I didn’t know about what would happen after that. I did know, with the Mets a half-game out of the final Wild Card slot, that we (we) were going to the playoffs and was almost as sure that we (we) were going to win the World Series.

For the longest time, there was nothing inevitable about the 2024 Mets. Kvetching about losses comes as second-nature to a fan, but I don’t think we collectively believed in the patently possible until very late in the game. Watching the September 11 near no-hitter in Toronto as a Mets Classic on SNY is an unintended exercise in Amazin’ hindsight. The Mets are slumping. They haven’t homered in days. The daunting Phillies are on the schedule the following two weekends. And, yes, a no-hitter is in progress for eight innings before LINSANITY! saves the day. I wanted to yell, months later, “It’s going to be all right! We’re going to get through this game and so much more!” But you don’t know that before it happens.

The Metzvahmobile had gotten hold of me in September, as the emotions of that Red Sox game stayed with me for the duration. Doubt would make cameo appearances in the weeks ahead; it wouldn’t be a playoff chase if there wasn’t doubt. But I was as in as I needed to be. When the Citi Field portion of the regular season ended on a Sunday night, the Mets holding on to fend off the once-mighty Phillies, my seat was technically in Promenade, but it might as well have been over the moon. When the succeeding week brought defeat and rain in Atlanta, followed by more defeat in roof-covered Milwaukee, I refused to plummet to earth. I didn’t care that the Mets had squandered their division title at Truist Park in 2022. I didn’t care that American Family Field was a stealth death pit for this franchise. The stars were now within reach. I wasn’t going to stop reaching.

We, together, grabbed what needed to be grabbed on September 30, Game 161, the first game of that doubleheader, the one game we had to have to ensure 2024 didn’t suddenly halt. It had come too far since May 29 to not keep going. That was the game — I’d call it The Francisco Lindor Game, though I’d need to be more specific than that — that launched 2024 into the stratosphere of 21st-century Mets seasons. I understand if it tops the all-time lists of others. As a single day and a single game and a single swing and a the manifestation of a single set of emotions, I’ll put September 30, 2024, up against anything I’ve been through as a Mets fan, even if I suspect I would have make the same claim on behalf of precious moments from 2022 and 2019 and 2016 and 2015 and on back through my life with the Mets.

I didn’t throw in the towel when the Mets fell behind twice on September 30. I believe I earned the #1 FAN towel that day. We all did, including those Mets who made it happen in synchronicity with us. There was practical magic to the 2024 Mets that transcended a clutch hit here or a key strikeout there. One fewer win, and “OMG” is a snappy earworm rather than a rallying cry for the ages. Our clubhouse seemed to contain 26 proud-to-be-a-Met Shawon Dunstons at any given moment, and they gave us the chance to discover their true orange-and-blue colors in full.

We wear players’ jerseys and such, but when we and they hang around together for a full season (or full seasons when it comes to the Nimmos, Lindors and Alonsos), they are a manifestation of us just as much. The Mets, when clicking, are forever young and forever a little silly. Being a Met doesn’t work with a scowl. And treating 2024 simply like a baseball season, even a highly successful baseball season, probably doesn’t take into account all of what made 2024 such a blast for so many Mets fans. Deep down, for the most part, I treated it like a baseball season. A highly successful baseball season, engineered by a highly appealing collection of baseball players. Successful seasons usually make baseball players seem appealing. Success is appealing.

I occasionally mutter to myself, “there are ways and there are ways,” meaning I find one way to get something done clearly preferable to another. I don’t know if such a mutter applies to ways the Mets win. For example, in 2022, under manager Buck Showalter and with veteran ace Max Scherzer setting the tone, the starting pitchers would congregate in the dugout when an effective outing was over, huddle in a corner, and confer intensely on what was to be learned from the pitcher who had just pitched. In 2024, under manager Carlos Mendoza and nobody necessarily assuming the mantle of veteran ace as Scherzer had, the starting pitchers gathered in the dugout when an effective outing was over, embrace in a circle, and hop together giddily. Which response is right? Who’s to say?

By not automatically opting for giddiness, I’m probably discounting the impact the ephemera had on people. I’ve seen enough shenanigans in enough dugouts in recent years to not think the guys holding the OMG sign, or the pitchers painting each other’s numbers on their faces, was that much a break from the norm. For all my fits of floating and flying over a team whose persona sometimes wafted off the charts — “no, they don’t usually have a concert led by a recently added utility infielder after a game with each of his teammates joining in” — I could be very literal-minded about the seasonlong slog. Sometimes I saw a team get off to a wretched start and then occasionally muddle through to its league’s sixth-best record. But treat it like a “regular” year, you probably miss its essential poetry. We all interpret and frame our Mets through our own prism. Mine pushes and pulls between poetic and prosaic.

Ultimately, I wound up more than delighted people were capable of finding extra joy in experiencing something that was happening again like it was happening for the first time. I got an enormous kick out of our players not simply nodding grimly at one another after succeeding. I couldn’t have been more all in on this team and how it was all in and how my fellow fans were all in. What a way to be, being a #1 FAN. I hope they made lots of those towels this offseason. However we rooted, we all deserve one.

The weeks after September 30 were Amazin’, too. Losing to the Brewers would have taken some of the shine off winning the final available Wild Card. But we beat the Brewers, and we continued to shine on. Losing to the Phillies…HA! We weren’t going to lose to the Phillies, never mind that they won our division. I was more sure of that than I was our not losing to the Brewers. Doubt lingered, but it wasn’t seated in the front row of my consciousness. In October, you just have to deal with doubt and drown doubt out. As a fan, you have to keep bringing it. You know…it. Your team just won its biggest game of the year, yet there’s a whole new game right after, and the last one is of no use. Conversely, your team just lost its biggest game of the year, and you almost surely cannot give up, because unless it eliminated you, you’re still on the caring clock.

I cared so much by the end of the loss of the Dodger series on October 20 that I would I describe myself without hyperbole as crushed. I listened to Howie Rose in the ninth inning — “once the immediate disappointment, if they don’t pull off some kind of magical comeback here, wears off, you’ll realize what an incredible ride this team took you for his year,” and Gary Cohen on the postgame show — “there are great days to come for this franchise ahead,” yet I was still crushed. The high priests of Mets fandom were giving it to me straight, but elimination is elimination. The Dodgers were going to the World Series. The Mets were going home. I had told myself and anybody reading between my lines after the aforementioned Red Sox game of September 3 that we were going to the World Series. My hopes had been aloft for nearly seven weeks. The air coming out was bound to create blowback.

But it proved minimal. Beating Atlanta on September 30, beating Milwaukee on October 3, and beating Philadelphia on October 9 sealed this as a most special season. Only five Mets teams have won two postseason series. The 2024 Mets are one of those five. Coming up short in any of their do-or-die situations would have diminished previous accomplishments and left at least a hint of a bad taste. They did rather than died time and again. Conversely, getting clobbered by Los Angeles four times in six games could be brushed off our shoulders without deploying a Helmac-brand lint roller. It hurt for a minute, but it didn’t sting for long. There was no sour note. There was no lower-case goat. There is yet to be regret-tinged long-term aftermath. There are no hard feelings that we know about. A season is more than the sum of its highlights, but since the final out of October 20, I find myself only playing the good parts in my head.

All of that equals No. 13½ by my estimation. The season 2024 nudged ahead of among my favorites, 2005, was one I understood as seminal as soon as it was complete…and favorite can be synonymous with meaningful the higher up we go, regardless of results. Writing in this medium about the team I love on a regular basis altered the act of rooting for me. To borrow from Artie on The Larry Sanders Show, it changed me into a figure out of Greek mythology: half-man/half-link. That transformation was bigger than the 2005 Mets going 83-79 and running out of Wild Card gas in early September. It represented a rebirth or reaffirmation of sorts. The commonality with 2024? This past season’s trajectory definitely reaffirmed my…I oughta say faith here, but I think it was commitment. My commitment, recapping games roughly every other night and then some, should be self-evident. But I know myself. My commitment dragged after 2023 and kept dragging through the start to 2024.

At 2024’s regular season morphed into the 2024 postseason, I could gaze into my soul as Ralph Malph did at Arnold’s men’s room mirror and declare with conviction, I still got it! Which “it” was this? Call “it” passion crossed with that extra layer of devotion that takes over when the Mets are on another level and your life is determined to reflect what they’re up to.

If I didn’t still got it, then there’d be no 94-track playlist on my computer. I think of it as Mark and Francisco’s Infinite Playlist. Lindor, our Most Vibeful Player, inspired it. Vientos, our fall breakout player, inspired it. Everybody inspired it. This collection of songs (I can hear any song and make it about the Mets), snippets of play-by-play, pregame and postgame interviews, and ambient noise recorded below the tracks of the 7 train suggests nothing could have meant more to me than the 2024 Mets, not in 2024, not ever. It’s a personal expression of immersion and affection I couldn’t have ginned up had the emotion behind it not been authentic. Yet its authenticity is an outflow of what built up over the preceding 55 seasons. It’s always like that, though. Every Met year builds on its predecessors.

Met-iculously crafting a 94-track playlist that both comments on the action and urges it in a Metsward direction is my version of wearing a Grimace costume to the ballpark. It didn’t matter that nobody but me was going to play it or hear it; every bit of its four hours and twenty-five minutes makes sense to me. In my head is my favorite perch from which to watch games, anyway. The playlist’s construction was an appropriate response to what was going on around me, because, in a way, I was playing the hits in late September and October. I knew what a playoff chase felt like. I knew what a postseason felt like. Being super into the Mets once 2024 got serious wasn’t far off from how it felt in 2015 or 2006 or any year marked by champagne showers and gripping tension. (This wasn’t my first season/postseason-inspired playlist, either.) I’m not sure what I felt in 2024 was new or revelatory, but the unexpected coda to what shaped up as an ordinary season was real. And it was spectacular.

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
No. 10: Retrospectively Happy Days
No. 9: The September of My Youth
No. 8: First Taste
Nos. 7-5: Three of a Kind
No. 4: Pound for Pound