This was late September last season, and the Mets were still a few days away from heading to Atlanta for what proved to be a calamity of such a scale it was Waterloo crossed with Watergate for them. It was a few weeks from when the Padres would take the staggering Mets to the vet’s office and gently guide them across baseball’s Rainbow Bridge.
The Mets were still a first-place club, same as they’d been since the opening hours of the 2022 season.
They’d wrapped up a postseason berth, the first of what they hoped would be at least four clubhouse celebrations.
Buck Showalter was asked if the Mets had progressed further than even he’d believed possible.
“What I hope for this organization,” Showalter said, “is that we achieve a place where success is an expectation and not something to be surprised about.”
And as another year dawns, that feels as much a mission statement as anything. You can wring your hands all you want as a Mets fan, bemoan balls that broke wrong or knees that bent wrong or elbows that snapped wrong through the years — but that argument loses steam when you consider the Mets have been the beneficiaries of the two greatest miracles in baseball history, in 1969 and in 1986.
More relevant, and more troubling, is how fleeting every prosperous spasm has been. Perhaps the most telling — and inexcusable — fact about the Mets is this: only twice in their history have they qualified for the postseason in back-to-back years. That was bad enough when they had a string of teams good enough to finish in first place.
But 2023 will mark the 30th year of the wild card (even if, in its first year of 1994, there were no playoffs due to a player strike). And in all of those 61 seasons, they have been postseason returnees exactly twice: in 2000 and in 2016. That’s it. That’s all. That’s almost so hard to believe that you may think you have to look it up, so go ahead. Look it up.
Amazin’, right?
And so that is the first order of business for these 2023 Mets. Get in the playoffs. Finish first. Finish third. Win 95 games or 90 games or 87 (which is what it took for the Phillies last year) or 86 (which is what it took for the Blue Jays in the American League).
What was it that Woody Allen once said? “Eighty percent of success in life is just showing up”? The Mets have to show up this year. They have to show up in October this year. They have to prove — to themselves, to their fans, to baseball — that they will not channel their forebears, that success will not be an outlier in Queens, a happy accident.
A minority of Mets fans still like to wear the cloak of “Little Engine That Could.”
Most of them — more every day — have grown weary of that persona, or of the perpetual-little-brother-to-the-Yankees guise. Maybe that was cute in 1969 and ’73. Maybe it was necessary under the years of Wilpon Austerity.
But now? When they are owned by the richest man in professional sports, who is many things but will never be accused of being shy about his ambitions for his baseball team? With the biggest payroll in the history of the sport — by tens of millions of dollars?
With a team that — despite the bad taste it left in its fans’ mouths by how it ended — still won 101 games last year, second-most in team history?
Yeah. From now on, there is no celebrating the Little Engine That Could. They are now the Steaming Locomotive That Should.
They are a team with multiple All-Stars, with two legit MVP candidates in Pete Alonso and Francisco Lindor, with two legit Cy Young possibilities in Justin Verlander and Max Scherzer, with the NL’s defending batting champ in Jeff McNeil, and a quartet of kids at Syracuse who’ll be summoned to Citi Field the moment any of the players for whom they’re presently serving as understudies requires a fill-in or a replacement.
They don’t have Edwin Diaz, it is true, and that could bite them in October. But we’ll deal with October in October. And the truth is, if losing a closer is what costs you the playoffs, you probably weren’t a playoff team to begin with.
The Mets are a playoff team — or had better be one. Success is supposed to be an expectation now. You take enough October swings, eventually you’ll connect. For the Mets, too often, those October swings have happened on golf courses. That has to change before anything else can.
