The Mets: Joy, misery, company and the most dependable team around
On Major League Baseball’s most perfectly human team's perfect summer
There’s an old saying about two similar-sounding Yiddish words with related meanings:
What’s the difference between a schlemiel and a schlimazel? A schlemiel is a person who always spills their soup. A schlimazel is the person it always lands on.
At all times, both people are New York Mets fans.
The Mets entered this season, their 63rd of existence, a team in transition. They had a new president of baseball operations and a new manager leading an old core that was the backbone of the 101-win squad from two seasons ago. But without true depth or top-end pitching to be a serious contender, they lacked the weight of expectation from years past.
“We should be competing for a playoff spot,” David Stearns said in January stating a modest and, at the time, ambitious goal for his first season as the new president.
“We expect to compete for a playoff spot and have exciting baseball at Citi Field in September and October,” he said in February. “Success can be defined in a lot of different ways, but certainly our expectations going into the season is that we’re gonna have a quality team that wins games and is a competitive, playoff-caliber team.”
Projections gave them less than a 50 percent chance of making the playoffs and finishing with around 84 wins, an improvement on the 75-win disaster from the year before, but, a ho-hum six-month slog seemed to lay before Major League Baseball’s most expensive roster (at nearly $360 million) thanks to the solid core and the ghosts of failed free agent signings of the past still haunting the deep-pocketed owner’s books.
The mood was dampened at the end of spring training. A worrying-sounding shoulder injury meant the pitching staff’s ace would miss the start of the season and with no contract extension for the team’s best homegrown player, a bad start could lead to him being dealt at the trade deadline.
The Mets entered baseball in 1962 and were heralded for bringing the National League back to the city after a three-summer absence. The roster was cobbled together with pieces picked off the scrap heap of the other 18 organizations and led by 72-year-old Casey Stengel in his 22nd season as a big league manager.
That year, they set a record for futility with just 40 wins and 120 losses.
“You look up and down the bench and you have to say to yourself, ‘Can’t anybody here play this game?’” Stengel said.
As the Mets lost game after game, Jimmy Breslin wrote that a line was repeated all over town: “I’ve been a Mets fan all my life.”
“Nearly everybody was saying it by mid-June. And nearly everybody had a good reason for saying it,” he wrote:
“You see, the Mets are losers, just like nearly everybody else in life. This is a team for the cab driver who gets held up and the guy who loses out on a promotion because he didn't maneuver himself to lunch with the boss enough. It is the team for every guy who has to get out of bed in the morning and go to work for short money on a job he does not like. And it is the team for every woman who looks up ten years later and sees her husband eating dinner in a T-shirt and wonders how the hell she ever let this guy talk her into getting married. The Yankees? Who does well enough to root for them, Laurance Rockefeller?”
The Mets opened the season with nine straight defeats and had losing runs of 17 games in late May and 13 in August. They were outscored 948 runs to 617 that year and set low-water marks for wild pitches (71), hits allowed (1,577,) earned runs allowed (801), and errors (210).
The Mets lost on Opening Day this year. They would lose their next four, too.
“Nobody in the ballpark. 0-5. Hitless through seven. It feels like rock bottom,” announce Gary Cohen said in the top of the eighth inning of the sixth game.
But in the ninth inning that day, Pete Alonso would homer and Tyrone Taylor drove in the winning run to earn the first win.
The turnaround didn’t materialize after as they scuffled through the opening weeks – with poor offense and a bullpen constantly on the fritz - before falling to 22-33 by late May in a game that saw relief pitcher Jorge Lopez ejected before he threw his glove into the stands. He was released the following day.
After that game, Francisco Lindor led a team meeting. In the next game, the shortstop – who started the season horribly before being moved to the leadoff spot by first-year skipper Carlos Mendoza – went 4-for-4 with a home run and two RBI in a 3-2 win.
“Not only [did] they get together and said a lot of things, they went out there today and showed it,” Mendoza said, adding of Lindor, “Pretty impressive. And it says a lot [about] who he is and how much he wants it for this team.”
The victory was the first in a series of in retrospect ‘defining’ moments. Along the way, a journeyman second baseman named Jose Iglesias was called up, played well, released a song, and became a pop star. A back-up catcher traded for just weeks earlier turned an improbable 2-3 double play to seal a one-run win in London. And a McDonald’s character threw out the first pitch on a night that began a seven-game winning streak.
The Mets – carried by good vibes and strong starting pitching – went 67-40 after the team meeting, clinching a postseason berth on the day after the rest of baseball finished the regular season in the first game of a doubleheader in Atlanta; a game in which the Mets trailed 3-0 after seven innings and, after taking a 6-3 lead in the eighth, were down a run in the top of the ninth before Lindor – in the lineup after missing two weeks with a back injury – hit a two-run home run.
“In April… I had those moments as well, I just didn’t come through,” Lindor said in September. “And right now, I’m coming through. This is baseball, it’s a wave. I’m in a good wave right now, just ride it as long as I can.”
In the Wild Card Series in Milwaukee, the Mets entered the top of the ninth of the deciding Game 3 down 2-0. With one out, Alonso, powered by a lucky pumpkin he got at a local patch, hit a three-run home run.
The season went on.
Ahead two games to one in the best-of-five Divisional Series, playing at Citi Field for just the second time in three weeks, Lindor hit a grand slam in the sixth to advance past Philadelphia.
“I want to win it all. I want to win it all. And then that's a team that forever be remembered,” Lindor said after the game. “That be a team that comes [back] every 10 years [for anniverseries]. They eat for free everywhere they go. I want to do that. I want to do that. The job is not done.”
The season went on.
In the 160th game this year – 61 years, 11 months, 28 days after the Mets lost 5-1 at Wrigley Field on the final day of their inaugural campaign – the Chicago White Sox lost their 121st game.
“No one wants to be associated with it,” Chicago general manager Chris Getz said in the season’s final week.
“There’s a myriad of reasons why we stand here today with the record that we have,” he said. “Now, with that being said, personally, I view this as a tremendous opportunity to build something.”
Stengel said something similar: “But we’ll do better in 1963. We’ll do better, all right. Just wait and see.”
It took a few years for their fate to improve, though they did better the following year winning 51 and losing only 111. They started a new life at Shea Stadium in Queens the year after. In their eighth year, the Mets had their first winning season, first 100-win season, won the first-ever National League Championship Series, and won their first World Series.
They called the 1969 squad the Miracle Mets.
The National League fans of New York (at least those not formally loyal to the Giants) had to experience the Dodgers, World Series winners two years prior, take a ready-to-win roster and a half dozen future Hall of Famers west for the 1958 season.
The next year, the Dodgers won it all and Los Angeles would win three titles in the first eight seasons, all before the Mets could win 55 games in a single year.
In this year’s Championship Series, the Mets faced those same Dodgers, a team that spent over one billion dollars in contracts to free agents in the offseason. A matchup between the league’s two highest spenders is not some David and Goliath contest, but in terms of who was expected to reach this stage, there was no doubt about who the outsiders were.
Despite splitting the first two games out west, the Mets returned to New York but could only muster one win out of three games in Queens, a blowout to stave off elimination. Reality struck in Game 6 at Chavez Ravine as a complete team flexed their muscles once more.
There was magic, but no miracles. The season ended.
“The Mets did not lose games merely because they played badly. Never,” Breslin wrote. “The Mets lost because they played a brand of baseball which has not been seen in the Big Leagues in over twenty-five years.
“And in doing this they warmed the hearts of baseball fans everywhere. They became, in their first year of existence, almost a national symbol. Name one loyal American who can say that he does not love a team which loses 120 games in one season.”
The New York journalist dedicated his book to the fans of that first season: “To the 922,530 brave souls who paid their way into the Polo Grounds in 1962. Never has so much misery loved so much company.”
For the 12th time in history, the Dodgers and Yankees will meet in the World Series. One fanbase will experience joy, one will not.
But that joy will be more of relief than exaltation. An exhale that they will not hear the howls of rivals after falling short of their win-or-bust goals. There is no way to exceed expectations for the two clubs.
How much joy did the Mets fans experience? Expectations were met and then exceeded before they were exceeded once again.
The Mets and their fans got the full gamut. There was nervous excitement, crushing despair, hope despite every reason for there not to be any, unbridled enthusiasm, marketing ploys, setbacks, singing and dancing, merchandizing, slumps, injuries, more setbacks setting up momentous comebacks, and more unbridled enthusiasm.
And, then, same for all the other teams save one, the season ended with a sour taste. Success was had, but the fairy tale ended without a happy ending. They came up short because that is how life works.
The Mets got to be the clunky, clumsy bungler of the simple who was perhaps too aloof to realize that they didn’t belong being this good and going as far as they did.
The Mets also got to be the unlucky victim of circumstance, with injuries nipping at them and the strain of constantly punching above their weight paying a toll at the end.
The 2024 New York Mets were the schlemiel and the schlimazel just like they’ve always been.
But they were cheered on by the happiest fans in baseball this past year because they were rooting for a team that was true to themselves. And that’s the most we can ever ask anyone to be.
Ben Krimmel is a writer from Baltimore who lives and works in New York.