New York Mets fans are a lot. I say this out of total, entirely genuine respect. To be a devoted sports fan is to be irrationally, floating-to-the-moon exuberant when your team is playing well and to be inconsolable and negative to the point of nihilism when it isn’t. It is to believe that your team is worthless and exists solely to break your heart while also understanding that if any nonfan says so much as one negative syllable about them, that person is to be torn apart with unalloyed fury. It is to know that as everything over the decades in one’s life shifts, alters, and eventually fades away, the one constant, the one thing that can never change, is the passion and undying loyalty to your team. It is to understand that your team is, in the end, your family.
No one represents this philosophy more full-throatedly than Mets fans. I’ve been writing about sports for a long time, and I learned pretty quickly which team’s partisans will inspire the most hair-trigger flurry of angry responses. The Mets have forever topped that list. And this is a good thing — a wonderful thing, even. That I rarely hear from Chargers fans, or Rockets fans, or Marlins fans, doesn’t mean those people are somehow nicer or more pleasant than Mets fans; it just means they don’t care as much. (And there aren’t as many of them.) Mets fans care. In spite of everything their team has done to them for nearly 40 years, they forever care.
And I’ll confess, as this baseball season reaches its final fortnight, I am worried for the fans.
The 2024 New York Mets have been one of the happiest stories in the sport, largely because they’ve been so unexpected. Last season’s team was disastrous, even by Mets standards: Boosted by their ambitious hedge-fund owner, Steve Cohen, the 2023 Mets had the highest payroll in baseball history, a jaw-dropping $334 million that included a shocking two-year, $86.7 million contract to pitcher Justin Verlander. Cohen had said when he bought the team in 2020 that he expected a World Series in the next “three to five years,” and, a year after the Mets had won 101 games, they were considered real favorites to do so.
And then they fell on their face. It began with closer (and recent recipient of a $102 million contract) Edwin Diaz tearing his patellar tendon while celebrating a win in the World Baseball Classic and ended with the Mets trading Verlander, firing manager Buck Showalter, winning only 75 games, and establishing themselves as the laughingstock of baseball. Cohen, to his credit, retreated immediately once he realized where the season was going, sending his stars to other teams and even paying their salaries in order to bring back young, more sustainable talent for the future. This was a wise decision, but it sent a clear message: 2024 was probably going to be rough. Max Scherzer, who the Mets traded to the Rangers at the deadline last year, seemed to confirm it, saying their “vision now is for 2025–2026, ’25 at the earliest, more like ’26 … ’24 is now looking to be more of a kind of transitory year.”
But it hasn’t turned out that way at all. They began the season in expected mediocre fashion, but thanks to an influx of young talent — particularly third-baseman Mark Vientos and catcher Francisco Alvarez — some short-term veterans having surprisingly strong seasons, and an MVP-caliber performance shortstop Francisco Lindor (who will never be booed in New York again), the Mets have been an absolute blast for about three months now. They have rocketed up the standings since the All-Star break, lighting up the as–electric–as–any–stadium–in–baseball–when–it’s–full Citi Field on a regular basis. After a walk-off win Monday night, they’re a game up on the hated Braves for the final NL Wild Card spot. Lindor has become a legitimate New York City star, longtime Met (and pending free agent) Pete Alonso is even more beloved than he was before, and Brandon Nimmo has at last received the accolades he has long deserved. Best of all, the Mets have become something a New York team almost never is: a surprising, insurgent underdog story. It’s near impossible not to cheer for them.
And therein lies the problem. If this Mets team belonged to some other franchise, without the history of pain and disappointment forever foisted on its fan base, it could simply be a fun story line: a team no one thought would make it this far that clawed its way into playoff contention. If it were to fall short in that scenario — as the Mets very well might over the next two weeks — it would be a bummer, but relative to preseason expectations, still an overperformance as well as an encouraging sign for the organization moving forward. After all: The Mets have already done an excellent job rebuilding their farm system, with a ton of talent in the pipeline. That “vision for 2025–26” thing that Scherzer was talking about is very much in place and bearing fruit. 2024 would be seen as a positive step forward, no matter what happened.
The problem is that this isn’t some other franchise: It’s the Mets. And if they end up coming this close to a playoff spot without securing one, if they fall short to the Braves of all teams, it will bring up a lot of bad memories. There is 2007, when the Mets led the Phillies by seven games with 17 games to go and coughed away the lead. There is 2008, when the Mets lost on the season’s final day, costing them a playoff spot and leading to the most awkward (and therefore fitting) good-bye to Shea Stadium imaginable. There was two years ago, when the Mets had a seven-game lead on the Braves on August 8 and lost it before falling to the Padres in the Wild Card Series, still the team’s last postseason appearance. There is just about everything that has happened with this franchise since it last won the World Series in 1986, including this forever-haunted photo that ended the 2006 NLCS. (Make sure to get a look at the entire background.)
Donald Trump watches Carlos Beltran strike out looking to end the Met’s 2006 season pic.twitter.com/DKMlu2c7sq
— Baseball In Pics (@baseballinpix) February 10, 2017
(I still can’t believe Melania stayed until the end of that whole game. It was raining pretty hard!)
History weighs on, and looms over, everything the Mets do, even with a team as surprising and spritely as this one. Falling short now will feel like a collapse, even if that’s not a particularly fair way to look at it. And storm clouds already started forming this weekend, when the Mets lost two crushers to the Phillies before rebounding Monday and lost Lindor with a back issue, causing him to miss his first game of the year and leave Sunday’s game after the first inning. (He was replaced by top prospect Luisangel Acuña, who is the brother of Braves star Ronald Acuña Jr. and the guy the Mets got for Scherzer, in another example of paying full freight for future talent.) As usual — again, as they should, this is what fandom is! — Mets fans instantly went from “We’re winning the World Series” to “We’re doomed.” When you’re a Mets fan, you see monsters around every corner.
It is important to remember that if the Mets don’t hang on to the final Wild Card spot, their future still looks bright: Cohen’s strategy of rebuilding the farm system and then spending on big free agents to build around is a smart one and one that’s probably going to work. But you can also forgive the diehards if they say they’ll believe it when they see it. I hope the Mets make the playoffs this year. That’s partly because baseball is always more fun when this team is still in it and Citi Field is going nuts. But mostly it’s because I just want Mets fans to be okay.
