The New York Mets managed to place collectively an ideal season final 12 months, regardless of failing to win the World Sequence. This ought to be unattainable — a title looks like a prerequisite for perfection — and for some other franchise, for some other fan base, it might be. However once you root for a group that’s gained simply two championships in its 63-year historical past, and none since 1986 — a group well-known not only for shedding however for shedding with cartoonish aptitude and bottomless invention — you study to be slightly versatile.
For Mets followers, 2024 supplied an unfamiliar mixture: a sense of accomplishment not like something we’ve skilled in many years (that’s simple — very low bar) and the entire absence of accompanying anguish (that’s a lot, a lot tougher). Sure, the Mets wound up getting brushed apart by the stacked Los Angeles Dodgers on that group’s march towards its personal championship, however a vital a part of what made 2024 so magical is what didn’t occur to the Mets alongside the best way. There was no epic collapse or humiliating blunder, no scapegoats, no lingering resentments. The Mets had a loopy run of historic moments that I’ll be rewatching on YouTube for the remainder of my life, after which we simply acquired beat by a greater group.
Then, in some way, the temper acquired even higher. In December, Steve Cohen, the group’s billionaire proprietor, tempted the low season’s marquee famous person, Juan Soto, into ditching the Yankees, our hated crosstown rivals. Then, for good measure, Uncle Steve splurged and introduced again Pete “The Polar Bear” Alonso, a fan favourite. Mr. Cohen and his entrance workplace deftly navigated two wildly totally different contract negotiations — a leaguewide bidding battle for a generational participant and a clumsy staredown over a homegrown hero — and got here away winners each occasions. Pause on that for a second: Mets followers can really belief the Mets entrance workplace to make smart moves! It’s no marvel that, three months into 2025 with spring coaching in full bloom and a brand new season practically upon us, Mets followers are floating on air.
And that’s the place our troubles start.
A well-liked false impression is that the Mets are irredeemably, unremittingly unhealthy, however that’s not true. (You’re considering of the Pirates.) What separates the Mets from atypical run-of-the-mill losers is the group’s lengthy, albeit sporadic, historical past of profitable each bit as theatrically as they lose, relationship all the best way to the so-called Miracle Mets who improbably gained the World Sequence in 1969. 4 years in the past, I wrote a historical past of the Mets advised by means of the prism of the one factor our pricey franchise has all the time finished higher than everybody else: shedding, in ever extra imaginative and excruciating vogue. As a result of with our group, you really by no means know. You solely most likely know.
Now I discover myself heading into this baseball season grappling with what appears like an existential dilemma. What if the Mets have immediately emerged as one thing they’ve by no means been earlier than — a reliable, well-run group, stocked with sufficient assets to compete with any group in baseball? What if — and sure, I do know what I’m tempting right here, maybe even guaranteeing, by placing these phrases out into the world — the Mets are literally good now? I’m undecided tips on how to be a Mets fan if the Mets are now not the Mets.
Fortunately I additionally imagine, within the grander sports-as-metaphor-for-life kind of manner, that my Metsian prism on the world is essentially the right one. Which is to say, we’re all losers more often than not. We’re all slightly Metsy a few of the time. We might have success, sure, however we will’t fully keep away from failure and the earlier we embrace it, the happier we’ll be. There’s a cause so many Mets followers, myself included, stay delusionally optimistic in spite of everything these years, regardless of all of the horrors we’ve seen and the LOLs we’ve endured. The highs are excessive, and the lows are low, and regardless of how excessive issues get we imagine with non secular fervor {that a} new low is simply across the nook. But additionally, proper behind that, probably one other excessive. It’s not a horrible solution to undergo life.
Perhaps that is merely self-sabotage. I do know from in depth conversations with Yankees followers that they very a lot imagine this can be a loser’s mentality, that we’re in some way manifesting a disappointing ending.
Truthful sufficient, but it surely’s been a minute for the Yankees, too, and their followers are tortured about it. Mere minutes after the Mets formally poached Mr. Soto, an outdated pal who’s a Yankees fan bombarded me with a string of indignant, nasty texts, going into full-scale meltdown mode. I savored each letter of it. I screened-shotted the texts to avoid wasting and share. Throughout a February podcast interview with David Stearns, the Mets’ new, endearingly competent president of baseball operations, the journalist and lifelong Yankee fan Pablo Torre confessed that he was “jealous” of the Mets. Jealous! For a long-suffering fan like me, the admission was intoxicating but in addition deeply unsettling. I fear that that is how we begin turning into what we hate most — the humorless bully who takes success as a given and pouts the second something goes improper.
The Yankees made the World Sequence final fall — they’d, objectively, a greater season than the Mets — but each Yankees fan I do know was depressing all the season whereas Mets followers had the time of our lives. The arrival of Mr. Soto in Queens calls for a change in our metric for achievement — you don’t spend practically a billion {dollars} on one participant only for sunny vibes, you do it to win a World Sequence — however that doesn’t imply the Mets need to essentially change. Ultimately, I’d relatively lose like us than attempt to win like the opposite guys. Being a Mets fan has all the time seemed like extra enjoyable as a result of, whereas additionally undeniably torturous, it’s extra enjoyable. I’m not about to let slightly factor like profitable break that.
Devin Gordon is the creator of “So Many Methods to Lose: The Amazin’ True Story of the New York Mets — the Greatest Worst Group in Sports activities.”
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