Why Not the New York Mets?

Getty Images/AP Images/Ringer illustration Alonso. Lindor. Grimace. The magical Mets have come so far, and they could keep going. Of all the little quirks and enormous moments that have defined the past few months for the New York Mets—the comeback at-bats and the lucky pumpkin; the McDonaldland mascots on the 7 train and that oddball, end-of-September doubleheader—one of the more classic details is that the team has a closer who is absolutely terrified to celebrate. Last Thursday, after Pete Alonso's go-ahead three-run homer in the top of the ninth lifted the Mets over Milwaukee to win the wild-card round, hurler Edwin Díaz demonstrated his postgame excitement by … treading lightly around the periphery of his teammates' bouncing dogpile and occasionally kinda swinging his arms. And Wednesday night, when Díaz struck out the Phillies' mighty Kyle Schwarber to wriggle his way out of a jam of his own making and clinch the Mets' NLDS win over Philadelphia in four games, he didn't jump up and down on the mound or get mobbed by the collective heft of his teammates, the way most happy closers do. No, Díaz kept his feet on the ground, prioritized his personal space, accepted a few deliberately gentle hugs from his bullpen colleagues, and redirected most of the rowdy hordes heading toward him to go envelop shortstop Francisco Lindor in love instead. notice how diaz waves everyone off from jumping on him celebrating the win, but then everyone just goes in for a calm big group hug. I love this wonderful team pic.twitter.com/W4ouSMdjt3— NYC italian baseball himbo (@mets_or_die) October 10, 2024 This wasn't your typical October baseball victory tableau. It was way, way cooler than that, a candid snapshot that captured both where these Mets have come from and where this team could maybe, possibly, magically go. As Díaz strode serenely off the mound, shooing his teammates elsewhere, I flashed back to that time, a year and a half earlier, when he tore his patellar tendon celebrating a Team Puerto Rico win at the World Baseball Classic and missed the entirety of the 2023 Mets season. That had been a painfully absurd situation, one that felt cooked up in some sicko lab to stoke all the worst doomer instincts of Mets fans. And Wednesday's Game 4 felt a lot like the antidote—an equally powerful, equally banana-flavored shot of pure "wow, wow, wowowow," as Alonso would later put it. As I watched the Amazins surround a tearful Lindor out near second base, hugging and hopping with dangerous joy, gone was the old woe-is-me gloom, having been replaced with a frisson of Why not us? I also flashed back to that time, a few innings earlier, when Lindor tore through the baseball and crushed a series-winning grand slam. And to that other time, a week and a half ago, when he ripped a one-out, two-run, ninth-inning dinger on the last day of the 2024 regular season to beat the Braves 8-7 and eke the Mets into the playoffs. Then I kept going, running the tape all the way back to Lindor's unexpected and expensive and exciting arrival in Flushing in 2021. "I'm just gonna walk in and say hello and smile," he said then, "and let them know: I'm not here to be your leader. I'm here to contribute to the great things you guys have right now." "Great things" isn't quite how one would describe the recent history of the franchise, either before or after Lindor arrived. The Mets cycled through multiple managers and executives, beginning this season with another fresh round of new hires in both roles. Until last week, the Mets had won one (1) playoff game in the past eight seasons, a real pity for a franchise that, for much of that time, boasted primo Noah Syndergaard and Jacob deGrom. Sometimes, when I meditate, I visualize my fleeting thoughts not as clouds passing through the sky or people riding escalators but as Max Scherzer's and Justin Verlander's ephemeral Mets careers. This season, ace Kodai Senga suffered one long injury after the next. Lindor, who is making $34.1 million a season through 2031, fell below the Mendoza Line this May during one particularly brutal 0-for-17 batting funk. By mid-June, the Mets were 17.5 games behind the division-leading Phillies. The franchise's cherished Polar Bear was the subject of reluctant, albeit practical, should-we-trade-him discourse. Owner Steve Cohen, once a terminally online big talker with some real pep in his step, deteriorated before our eyes into a radio-silent husk of a Twitter account that popped up ever so occasionally to say grim things like: "What a stretch , mind boggling .I know how disheartening this is for our fans.Ty for caring so much." And even in the final days of the regular season, with the Mets somehow in control of their own destiny thanks to some late-summer surges—from June 1 on, they posted baseball's best record—it felt as though they'd once again find a way to seize defeat from the jaws of victory. Instead, Lindor hit that two-run homer against the dreaded Braves on September 30 to end the misery and make the playoffs and clean the slate. A few days later, during the wild-card round's Game 3 rubber match, I sat at my kids' soccer practice scowling at my phone, certain that Alonso—who was at the plate in the top of the ninth with the Mets down two, runners on the corners, and one out—was about to ground into a double play and end the season right then and there. No disrespect intended, Pete—this was way more about me than it was about you. (OK, actually, Pete, it was about you too.) Instead, the slugger hit a 367-foot go-ahead shot that brought both Lindor and Brandon Nimmo home, caused me to make noises that frightened several children at the soccer fields, and helped the Mets advance to the NLDS for the first time since 2015. I remember that 2015 Mets team deep in my bones, in part because I was heavily pregnant with my first kid that fall and my bones always ached. (That baby is now somehow almost 9 years old.) But also because it was one of the most delightful playoff romps I've ever known as a fan, the kind of experience that embeds itself into your DNA forevermore and is activated each October by the crunch of the leaves. (A Céspedes Festivus, if you will.) Much like this year's squad, those 2015 Mets had seemed pretty cooked by the time summer kicked into gear. But then the tears of Wilmer Flores fell on a magical grass seed, and it sprouted into a beanstalk, and the team climbed all the way to the land of the World Series, and everything was coming up Metsies until Matt Harvey convinced Terry Collins to let him pitch a ninth inning and was promptly eaten by a passing dragon. (This is canon.) Last Monday, during that already-legendary doubleheader against the Braves, I was reminded of that lore. Díaz had entered the game with a 6-3 Mets lead, but by the time the eighth inning ended, he had given up four runs. After Lindor's go-ahead homer saved his bacon, Díaz surprisingly went back out for the bottom of the ninth. Later, after the Mets pulled out the victory, The Athletic's Tim Britton reported that Díaz had insisted he return, telling manager Carlos Mendoza: "I'm going back out. I don't care what you say, I'm going back out. I got this shit." So he did, and he did, and while I certainly wouldn't go so far as to say the game's result slew that 2015 dragon, it felt good to poke the cruel beast in the eye for a change. Something weird happened to me on Wednesday night when Lindor stepped up to the plate with the Mets trailing and the bases loaded. Once again, I was on the youth soccer sidelines with YouTube TV on my iPhone. Already, the Mets had stranded umpteen runners and were on the wrong side of a 1-0 score. The idea of returning to a hostile Citizens Bank Park in Philly for a winner-take-all Game 5 on Friday night was genuinely stomach turning—I feel a queasy twinge even typing those words. And yet the first thing that ran through my mind wasn't the usual preemptive despair about how a Mets player was about to fuck things up someway, somehow. Instead, I simply thought: Dude, he's gonna do it. Strangest sensation ever! Especially when Lindor then went ahead and did it indeed, making perfect contact and sending all of Citi Field into total oblivion along with that grandly slammed ball. (I'll admit to being far less confident about what would ensue once Díaz walked a pair of Phillies in the ninth to bring the tying run to the plate, but ultimately he did it too.) As the Mets were taking NLDS Game 4 at home, another beloved team of mine, the New York Rangers, was busy winning its season opener 6-0 on the road. The sweet start to a new Blueshirts season brought to mind the bitter way their last one ended: with a playoff run that was all whimsical and blessed by the hockey gods until the day it really, really wasn't. When the Rangers trailed 3-1 in the third period of a second-round Game 6 and then Chris Kreider scored a goal, and then another, and then another to win the game and send them off to an Eastern Conference final? Man, it felt downright preordained that the team would win a Stanley Cup after that. But, whoops, they never even made it to the final. But as the great Tug McGraw used to say, Ya gotta believe! Right? Well, kinda: After that iconic catchphrase was coined half a century ago, the Mets went on to lose the 1973 World Series in seven. Nothing is promised, and nothing is easy, and if the Mets even want to have a chance to compete for a title, they'll have to get past a stacked Southern California team led by a young, generational superstar. Exactly which team that is—the Los Angeles Dodgers or the San Diego Padres—is still to be determined, but either way, the Mets will be underdogs again. The road only gets steeper from here, but the views have been incredible so far. I've watched Mark Vientos establish himself in the majors this season after several years of toiling in the minors—and come alive when it mattered most, racking up one high-leverage RBI after another. I've observed Jesse Winker yap and vibe and gleam and zag and seen Starling Marte shine. I've worked diligently to develop and maintain an up-to-date, bird's-eye schematic of the messy tangle of talismans and inside jokes and acronyms and types of barnyard produce that have come to represent this season—like the OMG sign that has changed at least one life (even if those midgame photo ops really seem to tempt fate!), or the public transit king Grimace, or that perky pumpkin Polar Peter picked. I've rubbed my eyes in disbelief at the sight of Uncle Stevie in ski goggles, covered in champagne, and I've blinked back tears as the Mets' longest-tenured homegrown player, Nimmo, stood in the clubhouse and reflected, for the better part of four straight minutes, on his career in Queens. Nimmo recounted to broadcaster Steve Gelbs that when he was called up in 2016, he thought, "'Oh man, this is gonna be great, we're gonna be in the playoffs every single year.' And then you realize how hard it is to get here and to win here." Multiple rosters that were supposed to be really great turned out to not even be pretty good. And then this squad, one that spent months giving people very little to believe in, wound up accomplishing one thing after another in a manner that feels like make-believe. "If you were to write down, or put in a movie, what's happened in the last 10 days, let alone this season," Nimmo continued, "you would say: 'No, that's not possible. That's fiction, and it's just not possible.' But it's real life. It's happening right now." All anyone can do is hurl the ball and swing the bat and be ready to grab that beanstalk and hang on tight whenever—if ever—the magic finally kicks in. "I was just trying to get a good pitch to hit and bring one run in, and it worked out that it went over the fence," Lindor said on Wednesday night. "I wasn't trying to be the guy. I was just trying to continue the momentum that the guys had." OMG, these Mets! Not only does this beautiful bunch of humble chuckleheads have a closer who's hesitant to celebrate but they also feature an All-Star leadoff hitter who, having just delivered one of the grandest slams in the whole history of the franchise, is out there insisting that, actually, he'd been attempting to do less. It's hard to ask for more than that. Kodai Senga's reaction to the Lindor grand slam pic.twitter.com/0iZXgG1VMO— SNY Mets (@SNY_Mets) October 10, 2024 After the win, a reporter asked Lindor why on earth he'd looked so chill as he rounded the bases after his four-run homer, with nary a bat flip or demonstrative gallop in sight. "The place is going nuts," he explained. "I don't need to go nuts. We gotta finish the job, and the job wasn't finished at that moment." They may have clinched another series, but the Mets' 2024 silly season remains an open item, an unfinished job. Still, this is a team that's been playing with house money for months now. So all this work? No matter what, it's progress.

Why Not the New York Mets?

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