Mike's Mets - The Party Crasher

 

By Mike Steffanos

Please don't show up at someone else's party just to rain on their parade.

If you'll indulge me for a minute, I'd like to start this post by throwing some numbers at you: 1-6, 2-5, 2-4, 0-7, 3-4, 4-3, 2-4, 1-5, 3-4*. Those numbers represent the New York Mets' regular season record against the Los Angeles Dodgers for every season from 2021, going back to when the Dodgers were sold to their current ownership group early in the 2012 season. (They didn't play at all in the 2020 pandemic season.)

Cumulatively, the Mets have only won 18 out of 60 regular season contests with LA over that time period. That's a winning percentage of exactly .300. To put this into perspective, the two worst teams in baseball last season, the Orioles and the Diamondbacks, finished with a .321 winning percentage. On the plus side, the Mets did manage to beat the Dodgers in the 2015 NLDS 3 games to 2, but the Mets' record of futility against LA over those years is starkly awful nonetheless.

I've watched most of those games in that period. Some were blowouts, but many featured a final score that was quite close. Honestly, that's how it felt watching many of those contests — tantalizingly competitive, but almost inevitably ending up as just another "L" in the ledger. Being a Mets fan in the dying years of the Wilpon era was often a challenge, but those games against the Dodgers were often the smelliest turd in the larger sh*t sandwich. They highlighted just how far from being a legit contender the Mets really were.

2022 has been a transformative year for the Mets. Sitting at 85 wins even after the dreadful weekend against the Nats, the Mets have already exceeded their win totals for all but 7 seasons since the year 2000. With 27 games still to play, the Mets should exceed 100 wins for only the fourth time in their existence — last accomplished in 1988 when mullets were still considered cool. They've taken care of business quite well against lesser teams to build up that impressive win total, but they've also fared well against most of the better teams they've played. After splitting 4 games in LA earlier this summer, the Mets won the season series by taking 2 of 3 at home earlier this week — a feat only accomplished once before in the time period cited above, by the 2015 Mets, who made it all the way to the World Series.

Now, no reasonable Mets fan is going to claim that winning one more game than LA "proves" the Mets will be the better team in October. That would be quite silly. Almost as silly as some of the stuff written in the local papers when the Mets lost 4 games to the Astros earlier this summer or those 2 recent contests in the Bronx to the Yankees. Most of us who have followed this game for a while understand that nothing that transpires before October really proves much of anything, except for baseball writers who want to bury your team.

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* Thanks to the indispensable Ultimate Mets Database for being the source of the W-L info cited in the first paragraph.