Mike's Mets - The Relentless Road Forward

By Mike Steffanos

The Mets are undeniably down after falling in Atlanta, but the future is much brighter than it currently seems.

When the Mets dropped Sunday night's finale in Atlanta, a friend of mine who is a Mets fan sent me a two-word text, "it's over." I wanted to answer back at some length but, not feeling particularly eloquent at that moment, I replied, "not even close," and promised to elaborate further when I finished bandaging my feelings. Well, it took a couple of days, but here are some thoughts on why the club's face plant in Atlanta signified the end of nothing more than the club's chances to grab a rare NL East title.

Look, it sucked that the Mets put up such a lame effort to hold onto their division lead over the weekend. Any attempts to sugarcoat that would be ludicrous. I wouldn't waste anyone's time in that manner. I haven't been this disappointed with a Mets ball club in a long time. I honestly wasn't as disappointed with the 2015 Mets when they lost the World Series, because they had clearly overachieved to get there. Not that the Mets put up a particularly epic fight against the Royals in that series, but at least they made a bit of noise before heading off into the good night.

Sunday night after the game ended was a time of deep misery. It seems almost incalculably cruel to watch your team get meekly swept in their most important series in years and be forced to watch that happen on ESPN's garbage telecast and have it be against the Braves and have it happen in Atlanta. And I'm not here to gloss over any of that. However, nothing at all ended on Sunday night beyond realistic hopes of winning the division.

In my opinion, one of the truly hopeless days in my entire 50+ years of following the Mets happened 14 years ago, on September 28, 2008. It was the final year of Shea Stadium. In the final game, the Mets, for the second year in a row, lost to an awful Marlins team to complete a consecutive September collapse to the Phillies. That wasn't only the end for creaky, smelly, yet still wonderful Shea. It was the end of a short-lived era of success for the club.

GM Omar Minaya had inherited a bad club in 2005 and had somehow convinced Pedro Martínez and Carlos Beltrán to join young stars José Reyes and David Wright as the foundation for the 2006 Mets division winner. It made for a wonderful 2006 season that ended a hair's width away from the World Series.

But what Minaya failed to do was to build any infrastructure for success. The farm system was barely productive. The pitching staff was jerry-rigged together with baling wire and Bondo. What happened in 2007 and 2008 was the consequence of that failure. Moreover, as I was stewing away on that long-ago Sunday afternoon and evening, I knew beyond doubt that another brief, happy interlude in the ongoing disaster of the Wilpon Mets had come to an inevitable end. 

A couple of months later, on December 8, Bernie Madoff was taken into custody by the FBI. The Mets wouldn't even operate as a large-market club for more than a decade until the Wilpons were finally forced to sell.

The fleeting feeling of hopelessness I felt on Sunday night after the final out was nothing compared to the darkness of 14 years earlier. And, oddly enough, reflecting on that eventually lifted my spirits a bit. As brutal as that series turned out, it didn't end anything for this Mets club.

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