Mike's Mets - The Sun (and the Mets) Will Rise Again

 

By Mike Steffanos

Don't give into the despair that some pundits wish to inflict on Mets fans. There are tough decisions to be made, but the future is still bright.

The New York Mets' 2022 season came to a disappointing end at Citi Field Sunday night. In their first playoff appearance since 2016, the Mets didn't look much like the club that won 101 games in the regular season. This is too bad. They were an entertaining team to follow this summer, but they will likely be remembered for a couple of consecutive bad weekends in October.

Much of the coverage of the team was harsh and apocalyptic. Ken Rosenthal had a truly terrible piece up in The Athletic about the Mets that surprisingly went up after they won Saturday night's game:

Watching Saturday night's 4-hour, 13-minute slog, the tying run coming to the plate after his team took a 7-2 lead into the ninth inning, Mets owner Steve Cohen can be forgiven if he thought, "What the heck did I get myself into?"

His 101-win team will need to stave off elimination a second time simply for the right to face the Dodgers, the best team in the sport during the regular season. Once the Mets' playoff run ends — and the best guess is it will be sooner rather than later — the task will get even tougher. And the way Cohen reacts to his team's performance in October figures to have major consequences in Queens and beyond.

Three teams were swept out in the playoffs — including the St. Louis Cardinals, which writers like Ken endlessly tout as one of the best orgs in MLB — but none of them received this sort of treatment that the Mets did after winning a game to stay alive in their series. How dare the Mets allow the tying run to come to the plate! Wait, didn't the sacred Cardinals actually blow a ninth-inning lead in their series? I'm just going to share how I reacted to this from a thread on Twitter:

...not even a particularly well-written article filled with doom and gloom. Relentlessly pessimistic about the Mets present and future. It read like porn for folks who don't like the Mets. Not something I would recommend to any Mets fan. And it's not that I believe writers need to be a cheerleader for teams, but I keep asking myself why this was written about a team fighting to win a playoff series. Mets fans have waited 6 years to return to the playoffs, but Rosenthal couldn't wait until they were actually eliminated to put this out...

Once the Mets actually were eliminated Sunday night, Joel Sherman posted his own version of this, titled "Nothing to feel good about anymore as Mets painfully spoil win-now season." You can get the gist of the article from the title, so I'll spare you the rest unless you decide to wallow in a little extra post-season pain. At least Sherman waited for them to be eliminated before piling on the doom and gloom. Frankly, I was feeling pretty crappy after the Mets basically no-showed on Sunday night, but reading this stuff actually brought me back from the edge.

The Mets receiving harshly negative coverage is nothing new. Frankly, they did suck both in their weekend series against the Braves and their Wild Card matchup against the Padres. But, somehow, the pain of having to watch those games wasn't enough for guys like Rosenthal and Sherman, who have to carry that gloom over into the future. Such is the life of a Mets fan, to always get served up an extra dose of negativity.

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