Mike's Mets - Lowered Expectations, Part Deux

 

By Mike Steffanos

A November parade is quite unlikely, but I'm oddly excited about the upcoming New York Mets season.

I was pretty confident in the Mets' chances heading into last season. While nothing is certain in baseball, I thought they were as close as it gets to a sure thing for making the playoffs. And that would have been a big deal. As I pointed out in a post that I wrote a year ago, the Mets have only made the playoffs in consecutive years twice in their entire history: 1999 and 2000 under Bobby Valentine, and 2015 and 2016 with Terry Collins running the show. And that 2016 appearance was a one-and-done Wild Card game ouster.

The last time the Mets came up short on repeating playoff appearances was in 2007. It took a rather epic September collapse to put that failure in the books. They went 5-12 over their last 17 games, which felt even worse than that, as it included a 3-game winning streak in Florida early on. I still vividly remember watching Tom Glavine's atrocious performance in his last game as a Met on the season's final day. While Glavine somewhat infamously characterized himself as "not devastated" after that game, I honestly don't think I've ever had a lower point in more than a half century of Mets fandom.

If the relative suddenness of the collapse characterized the 2007 season, 2023 was more of a slow, season-long descent to Palookaville. That Mets club managed to parlay a record payroll into a 75-87 record. While the trade deadline figured into that disappointing number, the Mets were 50-55 when Justin Verlander won his final game as a Met just before being traded back to Houston. The Mets slipped below .500 for the last time in early June in Atlanta. After that, it was confounding how poorly they managed to play against mediocre or even just plain bad opposition.

I wrote about the way the season was going last June, in a piece titled "Lowered Expectations." The title came from a recurring sketch that ran on the MAD TV show that ran on FOX from 1995 to 2009. The premise was a series of commercials for a dating service for "chronically rejected singles" who were "desirably impaired." Basically, the singles in these ads had given up on dreams of Mr. or Ms. Right and were just searching for someone with a pulse. I always thought that the concept was a perfect metaphor for Mets fans, who often found themselves vaguely hoping for a decent season rather than dreaming of a triumphal campaign. "Just don't embarrass me" is not the rally cry for fans of a top-notch franchise.

What happened to the Mets in 2023 wasn't nearly as traumatic as the 2007 collapse, but it will still go down as one of my least favorite New York Mets seasons. Steve Cohen invested $340 million into that club in an effort to keep the good times going from 2022. Instead, we spent a season watching a team that wasn't bad in some sort of perversely fascinating way, like the 1992 Mets were three decades previously. My memories of last season was watching a club that was frequently quite boring to watch as they meekly went down to defeat — as uncompelling as watching paint dry.

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