Mike's Mets - Why We're Not Writing a Season Prediction Piece

 

By Mike Steffanos

We're not in the prediction game at Mike's Mets, but we are looking forward to a fascinating — and likely pivotal — 2024 season.

I'm not into writing preview posts full of predictions for an upcoming season. I did them for a while on the previous version of this blog, which ran from 2005-2009. I didn't like making predictions even then, but I felt I had to. The local papers and many other blogs covering the Mets all did them. I guess I thought it was part of the "job" of covering a team. Eventually, it finally dawned on me that there was nothing that I had to do as long as I wasn't receiving a paycheck. These days, I only write about things that matter to me, and I find that I do a much better job sticking to that philosophy for myself and my readers.

My feelings aside, it won't be long before bold predictions for the fate of the 2024 Mets start appearing. We're only two weeks away from baseball that counts. With all due respect to the efforts of the many excellent writers producing them for their respective publications, in addition to avoiding composing my own forecast piece, I won't be reading your predictions, either. They're all formulaic and usually completely erroneous. It's essentially the baseball equivalent of handing money to a fortune teller and expecting anything of value in return. If you were to save a bunch of these to read after the season, it would be shocking how wrong they all turn out. That's not the writer's fault. Nobody can foresee a fraction of the twists and turns a long MLB season will take.

Don't get me wrong. In some past seasons, it was easy to successfully prognosticate where the Mets would end up in the fall, at least as far as their win-loss totals. The teams were so bad that there was no way they would avoid losing around 90 games, skulking around the bottom of the NL East standings all season. It got more challenging when the team looked pretty good — a couple of injuries or underperformance could cost that club in the standings, particularly when the Mets broke camp with little depth to overcome those challenges.

Even some of the best Mets teams could be undermined by an avalanche of misfortune. The 1987 Mets were clearly still the class of MLB, but Dwight Gooden tested positive for cocaine before the season even started, and then injuries to key players piled up. The Mets watched the playoffs at home in those pre-Wild Card days. Then they made it back to the playoffs the following season, only to lose to an inferior Dodgers team in the NLDS. Such is baseball.

Although I avoid predictions, I can confidently state that the 2024 Mets are unlikely to end up either God-awful or the class of the NL. They could conceivably have a great year if a celestial being sprinkled the same stardust upon them that landed on the 2021 San Francisco Giants, who won 107 games after enduring four consecutive losing seasons. Quite unlikely, of course, and I wouldn't want the Mets to emulate those Giants, anyway. They fell back to earth in 2022 and 2023, with 81- and 79-win campaigns, respectively.

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