I have spent the better part of my adult life seeing a psychotherapist. Not the same one. I've lived too long for that. One at a time. Sort of a serially monogomous therapy patient. The net effect has been positive. I would have continued but for the fact that my most recent therapist raised his rates an additional 100/hr to a rate I am too embarrassed to share. Needless to say, by 'hour' I mean 40 minutes. At the advice of my accountant, upon arriving for my next appointment, I declared myself 'cured.' and left. I received a bill for the session nonetheless, that I paid in the usual timely fashion, uncertain as to why I was only charged the old rate. Relieved, nonetheless. Sometimes it makes no sense to look for an explanation.
I was substantially better; my therapists each substantial wealthier. Just leave it at that.
Still, inquiring minds always seem to want to know 'why' and, just about as often, 'how?'
Which brings us to the Mets.
All that occurred before the 2026 baseball season began in earnest. As the saying goes, that was then; this is now.
In the interim period between then and now, the Mets have done what none of my lingering bouts with personal demons has been able to do.
They have given me pause about my decision to forego additional therapy -- regardless of cost.
Nevertheless, until I win the lottery,
I am trying to figure out what's eating at me on my own. Maybe we can try together. It's better if we share.
We can agree that the Mets are genuinely unwatchable. Were that what has been gnawing at me, the problem would have been easily fixed. Don't watch. And for the most part, I have remained disciplined. I watch as much as I can bear and then have no difficulty turning away. Watching the Mets is like watching the news. But for the rare breaking news story, I can live without it. I get more than I need reading the post mortems on a regular basis.
But that has not cured whatever it is about this season that has so troubled me. It's not that I have found this season's performance measurably worse than any number of others all of us have had to navigate.
We Mets fans have experienced a lot of disappointing seasons.
There is something distinctively worse about this season: something qualitative, not quantitative
This season is not just disappointing.
It has been genuinely DISTURBING.
Disturbing in what way?
We all have met people or been in situations that are disturbing in the sense of making one feel ill at ease or uncomfortable. That's not what's going on with the Mets.
There are other, deeper and more powerful ways in which situations, events and people can be disturbing -- in particular, morally and epistemically.
Jeffrey Epstein's behavior is morally disturbing in that it is incomprehensible to anyone who is guided by even a bare modicum moral sensibility.
The Mets performance this season is not morally disturbing.
It is, cognitively or epistemically disturbing in that it seems incomprehensible and not subject to ordinary or familiar forms of explanation.
There is literally almost no way of understanding the mechanism by which the team that started the season with so much fanfare and hope has reached this point. Not only has all hope for the season been lost.
If I am reading the behavior of many fans correctly, the team's performance to date has wiped away many dreams we shared of a better, more glorious future, maybe even one in which we became legitimate contenders with the Yankees for the hearts of NY baseball fans.
How, I wonder, could we have gotten from then to now: from a place of so much excitement to one of such dread?
There is a difference between the state of affairs being puzzling and its being disturbing.
Something is puzzling when you have difficulty understanding how it could have come to be as it is, but you can ultimately solve the puzzle by learning new facts or by putting the facts you have together in a way you hadn't thought of before, etc. The resolution of the puzzle may not be immediately apparent, but the problem it presents is tractable. There is an explanation.
In contrast, something is genuinely disturbing when there appears to be no way of explaining how we got to where we are from where we began.
The current state of the Mets would not have been among the plausible and rational predictions any of us would have made when this season began. If an event is not rationally predictable before the fact, how can it be rationally explicable after the fact?
There is no way that anyone would have had good reasons to expect that this is where we would find the Mets come summer, not just in the standings, but on the field, in their listless play, their acceptance of defeat, and in the manager's stoic pose on the dugout steps.
All this is quite disturbing.
There are basically three ways of dealing with the cognitive strain that disturbing events create.
1. You can reject the claim that the current situation is what it appears to be.
2. You can accept that you were wrong about the situation at the outset.
3. You can accept both that both the beginning of the sequence and the current state are as they appeared then and now, and conclude that the current situation simply can't be explained by ordinary means, or that it is simply inexplicable.
1. Most fans who find the current situation fundamentally disturbing adopt the first approach to resolving their cognitive struggle. They deny or redescribe what they are seeing. They simply don't see what the rest of us do.
Tim Hardin aptly identified as the search for 'reasons to believe' that their eyes are lying to them.
These fans look at every series win, however, infrequent, as a reason to believe that the Mets are about to turn the corner, get on a winning streak and find themselves back in the hunt for a playoff spot.
Need a few examples? How about the enthusiasm after the Sunday victory over the Yankees that led to the series win? As hope builds and then fades it is replaced by all manner of alternative beliefs. So, upon seeing him hit .300, the fan base, persuaded that we are literally just a few days away from a massive turnaround, anoints Jared Young as the savior at !B. Sample size be damned. The inevitable decline in performance, once anointed, be damned. Or, just move on.
Those demanding more before seeing the light come to see that the key to success in the long awaited return to the lineup of Lindor and Polanco.
Some demanding even more are waiting for the arrival of vintage Senga. A fool's errand I venture, as it is more likely that those waiting for Godot will be rewarded long before the dream of Senga's playing a role in a grand turnaround reaches fruition.
If pitching won't do it, then the fantasy hails Alvarez's providing power sufficient to secure exit velocity! And off we go. Nevermind the obvious power outage we have witnessed from him over the past two seasons.
All of these are 'reasons' are superficially plausible. Self-deception is only possible if the story you feed yourself is at least possibly true. But no putative reason, alone or in conjunction with others, that those who deny that they see what the rest of us do suffices to change what is in fact self deception into prescient insight.
And what about the fact that the minor league affiliates can't hit worth a lick, the the POBO shops constantly in the discarded bin rather than bringing up any of the few players left in the minors who have performed well, e.g. Bae. Don't you feel that the situation is fundamentally dysfunctional?
I don't know if the Mets are a dysfunctional organization, but I am damn sure that they are not a Lindor or a Senga away from being competitive.
Because there are no reasons!
2. Many of us accept as fact that the Mets now are exactly who they have shown us they are. This leads some to adopting the strategy of shifting focus to our views about where the team was before the season began. These fans resolve the conflict by asserting that others were deluded into thinking the Mets had put together an organization and a team that was capable of much more than they have produced.
These fans and commentators will admit that the team has performed worse than expected, given injuries and bad luck, but that their ceiling was always just a few feet -- not miles -- above its floor.
No doubt, some of us who have become pessimistic about the future and distressed by the present, including me, were happily deluded by the team narrative that things would be different starting this year.
That ended with the early season 12 game losing streak. In 12 games, the Mets gave us all the reason to believe that we had been fed a lie as we found a through line from last year's mid-season collapse to this year's April/May performance and called for heads to roll -- not so much to jump start a change -- but to put an end to the bleeding, to give the fans a reason to care about the season.
Though I was among those who followed this path to resolving the cognitive bewilderment that the current team has provided in spades, if I am being honest, I did not lose my faith in the organization or the FO.
I thought we could fire the manager and end the listlessness. So while I am happy to take credit for seeing (in retrospect to be sure) that the story we were telling ourselves at the end of Spring Training about where the team was bull, I had no idea that things would prove to be as bad as they currently are. I never thought that the entire organization would be under siege, attacked by a cancerous rot that permeates it.
Never. And so for me, I take to credit in seeing the collapse for what it is, earlier than most, because I never saw it for as bad or as encompassing as it may well be.
There may well be those who did. Credit to them. They are no more disturbed now than they were then. They always saw this coming. I did not.
The rest of us are left with few options to resolve our cognitive dilemma of trying to explain the incomprehensible.
3. I don't know anyone who honestly believes that it is a confluence of forces, including some perhaps laying beyond human comprehension -- spells, voodoo, karma, divine intervention or something else -- that explains how the Mets got here, or that there is no point in seeking an explanation because we won't learn anything that will help us avoid it in the future. It's just one of those things. Forget it and move on.
I wish I was one of those who could believe in the mystical or magical, or even in the fates. I am not built that way.
I find that I continue to wonder why my therapist only charged me the prior rate and not the new one, satisfied only that I understood full well why he charged me at all for a session I showed up to but left in apparent haste.
I can't sleep at night because what is happening to the Mets is either incomprehensible or else we have to believe that so many things we thought the Mets were on top of are in fact things that they have botched beyond recognition: from drafting to developing players, to adopting rational organizational strategies, to having the best technology, to having the best and brightest, to making the best trades and the most rational decisions in free agency.
It's almost as if the choice is between accepting that the current situation is incomprehensible or else it can be explained by our having been wrong about just about everything re: the Cohen era: that it's been a lot of myth making but very little in the way of concrete outcomes.
Me, I don't want to accept either of those alternative.
Instead I am left with the Mets as a constant source of distress in my day. Too often, I find too much of my day to day experiences interrupted and colored by my inability to understand how the Mets could have found themselves where they are.
Even though I don't believe they will find their way to contending for a playoff birth this year:
* I want to believe that they will approach the the trade deadline with a strategy that makes sense and that they can execute on.
But what reason have they given me to believe that?
* I want to believe that they know what they are doing in developing players.
But I do know something about movement patterns and biomechanics of ballistic sports, and I don't see any evidence at either the major or minor league level that the coaches do either.
* I want to believe that the coaches are up to date on the neuroscience of learning movement patterns, that they know that coaching is a joint activity and that there really are better ways of approaching it than others, better ways of making players better.
But I look around and I don't see much reason to believe that they've got any of this under control.
* I am looking for anything to believe in, other than myths and the magical.
As Graham Parker put it, "I keep on searchin for Fool's Gold'
Cause there are no reasons!
Conclusion
I am reminded of what the great early 20th century philosopher, Bertrand Russell, who was the most renowned atheist of his time said when asked what he would say to God upon his death if he should find himself welcomed beyond the Pearly Gates. Russell said in effect (as I paraphrase him) "I would say to God that this is quite a surprise location in which I seem to have found myself, but you'll have to excuse me for the fact is that I found no evidence whatsoever that would give me reason to believe that you or Heaven existed. Then go on my merry way."
And that is the very much the disturbing position I find myself in these days.
Because there are no reasons, and yet, here we are.
What about you?
