There's no point in disparaging the Mets as if they were the Knicks. They are a promising team and on the way up, though not good to make the playoffs this year and not in the class of Atlanta and L.A. With sound defense, timely though inconsistent hitting, good starting pitching, and several young star players, the Mets have a solid base to work with.
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When is the last time the Mets had a great closer? '86?
Michael -
I've been waiting for your Mets post mortem, which, I believe you delivered last August - in which you said something to the effect that the Wilpons/Mets organization aims for mediocrity.
I guess it's progress if you waited until September this year, with the patient still on life support.
You know you nailed it again when you see the PTSD you've triggered in the reader comments. (Mine is the Beltran 3rd strike in 2006.)
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Fire the Manager! A constant refrain among fans of struggling teams. This might feel like a positive plan of action but it usually masks the real problem. Poor above the field upper management. The Mets have structural issues that will not be solved by whoever is managing the team on the field.
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As you say, structural issues (with ownership) won’t change with the firing of Mickey Callaway. However, their winning percentage will improve if he is let go. He is a terrible in-game manager and has cost this team a half dozen games easily this season. We sure could use those 6 wins right now.
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I honestly believe this franchise, which I've followed as a fan since i was a freshman at Columbia in 1962, is for some reason (mostly I think shallow-pocketed owners and tone-deaf management) the most star-crossed item since R&J. I've resigned myself to the fact that the two WS wins were aberrations and that I will never see them in the post season (let alone WS) again in my rapidly dwindling lifetime.
I hope better for Mr. Powell, but if the Mets are the new Cubbies (minus the "lovability" factor) I'd advise him not to hold his breath.
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Another great piece by Michael Powell who truly feels our pain but with humor. I’d rather laugh than cry and Powell shares that approach to life as a Met fan. Thank you Michael!
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I love your writing and wish we would see more of it in the NYT.
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@Robert Blair
Yes his writing is good when it pertains to actual sport games. He too often tries to get int racial politics to my dismay. Yes, he has every right to do that its just that many sport fans, including me, can read that stuff on the front page of the newspaper. Is it something we all want to read
In sports to? I don’t think so. That’s why you see so few comments written for his articles. Again he does have the right to write whatever he chooses. I have the right to read what i choose.
This writing is as good as I have read in the NYT since Red Smith. What a tremendous piece!
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Wonderfully entertaining read ... this from an Astros fan still dealing with the "Stros loss to the Mets in the legendary '86 NLCS ...
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"Every day a little death" but we Mets fans (this one goes back to Marvelous Marv) keep coming back for more. The sweetness of Cleon, Tug, Jesse, and Endy endures - made all the brighter by their precious scarcity. Still- I can't help but see the inanity of trading top future talent for an aging stag and a young arsonist. Ya gotta believe, or is it relieve, or better yet bereave!
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Bullpen roulette.
That is what teams prefer - believe! - is superior to letting an unsullied pitcher continue because statistics say otherwise.
Imagine if you took a medication even though you were feeling OK - the equivalent of a starter who reached, say, two trips through the lineup.
If the potential illness is the flu, this makes sense.
But what if the potential illness is a headache....and the risk of making an unprompted change is cholera?
Unless and until teams can recognize the risk of inviting trouble - believing their eyes instead of their sabermetric charts - fans of almost all teams are doomed to watch the same thing over and over and over.
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It's amazing, no pun intended, that the Mets have had only 2 owners. I am not discounting Nelson Doubleday who pushed to sign Mike Piazza, and was ultimately pushed out. Thanks to Bud the used car salesman Selig. But I digress.
I still do not understand how you hire a rookie manager known as an excellent pitching coach who has had a combustible bullpen for 2 seasons.
Maybe, we could get lucky that Mickey is fired and the Mets hire a a experienced regular Joe. Girardi and Maddon both fit the description.
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The Mets ownership is among the worst in a city of terrible sports team owners - with the exception of the Yankees of course (note: I am not a Yankee fan). Look at the NY Jets - no Super Bowls since 1970; Islanders - no Stanley cups since the mid 1980s; the Knicks - worst ownership on the NBA by a lot; Nets - one NBA Final I think but have not had a sniff of the finals since then; NY Giants are are on a down slope and a team that has a great history of defense is now terrible on that side of the ball. I don't understand why the Wil-Katz group doesn't sell the Mets. Need I say more!
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I am a life long Dodger fan now living in the Bay area. There is no way that I can understand what lifelong Mets fans are going through.I have to cut the management some slack on the Diaz trade.Diaz was the best reliever in baseball last year. He dominated the American League. His collapse this year makes no sense. If you would have told all the GM's in baseball that Diaz would go from the best to one of the worst over the winter I doubt that you would have received much support for that prediction. I would like to know if there were any baseball pundits who predicted this result when the the trade was made.
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A sobering, if not happy recap. I have a son who feels the same pain. When he was much younger, I wondered sometimes if he could drag himself out of bed the day after another blown lead.
I told him he was free to root for another team, but he wouldn't even consider it. The Mets remain the moral choice in a city of vast disparities. ...And Michael Powell can write.
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That is some top-notch writing! Thank you!
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It has been proven again & again that the most important man on a Baseball team is the General Manager. Epstein is the General Manager of the Dodgers, before that he was the General Manager of the RedSox & they became World Series Champs. Cashman is General Manager of the Yankee’s & they are always competitive, and usually in the Playoffs.
The Mets have an X baseball Agent for General Manager, who has made one blunder after another. His latest fiasco is Diaz & Cano, in which he gave up his most talented minor leaguers.He has a 85 year old pitching coach, what more can i say.Then there’s Caraway, the worst manager in the Majors,who is the most frustrating person in Baseball. There I got it off my chest, but I don’t feel any better. I gave up cigarettes, if I can do that, I should be able to give up the Mets , but I say that every year, but I come back for more. I must be insane, I certainly fit the part.
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As devastating as the loss 2 weeks ago when they couldn't hold the 10-4 lead, it didn't spell an end for the season, as the Mets bounced back with 2 straight wins and stayed in contention since then. Baseball players have to have amnesia after every game and not dwell on losses, as Callaway was properly responding to that game.
There is still a lot of baseball to go, and lots of time for recrimination after the season.
This year's team is like Lucy holding the football for Charlie Brown to kick, then pulling away at the last second. They tease us with hopes and visions of winning, only to rip our hearts out at the end. Does anyone remember Tom Glavine's last Met game?
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It is nice - at least - to have semi-meaningful games this late in September. And I know that has tons of equivocation and relies on the second wildcard, but I was at the game on Saturday with my kids and we were on the edge of our seat and scoreboard-watching throughout the game.
2
I am a New Yorker who grew up a Met's fan but now live in the Pacific Northwest. In order to continue to be an exasperated baseball fan, I have also adopted Seattle Mariners. The parallels between the two teams are striking. Like the Mets, the Mariners have wasted the careers of many great players like Felix Hernandez and Ichiro Suzuki because they could never quite pull all the pieces together. At least the Mets had their World Series run in 2015 but in true form played brilliantly to get there only to implode in a heap of slumps, errors, and bad managerial decisions. But I love it! There is nothing like baseball to make you swoon with joy one moment and fall into a pit of despair the next while keeping you fraught with anxiety the whole time.
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I was a fan of the Mets for ten years before I learned what has become a self-evident dictum: The Mets will always disappoint you. It is to my enormous discredit that I still follow the team ten years after my revelation.
The Wilpons are fortunate to share a city with James Dolan, whose disastrous ownership of professional sports teams overshadows the Wilpons' failures.
Mediocrity finds good company amid incompetence. We live inside a dream.
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At least I enjoyed Zack's pitching!
4
I was a Mets fan from an early age -- celebrating each of their World Series 1969 victories as an elementary student with my friends out on the front lawn of my parents' house.
I shut down my fandom hard in the aftermath of the Madoff years, when it became clear the owners were not going to put any money into the team, or sell. I have never stepped foot in Citifield (even turned down more than a few tickets offered by friends gratis) and at this point find even the idea of spending hours of my day lugging into Queens and back in order to sit through a game.
To those out there who say that "true fans" never give up on "their team," I am Exhibit A that you actually can. If year after year your "team" is making business decisions that result in your being offered a sub-par product, especially in the NY metropolitan area, you can readily find out other ways to spend your entertainment dollars and time.
1
"In walked the bullpen arsonists."
great writing on the team that ALWAYS provides rich material.
4
Apparently, no one on the Mets coaching staff has ever heard of the squeeze bunt. I am so sick of watching one-run losses and extra inning losses in games where the Mets had a runner on third base with fewer than two outs and let the opportunity go up in smoke with a strikeout or an infield ground ball that got the lead runner thrown at the plate.
I'm not convinced major league teams even expect hitters to be able to lay down a successful bunt. That's a skill that has, sadly, disappeared.
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@Boneisha Or, even worse, the refusal to hit-and-run (though technically it should be called run-and-hit, but I digress), taking advantage of the fact that they have some guys who can actually put the bat on the ball (not always well though, it must be admitted) when they focus.
3
As the ad for self storage said a few years ago, New York has seven professional sports teams. And the Mets.
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I am a life long Mets fan who was taken as a child to see the lovable Metsies play at the Polo Grounds. There is no team in baseball which can win games so magically one day and lose so tragically the next. This year we, as fans, have been made to feel like Pavlov's dogs - a bone has been held out to us and we are about to salivate and then it's held back all in a split second.
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