What is it with the Mets, the Marlins and Game 161s? (Games 161? Anyway.)
I’m generally allergic to tidy narratives, but this one was undeniable: John Maine [1] in 2007, Johan Santana [2] in 2008 … and now Clay Holmes [3] in 2025.
No, Holmes didn’t go all the way. But that’s nitpicking — he’s a converted reliever who’s way beyond his innings allotment, and has looked gassed in recent outings. Saturday night was his best outing as a Met, and the one [4] his team so desperately needed.
And the Mets backed it up in the other phases of the game, unlike innumerable nights during which they’ve failed to take care of one or all aspects of business. Pete Alonso [5] punished Eury Perez [6], Jeff McNeil [7] added key insurance, and the lineup gave Edwin Diaz [8] some space late. The relievers were sharp — Diaz has been particularly effective of late — and the defense was sound. And the Mets looked focused, as opposed to whatever it is they were doing [9] Friday night.
It was a complete game for the team if not for Holmes, made even sweeter by the odd spectacle of some 20,000 Mets fans packing Soilmaster Stadium so that the soundtrack would have made you swear you were at Citi Field.
Now here come the caveats.
With the Mets no longer in control of their destiny, they needed help — which the Brewers, already playoff bound and locked into their seeding, did not provide. (And while things like this don’t motivate teams, I doubt any of the Brewers are too broken up about it, seeing how the Mets wrecked a dream season 11 months ago.) Give the Reds credit too — they’ve been a monster down the stretch.
And all this talk of Game 161 inevitably leads us to the Mets, the Marlins and Game 162s. (Games 162? Anyway.)
2007’s Game 162 saw T@m Glav!ne lay an egg and torch his reputation [10] with Mets fans in the clubhouse scrum, earning the unique formatting his name will bear at Faith and Fear forevermore. (BTW, I vote we retroactively give his 300th win to the Braves, seeing how it’s a milestone nobody here wants to remember or celebrate.) 2008’s Game 162 [11] was handed to Oliver Perez [12], who didn’t pitch badly but wound up on the wrong end of a workaday 4-2 loss that wound up feeling like 40-2. (My lasting memory is of an ashen Howard Johnson [13] enduring the closing ceremonies at Shea [14] before a shocked, mostly silent house.)
No, Game 162s (or is it … oh let’s let this one go) haven’t gone well for us where the Marlins are involved. And, once again, we need help from entities that may prove less than motivated and perhaps even not wholly disinterested.
But that’s where the Mets have put themselves, and us. And at least there’s a last day that matters, a final carousel of desperate wild hopes and superstitions and exhortations and pleas to the baseball gods and everything else brought to the proceedings by us, the fans — who simultaneously care so deeply and can do nothing to affect the outcome of something that means so much to us.
That’s cruel, but it has always been thus.
One more guaranteed day of baseball. What will be will be.