“This summer, the Mets suffered so many difficult, late defeats in close games that no one on the team, surely, could have escaped the chilling interior doubt — the doubt that kills — whispering that their courage and brilliance last summer had been an illusion all the time, had been nothing but luck.”
—Roger Angell, in the wake of the 1970 season
The New York Mets have achieved baseball’s state of intermediate grace, a slot within MLB’s postseason matrix, eleven times in their 64-year history. In every one of the seasons that followed, their subsequent won-lost record paled in comparison to that which merited celebration. On average, Mets teams in those years after won twelve fewer games than they did during the preceding years when champagne flowed at least once.
1969: 100-62
1970: 83-79
1973: 82-79
1974: 71-91
1986: 108-54
1987: 92-70
1988: 100-60
1989: 87-75
1999: 97-66
2000: 94-68
2000: 94-68
2001: 82-80
2006: 97-65
2007: 88-74
2015: 90-72
2016: 87-75
2016: 87-75
2017: 70-92
2022: 101-61
2023: 75-87
2024: 89-73
2025: 83-79
As you can see, not all falls from graces are created equal. A couple of times, the tumbles were modest and hardly mattered — twice the Mets returned to the playoffs in those years after; once they advanced further in those playoffs than they had the year before. This was when playoff spots were more accessible than they had been when the Mets first earned one, if not as accessible as they would become in the most recent season in which the Mets failed to grab one, the season that ended Sunday in Miami with a 4-0 loss to the Marlins [1].
In 2025, the Mets’ record was 83-79, six games off the pace of the 2024 Mets of increasingly sainted memory. Unlike 2000 and 2016, despite the availability of more postseason berths than ever, this presented a problem. Had the Mets gone 89-73 as they did a year earlier, they would have cruised into the 2025 playoffs. Had they won a single game more, they would have eked in, but that would have been fine, at least until an 84-78 Mets squad was eliminated in due order, because very few teams with so few wins get very far in a postseason. Yet it’s been known to happen, and we were willing to find out if it could again.
Had 83-79 qualified us, we would have taken that, too. It came damn close to doing so. The 83-79 record with which the Mets completed their business was the same as that which will be carried into the postseason by the Cincinnati Reds, a feisty bunch that backed into clinching, pushed giddily into their bubbly by the feistless Mets, ass over teakettle, despite their own last-day 4-2 loss at Milwaukee. The Reds, a couple of hot weeks in September notwithstanding, were no great shakes in 2025. Actually, they were the same shakes as the Mets, except along the way to shaking out with an identical 79 losses, they won the season series between them and us, and that represented the difference between getting to go on or having to go home. There was a time when a tiebreaking game would have been played to determine postseason entry, but that’s simply not done anymore. And, honestly, if we’re determining which 83-79 team deserves to not be a league’s sixth postseason entrant, maybe baseball’s powers that be shouldn’t sanction spending one more minute on it than necessary.
I seem to be obsessing on the won-lost record rather than the game that sealed it. Yes, the Mets played nine more futile innings on Sunday. Yes, it boiled down to one panicked inning of middle relief and one scorching bases-loaded line drive that landed in a glove. Yes, it was the Marlins, official doer-in of last-ditch Met playoff hopes, who did in last-ditch Met playoff hopes once again. Yes, it was the Marlins’ World Series, except unlike in 2003, I wasn’t pulling for them to beat New York.
Give the Marlins credit for coming to play the role of spoiler with zest. Give the Mets another demerit for barely showing up when everything was on the line. Or maybe the Mets played to the best of their 2025 ability, which is a frightening thought. Then again, we were just presented 162 games’ worth of evidence that the Mets weren’t able to get done the minimum that needed doing to get where it once seemed there was no way they weren’t going. Their ability as a unit apparently topped out at 83 wins and 79 losses.
If I may be Dana Carvey’s Grumpy Old Man [2] character for a moment, in my day, our team didn’t play mediocre baseball for the vast majority of six months and still have a chance on the final day to be eligible to win the World Series unless somebody shouted in our face that we had to believe. If we were going to finish barely over .500, we’d simply give up before the last week of September and we liked it — we loved it!
Maybe we didn’t love it, but we lived with it. Flibbity-floo, I grew up rooting for Mets clubs that fell short of falling just short. The 1970 Mets, the first team I ever followed from the beginning of a season to its end, went 83-79. They made the bulk of September painful by discovering ways to lose to the eventual division champion Pirates and almost everybody else down the stretch, a stretch in which their chances expired four days before the season did. When their world title defense got them no higher than third place, I processed third place, even at seven years of age, as where they belonged. Finish first, keep playing. Finish third, keep walking.
Eighty-Three and Seventy-Nine locked in as the Mets trademark record in my mind a year later, 1971. At the last home game of this season, while my friend Ken was still ruing how September 1970 got away (gently ask him about Willie Montañez when he was a callup on the Phillies, I dare ya), I drifted to the next July. The 2025 Mets, as every schoolchild by now knows, started 45-24. Only the AP History classes probably mention that in 1971, the Mets sat in first place with a record of 45-29 on June 30. The next thing I remember — and I really do remember this — was the Mets went out and lost 20 of their next 27 games, exiting the NL East race as they spiraled. At 83-79, they finished tied for third, no tiebreaker of any kind applied to decide whether theirs was the best 83-79 record extant.
The Mets won 83 games in a 156-game strike-shortened season in 1972. It made for a better winning percentage than the previous two years, but proved irrelevant to the pennant race’s conclusion. The Mets won 82 games in 1973, the aberration of all aberrations in the four-division era. In 1975, the Mets won 82 games again, and they had a chance when September started, but by losing significantly more than they won after September 1, they transmitted to their loyalists that 82 wouldn’t be enough. The 86 wins of 1976 were stitched mainly from window dressing that materialized when the lone playoff spot on the table was too many seats up from where we’d positioned ourselves to stay by Memorial Day.
A slightly OK record, shorn of any given season’s context, was always a slightly OK record. You could be disappointed. You could be a rationalist. You could tell yourself next year would be the year we’d get back to where we were in 1969. You would be absolutely wrong about that last one throughout the 1970s, especially the late 1970s, but you recognized that a team that posted a record of or something like 83-79 was probably not going to be a playoff team, and if a team with a record like that did make the playoffs, you were entitled to use the word miracle like it was used in ’69.
That was all before Wild Cards existed. Wild Cards, from the mid-1990s on, have served roughly the same purpose the Mets did in 1962, per what the old Dodger Billy Loes said then upon his brief springtime dalliance with the expansion club:
“The Mets is a very good thing. They give everybody a job. Just like the WPA.”
In the modern baseball sense, the Wild Card makes every half-decent also-ran a potential contender while in the course of also-running. In the Wild Card era, prior to this season, the Mets had one 83-79 finisher, in 2005. That was the first year of this blog. We got our hopes up as August was becoming September, and we had our hopes quashed as the Wild Card we were seeking slipped from even theoretical reach. Still, it was a mostly fun year. The arrow was pointing up from the seasons before, and our next stop was first place in 2006. We didn’t necessarily know it was coming, but we could settle for finishing a little out of the race if we could be convinced better times were directly ahead. The 83-79 Mets of 2005 added Delgado, Wagner, and Lo Duca to Wright, Reyes, Beltran, and Martinez en route to becoming the 97-65 Mets of 2006. It was a very convincing transformation.
The 2025 Mets had something their 1970, 1971, and 2005 predecessors in 83-79 finishes didn’t. They had four shots to make the playoffs. They could win the division, or they could win one of three Wild Cards. Three! They drew none.
None!
Roger Angell wrote of the 1970 club, “Why the Mets failed to survive even this flabby test, falling seventeen games below their record of last year, is easy to explain, but hard to understand.”
Leonard Koppett wrote of the 1971 club, “You couldn’t fairly pinpoint any one fact, or one person” that would help explain or understand why a team that was once sixteen games over .500 landed only four above the break-even point, but he did lament, a couple of seasons later, “Everything considered, 1971 was probably the least satisfying year the Mets had ever experienced.”
Adam Rubin quoted Fred Wilpon on the subject of the 2005 club, “We had times where we were in similar positions in years past, and you didn’t see the same vibrancy on the field I think you do now. I think it’s progress. I’m not sure it’s success unless you are in the playoffs, and we’re not in the playoffs. So that part is a disappointment.”
These were all pretty measured, realistic responses to Met seasons whose records were slightly OK. Conversely, I’m not sure how to respond to this Met season with the very same record, this Met season that echoed the audible post-1969 sighs of 1970 and the post-June swoon of 1971. Despite maintaining the services of several extremely able players for the season and seasons ahead, I don’t sense palpable progress outside of the stuff flashed by a few very inexperienced pitchers, and after the way 2025 didn’t build off 2024, I’m not about to, at this instant, elevate my hopes for 2026. Although there is no more 2025 for the New York Mets, it’s too soon to tell myself next year will be the year we get back to where we were in any of those eleven years that extended into postseason. If I thought about it, I’d think they could, but I thought about it this year and thought they would, and I was dead wrong.
When the Mets won on Saturday via a 5-0 shutout and kept themselves alive for one more day, I did tell myself that no matter what happened Sunday, I’d be at peace with however it ended. I stopped telling myself that by Sunday morning, but it really was gratifying to watch the 2025 Mets one more time — for the 83rd and, as it turned out, final time — be the Mets we thought they’d be. The Mets who did have that Amazin’ start; the Mets who did fill their ballpark and elicit honest enthusiasm; the Mets who intermittently quelled our doubts. Those Mets didn’t show up for Game 162. It was fairly predictable, based on what the Mets had become, but it was still baseball season then, and during baseball season, we do like to imagine somebody is shouting in our face that we have to believe, even if it’s only an irrepressible inner voice we’re straining to hear.
Life is better when it’s baseball season, no matter that some baseball seasons yield nothing better than a slightly OK record, no matter that some baseball seasons crash rather than fall from grace. I didn’t much care for this Mets baseball season within the context of hoping for more Mets baseball, but I hoped for it, regardless. And I cared down the season’s last swing, which generated a 4-6-3 double play off the bat of Francisco Lindor, who cautioned us that this year might not contain the wonders of last year when this year was still next year.
“Nothing’s promised in this game,” Francisco told reporters who gathered around him in the visitors’ clubhouse at Dodger Stadium minutes after the Mets were eliminated from the 2024 NLCS. “Every year, whether you have the same guys or not, it’s a different year.” Lindor and his teammates could do no wrong then. They just couldn’t do everything. In 2025, Lindor and Pete Alonso and Brandon Nimmo and Edwin Diaz, joined by Juan Soto, did much, but they could do only so much, and nobody else could do very much. Or if the lot of them could, they didn’t. Still, for Game 162, I put that learning aside. On the final day of a season when everything’s on the line, nothing that happened before the final day matters…except everything that went right or wrong for 161 games is why the final day plays out as one of those final days when everything matters.
This final day, Closing Day of 2025, played out as its own kind of horrible. It produced precisely the same record as a few seasons that came along way back when, but it felt worse, probably because something was on the line at the very end, probably because it just happened. Give it time. It might not get better, but next year forever remains next year.
Thanks for sitting alongside us for however many seasons you’ve sought out our section since 2005. Last year, this year, next year — we’re always gonna finish here.