Previously on Flashback Friday…
A little piece of me is always watching the Mets in 1970 [1].
Mostly I was enchanted with the possibility that the Mets would win the World Series in 1975 [2].
I was in love with the 1980 [3] Mets. They weren’t the first Mets team I was ever hung up on, but I think, given where I was in life, that they were my first love.
I gave myself over to baseball and the Mets in 1985 [4] in a way I never had before.
If there was ever going to be a year when I might have discarded baseball and pleaded no lo contendre to the charge that I allowed myself to be distracted from the Mets by overwhelming matters of substance, 1990 [5] would have been that year. But it wasn’t and I didn’t. Amid a seismic personal shift that separated what came before from what came after, I was just doing what I’d always been doing. I rooted for the Mets like it was life and death. I didn’t know how not to.
In 1995 [6], I was determined to spend as much time at Shea as was humanly possible.
It was the Year 2000 [7], Y2K. Actually, it wasn’t any different from the 1900s, at least not the last few of them. Since 1997, the Bobby Valentine Mets had become my cause, my concern, my reason for being. Even more, I mean. If I had to rate the intensity of my baseball-commitment on a scale from 5 to 10 (let’s face it, it was never going to dip into low single-digits), these were the 9-10 years. The needle never saw 8.
For all the sporadic delight I’ve derived from the Mets since 1969, I don’t think I’ve ever been quite as personally gratified by a season as I’ve been by 2005 [8].
Make no mistake about it: we lived in 2010 [9]. Of course we did. We live in every season as if it’s our permanent residence. We inhabit them fully. Each one is the most important season of our lives while it is in progress. Across the entirety of 2010, I sat at this very spot and, in concert with my blogging partner sitting in whatever spot he was in, set in type that entire April-to-October effort. It mattered to me. It mattered to you. Then it mattered no more. Weird how that happens.
There’s nothing better than the year that Feels Different, and before we had a chance to feel anything else, 2015 [10] felt different.
And now: Flashback Friday.
Had Major League Baseball not presented its farcical version of a season in 2020 — no games until late July; 60 games in all; zero fans in attendance; everything a little to a lot off — Pete Alonso’s career home run total would have sat at 248 when he left the Mets for the Orioles this month, meaning Darryl Strawberry would still hold the franchise record at 252. That is unless Pete would have been moved at the end of 2025 to stay a Met a little longer for history’s sake, or the Polar Bear had powered up five more times than he actually did in the five seasons that followed the one that theoretically wasn’t played, one I almost wish hadn’t been played.
But that’s all hypothetical. Sort of like “imagine MLB needing to lop more than 100 games off its schedule and conducting its on-field exercises in front of nothing but empty seats and cardboard cutouts, altering its rules along the way, all for reasons that ostensibly had nothing to do with baseball.” Before 2020, I don’t know why anybody would have imagined such a hypothetical. By March of that year, our imaginations were becoming overwhelmed.
What a strange year it was five years ago, mostly outside the realm with which we concern ourselves here, but within the walls of Metsopotamia as well. COVID-19 crept into our collective consciousness in January. Whatever it was, it was said to be dangerous to everybody. By March, it was unstoppable. It stopped Spring Training and then the season’s beginning. It stopped just about everything, so why should baseball have been any different? It surely stopped the sense of momentum the Mets carried over from the end of the previous decade. The 2019 Mets made themselves memorable by finishing strong, clear through to Dom Smith’s rousing final swing on the season’s final day that nurtured optimism for the near future. The offseason leading into 2020 was brightened by the story of how those young, spunky Mets gathered for milk and cookies and hitting talk on the road after games. They were the Cookie Club [11], and how could you not be optimistic about that? Alas, the “Summer Camp” that prefaced the impending ad hoc season brought a bittersweet update [12] from Jeff McNeil:
“We may have to do some Zoom calls and order in.”
No, it wouldn’t be the same. Once the 2020 season didn’t start on time, and especially once the 2020 seasonette got going, memories of 2019 existed on an island, disconnected from a next step. Yet it was 2020 that was bound to live in true isolation, sheltering in place from what came before and what might come after. Members of Mets teams that earned postseason berths in 2015 and 2016 played alongside members of Mets teams that would go to the playoffs in 2022 and 2024. None of that experience with or capability of success rubbed off on the unit that called itself the 2020 Mets. To be fair, the 2020 Mets didn’t have much runway. The 2019 Mets were past 90 games before they began to coalesce into lovability. The 2020 Mets had only 60 games total. To be just as fair, all they had to be, essentially, was the eighth-best team in their league to be granted a World Series Tournament bid, and they couldn’t manage that much. The Cookie Club and everything else that felt promising prior to 2020 simply crumbled.
It seemed unseemly to complain to much about the Mets’ indifferent results when the world was unsettled by weightier issues. Not that we didn’t complain. With a pandemic in progress, we had not much else to do in 2020. Complaining bitterly and watching empty-stadium baseball became the newest national pastimes. Complaints — legitimate and concocted — were everywhere. Mets baseball was on TV and radio if you wanted something else to get annoyed by.
Remember that most obscure Mets season? It’s OK if you don’t. It was destined for instant obscurity from its delayed outset, and did nothing to divert from its path to nowhere while it went about its abbreviated business. On July 24, 2020, the Mets commenced their condensed NL East/AL East-only schedule with a victory over the Braves. Yoenis Cespedes, anachronistically sharing a box score with Pete Alonso, homered to give the Mets a 1-0 win. Soon Cespedes would decide he preferred to not court the coronavirus and opted out of further baseball. That was something players could do in what the commercials called These Challenging Times. For a couple of days, Cespedes ceased to be the revered slugger from the 2015 pennant surge and became the guy who ghosted on his teammates and, by extension, us. I assume he is more widely remembered now for his heroic entrance onto our stage than his murky exit from it, but in the moment, he made for an easy object of online Mets fan scorn.
Not that Yo would have heard any boos. The only noise at ballparks was piped in, intended to add a lifelike quality to an otherwise desolate atmosphere. Cespedes, when he hit that Opening Day home run, was serving as DH at Citi Field. That was new in 2020. Player health was enough of an issue to let MLB shove the designated hitter into the National League, lest pitchers drop like flies on the basepaths. Same for this new scourge that became known as the ghost runner. You get to extra innings, you put a runner on second base, the maker of the last out from the last inning, specifically. Was it baseball? It was now. Same as doubleheaders whose games were each seven innings…unless they went to extras…meaning the eighth and maybe the ninth.
It was all very bizarre and not particularly welcome. Had the Mets made more of it, it might look different a half-decade later, but the Mets made nothing of it, going 26-34 and finishing in a fourth-place tie. They stayed in mathematical contention to the final weekend mostly because it was almost impossible to not last nearly 60 games. They did their best to opt out of the “pennant race,” but hung in just the same.
The Mets who weren’t a part of better teams before or after 2020 were destined for their own individual pervading obscurity, at least as we define it. Some players who had representative careers just sort of passed through Flushing. That happens every season, but this was the worst possible season to do it if being remembered as a Met was ever your goal. I could tick off close to a dozen names that would draw blank expressions from Mets fans who probably watched the games in which those names were sewn onto the back of Mets uniforms. Forty-seven different players played for the Mets across those 60 games. There was little time for introductions let alone impressions. Of those who showed up at Citi for the first time, maybe two Mets became known as Mets. One was, by 2025, the last of the new-for-2020 Mets, David Peterson. The other was another promising rookie, Andrés Giménez, and he lives on in the Mets consciousness as the primary trade piece exchanged for Francisco Lindor.
That trade, which also sent Amed Rosario to Cleveland, happened in 2021, by which time Steve Cohen had taken over ownership of the club. A different owner employed a different general manager than was on the job in 2020 (there’d be a lot of that). The manager who nominally led the Mets in 2020, Luis Rojas, wouldn’t make it to 2022, though he wasn’t supposed to manage the Mets in 2020 to begin with. Carlos Beltran was Brodie Van Wagenen’s unorthodox hire post-Mickey Callaway, but that choice imploded when it was discovered Beltran played a key role in the Houston Astros’ unorthodox world championship strategy of 2017. Van Wagenen, it will be recalled, was hired by Jeff Wilpon, who would have nothing to do with the Mets after 2020, same as Van Wagenen.
Almost everybody who was here would be gone soon enough. Even more than usual. That was how 2020 and our scant developing memories of it operated. A few moments stand out in my mind, and I could detail them, yet despite my self-imposed obligation to flash back to it in the waning days of 2025 (I have a longstanding thing [13] about Mets seasons that end in “0” and “5”), I don’t see the point in diving a whole lot deeper.
Five years after the fact, the most significance that I can attach to the 2020 Mets season is Pete Alonso belted 16 home runs and set himself up to own the Met record at 264 before bolting to Baltimore. And that Baltimore, where the Mets had just defeated the Orioles on yet another vacant weeknight, served as backdrop for the bulletin that Tom Seaver died, partly from COVID-related complications. Because the Mets were playing a schedule, they would be in a ballpark — their own — the next afternoon, and they would do their best to offer a memorial to Tom. No fans were there, of course, and the organization would attempt more fitting do-overs during their Home Openers in 2021 and 2022, but in 2020, any void that could be filled was a void temporarily vanquished.
The Mets played the Yankees that day in a game that went to extra innings (the tenth), and Pete hit one of his 16 homers to win it, a leadoff blast that drove in two runs, one of those “huh?” constructs we’d start getting used to if we wanted to keep watching and possibly enjoying baseball. Pete had struggled a bit in the first weeks of his sophomore season but would launch ten longballs in September 2020, none more meaningful than the one that ensured missing Tom Seaver wouldn’t feel any worse than it already did.
So I’m glad they played that game. And a few others that flicker through my mind when I think of the 2020 season, which isn’t often, though I did think of it the other night. I’ve been rewatching Mad Men since it came to HBO Max, and I was moved to recall Don Draper’s signature advice to Peggy Olson in a 2008 episode that took place in 1962 with a flashback to 1960, and it seemed relevant to a retrospective of 2020 about to be offered in 2025:
“Get out of here and move forward. This never happened. It will shock you how much it never happened.”
Yet it did happen. Sixty games. No attendance. No playoffs. Faint footprints. But the Mets did play baseball that counted the way baseball counts. Entering that season, that wouldn’t have loomed as an accomplishment. In the rearview mirror, it doesn’t appear much was accomplished.
For a couple of months, the 2020 Mets happened a little. It’s five years ago now. Eventually, it always is.