A button at the end of one of my favorite [1] Mad Men episodes has been circulating through my head ever since Opening Day. Don has come home to discover young Sally is still freaked out by the appearance of her new little brother Gene. Dad has to sell daughter on the notion that this infant is not the ghostly reincarnation of the recently deceased Grandpa Gene (despite having the same name and sleeping in what had been the late Gene’s room), so he makes the following pitch right before the end credits roll:
“He’s only a baby. We don’t know who he is yet, or who he’s going to be. And that is a wonderful thing.”
The Mets represented the spirit of that newborn as of March 26, more than they usually do when baseball gets going. All seasons start 0-0, clean slate, fresh outlook, the whole bit. But the 2026 Mets loomed as particularly mysterious given that so many of those who composed and defined the Mets of not just 2025 but the years directly prior had been replaced in a phalanx of key roles by an influx of near-total strangers. We may have been acquainted with individuals’ reputations from a distance, but distance is wide when you focus mostly on a single team summer after summer. Of course we knew the new Mets’ names. We might have known their stats and a few other things about them. We had never lived with them before. We had never leaned on them before. We had never asked them to be, in concert with select holdovers, the Mets.
We are sixteen games into the 2026 season. We still can’t say we know who this team — the strangers, the holdovers, the end product — is yet or what it’s going to be. How much of a wonderful thing that is depends on your tolerance for finding out.
Did you know the Mets once held the top spot in their division all by themselves? Not last June, not forty years ago [2]. Practically just the other day. After this year’s first eleven games, an admittedly small sample size but one just large enough to enable the formation of impressions if so inclined, the 7-4 Mets sat alone in first place in the NL East. Five games later, the 7-9 Mets sit alone in last place in the NL East. The sample size has hardly grown. Nascent 2026 impressions have curdled.
The Mets have lost five in a row, including the three they just played versus the Nowheresville Athletics, getting shut out [3] in the Citi series finale Sunday, 1-0. A sweet sliding catch from Carson Benge kept the score from becoming 3-0. Nothing any Met did with a bat came close to preventing a loss from becoming a loss. Losing five in a row in April grants a fan early access to frustration, aggravation, disgust, what have you. It’s never too early to be frustrated, aggravated, or disgusted by any Met sample size, Sotoless or otherwise. It’s almost certainly too early to determine that those will be your overriding emotions during the summer to come. They could be. Or they could very well not be.
We don’t know who this team is yet. That’s not letting them off the hook for a hollow baseball weekend. If anything, the lack of familiarity is what makes this latest on-field dip more disconcerting. When the Mets of the previous five seasons endured losing stretches, we could default to denial. From 2021 through 2025, intimate as we were with our core and unless thoroughly disabused of our innate optimism by overwhelming evidence to the contrary, we could convince ourselves in the first month of a season that “this team” is too good to drop five in a row; or too good to get swept by the A’s at home; or too good to go into a teamwide slump.
This team? The 2026 Mets? Damned if I know if they’re too good to have endured the indignities of the defeats they were handed by the Diamondbacks and Athletics. Damned if I knew if the Mets were a worthy first-place first team after eleven games, but I was willing to ride the high, especially after they frustrated, aggravated, and disgusted us in the days immediately preceding their upward blip.
The average US life expectancy is 79 years old. For convenience sake, let’s give the average American an extra year and call it 80. Thus, somebody in this country stands an average chance of living until the age of 80. Of course we don’t know what this person is or will be when born. How about by the time that person has lived eight years? You might see that kid and conclude great things are on the child’s horizon. You might gather the sense that this kid is, in one way or another, bad news. Or you might extend the grace of time to kids of that age. They’ve got their whole life in front of them. Let them be who they’re gonna be. Eight years amount to 10% of an average lifetime, with 90% very much in the to-be-determined column.
With sixteen games of a slated 162 in the books, the 2026 Mets have played approximately 10 percent of their schedule, making them the equivalent of an eight-year-old kid if we go by the actuarial tables. They are not, however, an eight-year-old kid in isolation. How the rest of their life, the next 72 years/146 games go will depend on how they interact with a whole lot of other kids/teams who are approximately 10% through their lifetimes, and how those other parties interact with each other. A glance at the National League indicates the fourteen teams who aren’t the Dodgers are bunched up within four games of one other. We would not be wrong to estimate that we don’t who anybody outside of L.A. — where the Mets have landed to play next — is or what they are going to be. Teams having their problems will solve some things. Teams on a hot streak will cool down. Teams lacking an identity will forge one. In the case of the Mets, hopefully a good one.
In the meantime, Craig Kimbrel [4] has supplanted the regularly replaceable Dicky Lovelady [5], Joey Gerber [6] has bumped Luis Garcia [7], and Recidivizing Tommy Pham [8] is coming in, which means Ronny Mauricio [9] is going down. Groping at the personnel margins figures to do only so much, but everything has that conditional feel to it. Juan Soto’s calf figures to heal. Jorge Polanco’s bursitis may flare up with less frequency. Freddy Peralta, whose usual grinding pitch count didn’t stop him from going six on Sunday, might begin to last a little longer. Luis Robert, Jr., who rested as a general precaution against overuse Sunday, might require fewer off days. Batting averages wallowing south of .200 might find a northbound exit. The 2026 Mets season will get a little older. How much life we can expect out of it…and how much expectation we can build for this team…that’s what the season’s for.
A slow start. A blah interlude. A sense that we have no idea what’s going on with this team we root for but will continue to dwell on in spite of our instincts to think about something else. Believe me, somewhere in this business, this has happened before.
On Monday night, April 20 (when the Mets are idle), I will be joining A.M. Gittlitz in conversation at the Barnes & Noble in Carle Place at the Country Glen Center, where Old Country Road meets Glen Cove Road, a few blocks west of Roosevelt Field. We will be discussing Mr. Gittlitz’s new New York Times best-seller, Metropolitans: New York Baseball, Class Struggle, and the People’s Team, a pre-publication excerpt of which we ran here [10]. The program [11] begins at 6:30 PM. If you’re on Long Island or anywhere in the Metropolitan(s) Area, I hope you’ll drop by.