Collective Shrugs All Around

On Saturday I had nothing to do with the 2026 New York Mets, and honestly it was the nicest day I’d experienced in some time.

Oh, Emily and I kept it Mets-adjacent: We spent the afternoon in the stands at Maimonides Park on one of those “nice in the sun” early spring days, watching the Brooklyn Cyclones dismantle the Greensboro Grasshoppers and paying mild attention to the hot dog race, the amiably bush-league fan skits and the dogs attending Bark in the Park, doggily cheerful at being included.

I have a (rather modest) flex plan for this season; to my surprise the Cyclones decided this meant I deserved what seems to be a game-used jersey from last season’s Superman Night, with Superman and Krypto splashed across the front. Being me, I spent about 15 minutes Googling old rosters trying to figure out which Cyclone it had been issued to; in a shift to very much not being me, I then decided that it didn’t particularly matter and I could let it go.

The Cyclones, as I suggested to Emily while we lazed in the sunshine, are ambient baseball: even more enjoyable because close attention isn’t really necessary. And the Cyclones, wisely, made no mention of what their big-league brethren were up to; Emily and I didn’t know anything was amiss until the kid texted to anoint Brooks Raley the savior of our losing streak, news we greeted with … a vaguely existential shrug. Losing streaks of this duration will do that to you.

Come Sunday, though, we were back on duty, at our stations with my mom riding shotgun, wearing her O.G. Faith and Fear t-shirt in a bid to change the luck. And hey, the Mets didn’t play badly: David Peterson‘s outing was encouraging, Francisco Lindor didn’t do anything inexplicably dopey, Luke Weaver looked better than he has all year, and poor lost-at-sea Brett Baty even stopped lunging at bags of peanuts tossed into the cheap seats by vendors.

But the Mets’ offense was limited to a lone run, a bolt into the stands from MJ Melendez, and as the game ground through the late innings you knew that wasn’t going to be enough. The fatal blow came in the ninth, when Devin Williams offered once-upon-a-time Brooklyn Cyclone Michael Conforto a four-seamer in the middle of the plate. Conforto smacked it down the right-field line for a game-tying double; following a maddening top of the 10th, Craig Kimbrel advanced free runner and former Met farmhand Pete Crow-Armstrong to third via a wild pitch and then lost the game on a deep-enough fly ball from Nico Hoerner, who’d kept the Mets from scoring with heads-up defense in that tooth-grinding top of the frame. The Mets had lost, running their streak to 11, but honestly it came after an hour of seeing that as a when and not an if.

(Conforto and Crow-Armstrong, sheesh. Nothing like a defeat with a side of irony. But hey, who doesn’t cherish the memory of Javy Baez sulking around Citi Field giving us the thumbs-down?)

Impossible though it seems right now, the Mets will eventually win a baseball game and probably follow that win with other wins at various intervals. The question is whether any of us will care, ground down by this interminable stretch of winless baseball but also by the collective shruggability of David Stearns’ stopgap collection of misfit toys.

To be fair, April isn’t destiny in terms of records or identity: The 2024 Mets were still mismatched and off-putting as they staggered to the end of May, without so much of a hint that the season would gift us on-field concerts and then a deep playoff run. The 2015 Mets were fielding late-summer lineups so feeble that fan moaning could be heard a time zone away and columnists wanted Sandy Alderson’s head on a pike for negligence.

But I’m not finding “assume another miracle” a particularly satisfying north star. It sure is getting late early around here.