Into the Great Wide Open

Based on where the Seattle Mariners went last season and where the Seattle Mariners sit this season, it is fair to say that on Wednesday afternoon at T-Mobile Park, the New York Mets beat a playoff or at least playoff-caliber team. The Mariners made the postseason in 2025 and lead their division in 2026. The Mets missed the postseason in 2025 and linger in last place as 2026 goes along. Until further notice, the Mets’ only association with the concept of playoffs will come from interacting with teams in position to make them.

On days like Wednesday, you can tell yourself they are serving notice that they plan to strive toward being one of them. On Wednesday, it was they who looked like a team with which to be reckoned. Seattle couldn’t reckon with Freddy Peralta for six innings, or Bo Bichette getting four hits, or A.J. Ewing posting the first three-hit game of his nascent career. They couldn’t reckon with a double-steal attempt executed to a tee by Carson Benge, who swiped home, and Juan Soto, who slid into second safely. They were wrecked for good when Jared Young drove in Soto to build the Mets a 5-1 lead in the fourth. New York left town with a decisive 7-1 win.

What was so decisive about it? It compelled me to decide to look at the Mets’ record after 62 games and do a bit of baseball math. Baseball math recognizes 62 as 100 games distant from the completion of a regulation regular season. The Mets through 62 games have been, to put it kindly, unremarkable, having gone 27-35. Also unremarkable: the marine layer of National League teams above them, specifically the clubs that don’t lead a division.

Forget about the NL division leaders, except for when they are Met opponents. Atlanta is in another stratosphere right now. The Mets haven’t played the Braves once. Maybe that’s foreboding. Maybe that’s good timing. The Braves could hardly be any better than they’ve been to date (42-20). We’ll get them when they cool down. Yeah, that’s the ticket. We haven’t seen the first-place Brewers (37-22), and we still await the pleasure of a visit from the first-place Dodgers (40-22). That makes 22 games against teams I’ve just advised forgetting about. Precautionary selective amnesia will be helpful.

Back to that marine layer. It’s very foggy up there in the Wild Card standings. Who’s the powerhouse? Who’s the sure thing? Who’s ready to take command and make reservations for October? You can’t tell. It’s too foggy. At the moment, the three NL clubs that can claim Wild Card leadership are all in the same murky boat. The Padres (the Mets’ next opponent), Cardinals, and Pirates each paddle along four games above .500. On their heels or their hulls or whatever metaphor you choose, are the Diamondbacks and Phillies, each three games above .500; followed by the Cubs, two games above .500; the Reds, one game above .500; and the Nationals, one game below .500. That makes eight teams within two-and-a-half games of one another for three playoff spots.

The come the Marlins, who have crept back ahead of us by a game-and-a-half despite our having swept the gills out of them a few days ago. Then there’s us. We — funny how the first-person plural gets trotted out after a decisive win — are six games behind those three leaders in the foggy regatta. Lotta nautical traffic ahead, but if any of the other vessels floating out there has a motor attached to it, they sure haven’t revved it up. The Phillies, another outfit we haven’t directly encountered yet, had to win like crazy to approach mediocre waters after a start that was even worse than ours. Maybe they’ve already played their best ball. Or maybe they haven’t, but that’s OK, because that’s why Rob Manfred sanctioned three Wild Cards. (The commissioner also blesses Interleague play, and we still have some challenging assignments left on the schedule where that’s concerned, if no further trips to far away outposts like Seattle after this weekend in San Diego).

Everybody in the NL who isn’t the Giants or Rockies has a better record than the Mets, and it’s not as if they are static actors here. If three of those above us take off, and the three division leaders don’t drastically fall apart, well, enjoy the view from down below. But the Mets, freshly minted 7-1 winners over a playoff-caliber team from the other league, are absolutely eligible to make a move upward. One-hundred games remain to do something in that direction.

History suggests that the 2026 Mets will win somewhere between 24 and 66 of their final 100 games. The most any Mets team has ever won of their last hundred was 66, which happened in 1969. The 1969 Mets were legendarily 100-to-1 long shots to win the pennant. Imagine the odds you could have gotten that they’d win nearly two of every three of last their 100 games. Bowie Kuhn would have looked askance at such gambling parlance. Rob Manfred will gladly take your parlay and blow on your dice for luck if you ask. Given that 1969 was a once-in-a-lifetime baseball experience, let’s bet the 2026 Mets won’t match the franchise record of 66-34 down the 100-game stretch.

Let’s also be optimistic that the 2026 Mets will better the franchise low of 24-76, established by the 1962 Mets. What, you were gonna bet somebody else lost more of their final 100? Sometimes the obvious wager is the right one.

So somewhere between 24 wins at the low end and 66 at the high end is what we can look forward to the 27-35 Mets adding between now and the end of the season, pending any rainout that doesn’t get made up. That doesn’t happen too often anymore, but it has in the past, thus when I looked at last 100 games of a Met season for every Met season, I took “last 100 games” literally. In 1962, the Mets played 160 games to a decision, so that 24-76 reflects games 61 through 160. In 1988, the Mets weren’t bothered to make up two rainouts, so ditto. Same for the handful of 161-game seasons, the two strike-impacted seasons (1972 and 1995) that can be said to have had full enough campaigns (156 and 144 games, respectively), and the 163-game epic that was 1999. For this exercise, I opted to ignore ties. Mostly, when we refer to last 100 games, it means Game 63 through Game 162.

Here are the thirteen best records compiled by Mets teams over their final 100 games of a season:

1969: 66-34
1986: 64-36
1999: 64-36
1985: 63-37
1988: 62-38
2024: 62-38
2022: 61-39
1987: 60-40
2000: 60-40
2008: 59-41
1990: 58-42
2006: 58-42
2015: 57-43

Notice an overwhelmingly common denominator? Nine of these thirteen Mets teams went to the playoffs. The other four made things interesting, if aggravating. The baseline here is a .570 winning percentage, or a 92-win pace when extrapolated for a 162-game season. Play at a 92-win pace all season in the three-Wild Card era, you don’t have to worry about keeping busy come early fall. It helps if you don’t completely fall apart during your first 62 games, though the presence of the 2024 Mets in this group indicates falling apart as the season is taking shape isn’t always a dealbreaker. The 2024 Mets had the same 27-35 record the 2026 Mets do currently. If the 2024 Mets may not have quite represented a once-in-a-lifetime baseball experience à la 1969, yet it might be a bit much to ask for a statistical replica of what they did a mere two years after the fact. Then again, 1973 happened only four years after 1969, and with inflation, two years may be the new four.

Usually, however, a team playing like the 2026 Mets have through 62 games is showing its true colors. The 1996 Mets, for example, also went 27-35, a pace that would work out to 71-91 over 162 games. When the 1996 Mets finished playing their 162nd game, their record was 71-91. Other Mets squads stuck in the same strain of mud — 1977, 1980, and 2003 — saw their overall winning percentage only dip over the long haul.

You can mess around a little early and not not put on a 100-game surge for the ages, yet you can still get where you want to go. It doesn’t happen frequently, but it has happened twice. You do have to get blazingly hot eventually. The 2016 Mets built on a respectable but not otherworldly 32-28 start by going a respectable but not otherworldly 53-47 in their final 100, highlighted by a 27-12 run late. They wound up with one of the two National League Wild Cards. The patron saints of statistical outliers, the 1973 Mets, were 28-33 after 61 games, the exact same mark held by their successors in 1978, 1994, 2004, 2014, and 2017. The 1994 Mets went on strike after 113 games. Nobody in this cohort finished with a winning record. The 1973 Mets? They didn’t exactly catch fire as of Game 62 and keep burning clear to Game 161. They went 54-46, good for an 87-win pace over 162 games. Eighty-seven wins was sufficient to make the playoffs in 2016. Eighty-two wins, boosted by a very timely 21-8 step up, was sufficient to win the division in 1973. That’s what the Mets had after adding 54-46 to 28-33 and totaling 82-79 in an NL East where nobody else put together enough successful season segments to top them. The 161-game math worked so well that Game 162, when the grounds at Wrigley were suddenly judged soggy, was deemed unnecessary.

Some Mets teams that finished fairly strong, including the 1976 Mets (56-44), the 2001 Mets (56-44), and 2019 Mets (56-44), can only look back and rue that they didn’t start a little better or benefit from a more generous dispersal of playoff spots. I doubt the 1976 Mets, 2001 Mets, or 2019 Mets gather specifically to look back and rue, but I do like the image, provided they eventually brush aside their shortcomings and instead relish that they put together pretty nice stretches of baseball. Actually, I think it would be nice if each individual Met team got together.

Hey, Flynnie!
Hey, Swannie!
Have you seen Bomback?
He’s right over there by the crab puffs with Pacella.
Oh, man, his hat fell right onto the tray. Same old Johnny! Oh wait, he’s coming right here.
Hey Doug! Hey Craig! What are you guys giggling about?
Nothing, John. Nothing at all.

More relevantly, the only Mets team still in action can’t do anything about their tepid launch. The 2026 Mets are 27-35. History hasn’t shunted them aside, but history isn’t doing them any favors. Fortunately, history won’t matter if they can make great hay from their next 100 games…and not too many NL competitors do the same.

Baseball math can be complex, but it’s simple enough if you just start winning and basically don’t stop.