Someday, the Mets will do that thing you want them to do. They’ll figure out a place for Brett Baty [1], whether on the field or in another town. They’ll let a pitcher go as deep as his arm will allow him. They’ll hit a ball past a Brewer with runners on base. They’ll take less than three hours to slog to a 4-3 loss [2]. They’ll loom as savvy buyers rather than put-upon sellers as a trade deadline approaches.
Wednesday was not the Opposite Day you might have sought. Baty was directed to a position that wasn’t in his Top Two, right field, and made the critical misplay that turned the getaway day matinee irreversibly against them. However many extra pitches his failure to make a difficult but makable grab cost Christian Scott [3] ushered the righty off the mound before four innings were complete. The Mets bullpen, currently doubling as a trendy pop-up shop for MLB contenders, didn’t do badly after the starter departed, but the Mets were too busy finding a way to not win for it to matter. The Brewers are a first-place team. The Mets are a last-place team. The Mets played as well as they could have for considerable stretches, yet they were doomed to not get the big hit or make the key catch, whereas the Brewers were destined to do enough of what they had to do to prevail. Doom versus Destiny. It’s one of those seasons. Losing only two of three at the facility formerly known as Miller Park is the July 2026 equivalent of one of those series wins the rationalizing set usually trumpets as a tangible victory. They came so close to a four-and-two road trip!
Someday, the Mets will win twelve games in a row. That’s the thing I want them to do. Win another World Series, too, but that’s on everybody’s to-do list. I’ve seen them win two World Series. I’ve never seen them win twelve in a row. Five times in their history — 1969, 1972, 1986, 1990, and 2015 — they’ve won eleven in a row. Eleven in a row has been the Mets’ winning streak record for the life of my fandom. It’s one of the first things I knew about the Mets, and it is therefore one of the oldest things I know about the Mets. I found myself thinking, in the weeks leading up to this season, “I’d love for the Mets to win twelve in a row in 2026.”
[4]An incredibly tough act to follow.
A couple of weeks after the 2026 season had started, the Mets had lost twelve in a row, which was not a record, but that’s OK, I wasn’t looking for a record in the opposite direction. They had won four in a row right before losing twelve in a row, and they later won four in a row once more. Their two longest winning streaks of 2026 have combined to equal a third of their longest losing streak of the year, the most games they had lost in a row in 24 years.
All of this came to mind as the 2026 Red Sox ran their winning streak to 15 consecutive games, which tied their franchise high from 1946. You may recall the Mets were the opponents in Boston’s seventh, eighth, and ninth wins in a row, proving it takes a little luck to fire off a monumental streak of this nature. The Red Sox’ luck was finding the Mets on their schedule right in the middle of it. The Sox couldn’t break their record, falling to the Orioles [5] in the night half of their doubleheader Wednesday, meaning any fan of theirs who had been thinking as I was thinking before the season (“I’d sure like to see that 80-year-old standard of ours surpassed at last”) did not come away fully sated. Still, 15 in a row was pretty effective. The Red Sox rode it from the edge of oblivion to grasping a playoff spot. They don’t figure to be selling off players as we will be over the next eleven days.
I still wish for the Mets to someday win a dozen consecutive games, to top their most sustained hot rolls of dice from 57, 54, 40, 36, and 11 years ago. Should the Mets suddenly grow scalding, I won’t throw myself in their path to slow their roll, but I don’t know that I’d appreciate an unforeseen twelve-game winning streak in the back half of 2026 the way I might when it could do the Mets some genuine good. Let’s say the Mets win twelve in a row starting Friday against the Dodgers. Such a skein, as the papers used to call it, would lift them from their current mark of 43-60 to 55-60. They’d likely still be out of the Wild Card stakes, albeit quite a bit closer than they sit now. For this unforeseen uprising to create the kind of impact a lengthy surge oughta, the last-place Mets would need to follow these hypothetical twelve in a row with several more sizzling streaks, skeins, and spurts. Like a sweep of the three upcoming games versus the Dodgers, I’d welcome such momentum, but I wouldn’t expect it. Had somebody else’s winning streak not become a story, it wouldn’t occur to me to even think of asking for one of ours right now. It’s one thing to order a win à la carte. It’s another to request a dozen of them prepared to your liking ASAP.
I’m asking for twelve wins in a row someday. If I can be choosy about it, I’m asking for them in a season or the juncture of a season when they won’t spur me to ask, “Where were these when we could have used them?” I distinctly remember a seven-game winning streak in the latter half of August 1992. The Mets had already fallen on their faces and out of the pennant race. Then they won those seven in a row, and I found myself annoyed at the timing. The seven consecutive victories lifted them from fourteen under to seven under, from fifteen out to twelve-and-a-half-out. Save it for when we can use it, Mets. By the next time we could use it, we’d have mostly all new Mets. The next time the Mets won as many seven in a row was six years later. The Mets won nine in a row right after acquiring Mike Piazza in May of 1998. It got us into Wild Card position, a status that didn’t exist in August of 1992. That winning streak, like the non-coincidental presence of Mike Piazza, really came in handy in the context of its season. A mammoth winning streak now will just insert additional data points into any calculus our president of baseball operations is quantifying as the trade deadline approaches. That’s a guy who already acts as if he knows all the answers.
So while I will not be rooting for the Mets to not win their next twelve games in a row, and while I suspect I would heartily applaud the breaking of a positive franchise record, I’m putting my desire for a Mets twelve-game winning streak on the proverbial back burner. Or I would if, in fact, a twelve-game winning streak was just sitting around the kitchen waiting to be heated up. The waiter has just come to my table to advise me a Mets twelve-game winning streak is not on the menu, and special-ordering it now will be impossible.