A baseball season is hardly an immaculate grind, and unlike the puzzle [1] with which many of us start our day, solutions can prove elusive. We didn’t know how to solve the 2026 New York Mets season. The grind ground to a halt and therefore solved itself.
Our team played its 162nd game of its allotted 162 on Sunday, losing for the 88th time, this time [2] by a score of 6-4 to the Washington Nationals in Washington. We who wouldn’t think of missing a final game tuned in for the announced start time of 1:05 PM, which had been moved up from 3:05 PM to fool Mother Nature and her nor’easter inclinations. Mother Nature suggested everybody wait another hour for first pitch, thus it was rescheduled for 2:05 PM. Perhaps they could have hidden the last game under a cap and shuffled it so it couldn’t be found. That way we could have just kept looking forward to one more Mets game.
In the second inning, Ronny Mauricio [3] hit his third home run in a span of three at-bats dating back to Saturday [4], which was a reason for to make room in our minds for a couple of more ounces of future-leaning optimism. Then Francisco Lindor [5] stepped up and hit the 300th home run of his career, which was a reason to applaud heartily from a distance. That’s what I did from my couch, after which, I sank back into a reclining position and let the season drift off toward oblivion. Sort of like the Mets did at Nationals Park. Carson Benge made the final out of 2026 by striking out at 4:47 PM Eastern Daylight Time. If Carson Benge couldn’t keep our season going, who could?
After his successful final start of the year on Saturday, Jonah Tong was asked what was next for him. “I’m gonna take a shower, eat some food, go watch Sean shove tomorrow” was his cheeky response. I love Jonah’s felicity for postgame quotes more than I loved his prognosticative abilities (Manaea’s last line: 6 IP, 5 ER). I also love that the kid knows you’ve gotta take it one plate, one day at a time. “Just see where life takes us,” was Tong’s slightly more serious answer. Like his pitching, it was on point.
Baseball life took me to keeping tabs on other compelling action on this final MLB Sunday. Zack Wheeler needed to take the ball to shove the Phillies into the playoffs, and he did, just beyond the reach of the late-charging Diamondbacks. Max Scherzer took the ball so he could keep Shea Stadium alive for one more afternoon. The final active player to have pitched on our old slab of rubber, for Arizona in 2008, did himself proud at Rogers Centre. He didn’t declare his end was nigh, as 2023 Mets teammate Justin Verlander did on Saturday (before JV’s daughter came out to remove him [6]), but Max is 42 and missed large swaths of 2026. Seven strong innings or not, a rousing ovation might be the best sound to hear on your way out.
The Astros outlasted the Rangers in the sag to an American League Central title, going 81-81 and receiving a golden ticket for their so-so season. Brandon Nimmo and Jacob deGrom go home. Some of the young Mets those guys used to lift our spirits alongside late in seasons — Dom Smith, Amed Rosario, Michael Conforto — are, like Wheeler, attached to playoff-bound entities. Pete Alonso had to sit around in the Bronx before his 162nd game was called on account of rain. He packed up his AL home run and RBI titles, presumably wrapping them for safe keeping in one of his quotable t-shirts [7]. Mike Krukow, who with Duane Kuiper, is rightfully beloved in the Giants booth, said goodbye in San Francisco, his career yielding to health concerns. The Angels, who had never before lost 100 games in a single season, lost their 100th game of this season. The Brewers, who have never won a World Series, won their majors-leading 103rd, beating the Cardinals, who had already “clinched” back-to-back full-year losing records for the first time since 1959. The Pirates, with an 82nd win,, finished over .500 for the first time since 2018; if the Allegheny and Monongahela formed the mighty Ohio deep in the heart of Texas rather than Western Pennsylvania, Pittsburgh could be the AL West champs. The Cubs topped the Red Sox at Tampa Bay, a game that loomed with potential postseason impact when the nor’easter approached Fenway Park, yet had none by the time it flew south.
Baseball will go on for eight teams in the Wild Card round, then four of those will meet four others in the League Division Series round. Twelve teams did well for themselves, either through competition or geography. Ours is among the other eighteen. The Mets had their months — 16-12 in May, 15-12 in August — but we learned it wasn’t their year in April, when they went 7-19, which included a big ol’ 0-12 that blotted out the sun for the duration of 2026. From March 26 (too soon to start a season) through September 27 (too soon to end one), the Mets posted a record of 74-88, leaving them and us 14 games from the last available Wild Card and 20 games out of first place in the division. When I looked that up, I realized I hadn’t scanned the Games Behind column all the way down to the Mets’ standing in weeks.
We knew early on the Mets weren’t going anywhere, yet we watched them. I watched or listened to or attended every one of those 162 games in 2026. I saw or heard the exploits of 64 different Mets, tied for the most used in any Met season with 2021. The 2021 season was the year after COVID and there was an epidemic of injuries. I’m not sure what 2026’s excuse was for so much churn, at least until the trade deadline necessitated an infusion of even more new blood. At various times, the Mets added to their roster gentlemen named Dan Hammer, Bryce Conley, and Cameron Weston, yet never let them play. May those fellows not get bogged down in self-esteem issues.
The 2026 New York Mets were a universe that encompassed, at various points, Luis Garcia, Craig Kimbrel, Carl Edwards, Matt Seelinger, Gabriel Arias, and the king of the end of the alphabet, Guillo Zuñiga. Tommy Pham came back. Zack Short came back. MJ Melendez and Eric Wagaman were among us long enough to qualify as relative mainstays. Cristian Pache and Christopher Morel joined us in August and, shockingly, never went away. I rooted at least a little for every last one of them. And I still would have welcomed an appearance from Hammer, Conley, and/or Weston. It’s the marginal details that keep me going when the margin from a playoff berth resides in double-digits.
That delay of one hour on Sunday? It made for a total of 12 hours and 20 minutes spent waiting for the Mets to get through rain or ceremonies or anything that pushed back a start time or interrupted play. How do I know that? I keep track. How do I know about the definitive non-exploits of the Mets who rated DNPs? I keep track. How do I know that Pham from 2023 and Short from 2024 weren’t the only Recidivist Mets in 2026, that Chris Devenski from 2025 also made our scene following a tenure with some other team since initially leaving us? I keep track. Baseball season gives me lots of things to keep track of.
The Mets won on the day A.J. Ewing was born.
The Mets lost on the day Christopher Morel was born.
The Mets won on the day Dan Hammer was born, a piece of info I wrangled just in case I needed it. Not that anybody exactly needs it, but I wouldn’t think of not having it handy.
Hayden Senger, Jonathan Pintaro, Joey Gerber, and Eric Wagaman were each Mets in 2026 and were each born in 1997, yet the 2026 Mets ended their season with not a single Met born in 1997 on their active roster. Pintaro went on the IL over the weekend to make it so.
Previous Mets born in 1997: Ali Sanchez, Grant Hartwig, Ty Adcock, Eric Orze. All moved on from Flushing fairly quickly.
The 1997 Mets surprised us with the statistical opposite of 2026, going 88-74. Perhaps the lack of a sustainable 1997-born Met to date is karma’s payback.
No Met pinch-ran in 2026 more than Tyrone Taylor (9), even though he ran to the North Side of Chicago at the trade deadline. Cristian Pache was the pinch-runner runner-up (6).
No Met was pinch-run for in 2026 more than Francisco Alvarez (7). He nosed out Jorge Polanco (6), who proved too injured to be intermittently replaced on a going basis.
Also, Jorge Polanco apparently reached base in 2026.
I could go on, and I often do, but the marginalia of a season is only part of its charm. Habit is the hugest part, probably. My habit is well-honed after 58 seasons as a fan. My addiction to the Mets started in 1969 when they got me hooked. I stayed hooked. The big stories. The minuscule footnotes. The enormous stars. The roster’s edges. The World Series championships. All the rest of the results.
In 2005 came the blog. That’s a habit, too. Like my Met addiction, I’ve never tried to give it up. Like the Mets, I think the blog’s been mostly good for me. I devote a lot of time to the Mets and a lot of time to processing them for these digital pages. At the instant I press “publish,” it couldn’t be more rewarding. Then, in the minutes following, as I’m sharing the links on social media and such, I wonder if anybody will read it, if anybody will get it, if anybody but me cares about the Mets the way I care about the Mets. Not as much as I care, but in my particular fashion. Then I try to stop asking myself that question and go back and look for typos.
At some point this season, I thought of one of the poignant final exchanges in Breaking Bad, which the New York Times recently rated as the best television show of the 21st century [8], which it can’t be, given that Mad Men exists, but is nonetheless very good. Walter White’s time as the meth kingpin of the American Southwest is coming to an end. His wife Skyler has heard him rationalize too many times how he was doing what he doing for the benefit of his family. She’s not going to hear it this time.
“I did it for me,” he interjected. “I liked it. I was good at it. And…I was really…I was alive.”
Doing this is a helluva drug. I do it for me. But I wouldn’t do it for me if I didn’t think you’re into it, too. So I thank you for whatever extent you take a moment or more to enjoy what we do here. If you come by to tell us, that’s greatly appreciated. If you come by to vent about something bugging you regarding last night’s game or something that went wrong in 1977, well, we appreciate that, too, if differently. Being a part of your Mets life, however we land there, is no small thing. Thank you for letting us in and letting us linger.
To paraphrase Gerry Rafferty, we’ve still got that light in our eye [9] for the New York Mets, all of us. We love this team. Maybe not the 2026 team and many among its 64 who could have been 67 baseball transients, but we love what they do, more when they do it well, but we love that they do it at all. Should a lockout hit, not having them will remind us we accept them under any circumstance. We love being a Mets fan. I’m confident in speaking in the first-person plural here.
We’ve got some good players among the 64 we’ve seen this year, players we’ll see again in the years ahead. When we get a chance, we’ll try, by habit, to make out what they can do, which is to say what we can do. First-person plural is also a helluva drug. Nobody ever refers to a good team’s nucleus, because they don’t have to. A good team’s nucleus is implicit. The Mets aren’t yet a good team, but it feels like there’s a decent nucleus to be built around, a lot of it young, all of it more experienced than it was 162 games ago. There’s enough reason, per Mr. Rafferty again, to believe our day is coming by and by. We still got a long way to go. I’m grateful to be traveling this long road here with you.