Is Atlanta Still in the Division?

Clay Holmes pitched into the seventh inning Saturday night and pitched well. Just three hits and two walks allowed. If Clay wasn’t showing the transcendent stuff of Nolan McLean from Friday night, he came close enough; going deep and being effective must be contagious. Relievers Gregory Soto, Tyler Rogers, and Edwin Diaz stoked no tension in their two-and-two thirds. It’s only fair to shout out the bullpen when the bullpen isn’t making us scream.

Many a Met defended well Saturday night. Tyrone Taylor, whose presence in center field could be described as sorely missed once you were reminded what presence he has, did to Michael Harris what Ron Swoboda did to Brooks Robinson in diving, backhand, you gotta be kidding me, he actually caught it? fashion. Lesser stakes than 1969, similar degree of difficulty. Brett Baty was Brooks-ish with the glove on a couple of potentially tricky plays in the vicinity of third base. And Starling Marte, not your everyday left fielder, made the kind of throw home to gobble up Nacho Alvarez that you’ll take every day of the week and twice on a Saturday night.

Marte was one of several Mets who smacked the stitches off of baseballs during this same festival of Met capability. Starling homered. Pete Alonso homered. Jeff McNeil and Mark Vientos homered twice apiece. That’s a lot of homers, which explains why the Mets scored a lot of runs in their resounding 9-2 victory at Truist Park.

So there’s no doubt, that’s their resounding 9-2 victory at Truist Park over the Braves, which made the entire effort a spectacular Saturday night, for though we are huffing and puffing to keep up with the Phillies (who we trail by six) and attempting to fend off the Reds (who we lead by two-and-a-half), it is the Braves among all National League opponents I most enjoy watching flail. Until Rob Manfred gets his grubby hands on realignment, this is my default all-things-being-equal selection, and it’s possible I’ll stick with it should Atlanta move to some mythical Selig Conference South. The Braves aren’t anywhere near a playoff race as August grows late, yet I still instinctively prefer their losses to those of anybody else in our realm, as long as those losses a) aren’t against the Yankees — hey, I never asked for Interleague play — and b) don’t screw anything up for us…and even in the latter case, specifically as regards their upcoming series against the Phillies, I will have to overcome my hard-earned, deeply ingrained antipathetic instincts toward Atlanta to remember I should want them to win.

When this season began, it seemed essential that the Mets beat out the Braves. As this season has proceeded, the Mets leading the Braves has proven incidental to our larger ambitions. But after the bulk of these past three decades, don’t think it’s not also a delicious bonus.

In the Seventies, I would have said the Cubs were the intramural rival I always wanted to see lose, regardless of won-lost column reverberations. In the Eighties, my NL East wrath transferred to the Cardinals. For too long since, my active — sometimes simmering, sometimes boiling — animus has been directed at the Braves. The Phillies have risen and fallen and risen again to the top of our five-team ranks. The Nationals held divisional sway somewhere in between. I’ve mostly wanted those teams to lose when I’ve needed those teams to lose. It was situational. But I always want the Braves to lose, need hardly being a necessity. It’s been personal.

Envious, spiteful, bitter resentment got my goat and kept tight hold of it? Sure! I don’t believe I must gin up a healthier reason for disdain in a sports sense. They won more than we did over and over again, often in our faces and at our direct expense. That’s plenty reason for grudge maintenance in my book. Everything else is details.

Having established themselves as Beasts of the West in the early 1990s, the Atlanta Braves entered the National League East in 1994 and were solidly in second place the night the lights went out on baseball. They probably weren’t going to catch the Montreal Expos of questionably sainted memory to win the division (they trailed them by six games as of the strike), but you wouldn’t have put it past them. They were certainly in pretty good shape for the brand new Wild Card. The Braves were the Braves even then, which has meant one thing to Mets fans ever since: we were compelled to look up at them.

When the strike was settled in 1995, the Braves went about winning the East. They did the same thing in 1996. Rinse and repeat clear through to 2005. By definition, they finished ahead of everybody in the division for eleven consecutive years, “everybody” encompassing the Mets. Going back to ’94, they’d finished ahead of us all dozen seasons we’d been jumbled together in company with them, Philly, Florida, and Montreal/Washington. A few of those years we finished close enough to them that not finishing ahead of them produced pain that still resounds in the soul. So, yeah, I like when the Braves lose.

Over the three years following 2005, we finished ahead of them, hallelujah. Once it came with tangible reward, the 2006 NL East title, won in a one-team race. The Braves were not a factor. In 2007 and 2008, we infamously did not win the division, falling short late, but at least we didn’t fall short to the Braves. Not that falling short to whom we fell short was much of a consolation prize in the moment, but for our purposes at this moment, it was something. It was the last time for another seven years that the Mets finished ahead of the Braves.

From 2009 through 2014, the retooled Braves — capturing one division title and two Wild Cards — had their moments. The Mets had few, none that included finishing ahead of the Braves. Our crowning standings-related achievement came at the end of that final season, in ’14, when we tied the Braves for second place. They weren’t close to first, which is to say we weren’t close to first, but at least we didn’t have to look up at them. Perhaps looking across at them, with our identical 79-83 records impressing nobody who wasn’t paying close attention, set the stage for our accomplishments in 2015 and 2016. We went to the playoffs twice and they disappeared from the contending map. The Mets came in ahead of the Braves in each of those years. Those are what are known in Met circles as good years. Rare years, but good years.

And that’s been it since we’ve shared a sector. The Mets have finished in front of the Braves exactly five times between 1994 and 2024. There was that self-esteem tie in 2014, plus two other knottings with actual implications, in 2022 and 2024. In 2022, we each won 101 games, but they won the division (their fifth of six straight) on a newly invoked tiebreaker. That rather sucked. In 2024, we each won 89 games and they were rewarded with a higher seed in the same postseason to which we both gained entry. It will be recalled we stunned the Braves in Game 161 to get what we needed, so we convinced ourselves to not much care if they beat us in Game 162 to get what they needed, which they did. But then they disappeared without a Wild Card Series trace and we enjoyed one of those rides of a lifetime runs (we’ve had several) for a couple of weeks. That rather ruled.

I don’t know if our experientially different doubleheader on September 30, 2024, set the stage for what lay ahead, but while we’ve been up and down and are hopefully on our way back up in 2025, they’ve been nothing but down. You wouldn’t necessarily know it from the previous three series the Mets have played versus the Braves this year, but the Braves have been down as hell, and I am so there for it. After Saturday night’s 9-2 romp north of Atlanta, which came on the heels of Friday’s 12-7 thumping, we have built an eleven-game lead over them. The Miami Marlins are a buffer between us and them. It’s a beautiful thing not actively worrying about what the Braves are doing or seethingly resenting what the Braves are doing. I’ve been absolutely loving what the Braves are doing. The Braves are losing like they haven’t lost in ages. They are losing so much that, barring a catastrophe of epic proportions on our side (we’ve had several) and a 33-game resurrection for which scriptures would require rewriting on their side, we will finish ahead of them. At the close of 2025, we will look down on the Braves the way we did in 2006, 2007, 2008, 2015, and 2016 and no other time in modern National League East history.

As manager of the defending league champion New York Giants, Bill Terry needled the downtrodden Dodgers by asking reporters if Brooklyn was still in the league, and lived to regret it when the Dodgers pulled together enough gumption to become spoilers of the Giants’ pennant chances at the end of 1934. Bums skipper Chuck Dressen declared in the summer of 1951, “the Giants is dead,” yet it was his Dodgers who died at the hand of those Giants come the afternoon of October 3. It’s always dangerous for rivals to cackle too soon over the fate of rivals. We have one game left versus Atlanta. It is today. It would be handy to win. It won’t make or break us either way. We’ve lost in dumb and inexplicable fashion to too many other teams to attribute any pending Met demise to the last National League team we traditionally wish to rile up.

For once, I’m throwing caution to the winds of Windy Hill, risking overcharging the Battery, and choosing to conveniently forget that during the sixth game of the 1999 National League Championship Series I spent innings in my Long Island living room singing hosannas to Joneses named Andruw and Larry so they would let their guard down some 900 miles away (because in addition to their top-tier baseball skills, they apparently possessed excellent hearing). The 2025 Braves are headed to their competitive grave, and I’ll be damned if I don’t take at least one moment to figuratively dance on it. Come on, baby, let’s do the Twist, do the Hustle, do whatever dances young people do in the twenty-first century. Just be sure to do it wherever the Braves are buried, which is currently a very distant fourth place in the NL East.