A Real Wild Card

My whole life as a sports fan, I’ve seen teams seek “Wild Card” spots in playoffs and understood Wild Card to mean “not a division winner,” without ever really stopping to think of the term’s implication away from sports. To be certain I had it straight, I went to the dictionary (well, a dictionary site) so I could cite the definition of wild card accurately. It is “an unknown or unpredictable factor”.

Based on what the good folks at merriam-webster.com have to say about the matter, the New York Mets loom as the ideal wild card for the forthcoming postseason, because I can’t think of another contender whose actions from one game to the next answer so precisely to their dictionary definition. You never know what the Mets will do in the course of nine innings — even when you acknowledge that you never know what any team will do in the course of nine innings — and you’d be courting frustration if you attempted to predict it. Inning to inning, there’s no telling who the Mets will be or what the Mets will do. Within an individual inning, the outcome is beyond anyone’s educated guess.

If MLB were to give out Wild Card spots based on capriciousness, the Mets would be a lock. They give out Wild Card spots based on best records among non-division leaders. The Mets aren’t a lock, but even after losing the kind of game on Saturday it appeared they’d come back to win after appearing certain to lose, they appear to be in solid shape, five games up on the Reds for the final playoff berth. The Reds — who have three with us next weekend and a tough schedule in general — have been their own kind of meh lately and therefore haven’t been able to close in on the Met brand of meh. At the rate Cincy is going, they might fall behind any of three National League clubs that sold at the trade deadline. If you can’t beat out towel-throwers, you might not have what it takes to stay in the ring.

Appearances are in the eye of the beholder, however, for the Mets always appear to be something different. Saturday’s comedown followed romping on Friday; falling flat on Thursday; emphatically shutting out the team they’re chasing and effecting a series sweep on Wednesday; a thriller of a win on Tuesday; a romp on Monday; epitomizing not quite enough Sunday, a break-it-open-late thumping the night before; an all-around stomping that would have been more fully enjoyable had the bullpen not given away a bunch of runs toward the end the night before that; and failing to be competitive versus a last-place team the afternoon before that. Go back a little further, through splitting the first two in Washington and taking the last two from Seattle, and you have losing 14 of 16, which came after winning seven in a row, which came after a 7-6 stretch that surrounded the All-Star break, which seemed to lift them from a 3-14 descent, which negated a 15-3 surge, which we thought erased a 2-6 stumble, which took the edge off going 5-1, which made us think going 2-5 in the seven games prior was an aberration.

The aberration may have been the 19-6 spurt the Mets ran off on the heels of their sluggish 2-3 start to the season. At that point, on April 29, they were 21-9. Playing .700 ball figured to be unsustainable, but they looked good enough to do great things. Their few losses in that period seemed accidental, as if only they would focus just a little harder, they could go mostly undefeated from there to eternity.

Baseball seasons last longer than that when the winning isn’t reliable, and the Mets, despite sitting five clear of a playoff spot and ten above break-even, can’t be counted on to ride any form of consistency. Banking those wins early provided the foundation for the indecisiveness they’ve chosen since. Win a few? Lose a few? Lose a few more? No, wait, we like winning…we think… It may not be as conscious as all that, but it might as well be. It would at least explain why from April 30 through August 30, they’ve gone 52-54.

There are reasons within results, of course. There are reasons they lost, 11-8, to the Marlins on Saturday. The first reason was their most reliable starting pitcher over the course of 2025, All-Star David Peterson, couldn’t get outs when he needed them in the first and third innings, the latter a frame he didn’t escape. The second reason was the fixation Met defense has developed with fumbling. Perhaps they watched too much NFL preseason, but Mets with gloves the last few nights proceed as if those items on their hands are merely fashion accessories. The third reason, if we fast-forward toward the final third of the game, centered on an inability to hit with runners in scoring position, a discipline at which the Mets were suddenly excelling until they weren’t.

In between the bad parts — the falling behind, 5-0; the falling behind again, 8-2; the not completing the storming from behind once it got to 8-8 — there was swell stuff. There was Juan Soto giving off bargain vibes. Homered twice. Stole twice. Walked twice. Also ran the bases not brilliantly early, but you don’t necessarily wish to ding a 35/25 man for his imperfections. Mark Vietnos remained on fire, going deep for the sixth time in his last eight games. Francisco Lindor led off the home first with one of his keynote specialties as well. The Mets have been a home run juggernaut in August. They’ve never hit more in a calendar month, a span in which they are 11-16 with one game to go.

After Peterson all but took them out of Saturday’s game, yeoman reliever Chris Devenski and ageless lefty Brooks Raley combined with a mighty offense to get them back in it. Then Tyler Rogers made life a little more difficult, but Gregory Soto held firm. Except by then, the offense had gone back into sleep mode at the absolute worst time (runner on third, nobody out in the seventh) and never woke up. Edwin Diaz couldn’t keep it razor-close in the top of the ninth, and Cedric Mullins couldn’t extend a potential tying rally in the bottom of the ninth.

The Mets transcend streakiness. They’re not riding a rollercoaster as much as getting on and off it at every turn. One inning they’ve got their problems licked, the next inning they’re getting licked by the likes of the Marlins. This is a team that can scare and defeat any team it sees on its way to or in October, just as it can lose a series at any moment to any also-ran and not have it feel like a fluke or “just one of those things” that happens when you play 162 games. They’ve played 136 games to date. They have yet to offer a coherent vision of who they are.

But they have gone 9-5 in their last 14, which indicates they are capable of not giving up their five-game lead for the last playoff spot, and suggests that should they land in the playoffs, they can go 13-9 should they earn the opportunity to play every possible game presented to them. A curated 13-9 wins them a championship, but they can’t mount flash-mob losing streaks, because there will be no coming back from them. Two out of three in the NLWCS. Three out of five in the NLDS. Four out of seven in the NLCS and WS. It’s too soon to ladle out all that alphabet soup, but this is, somehow, a championship contender.

First, go 1-0 today and start fresh tomorrow. They’re always starting fresh the next day, as if they have no idea how they did what they did yesterday. I certainly don’t.