Good Peripherals

Sunday’s victories were small, specific, and personal. Taking the train in from a different station and everything clicking as a result. Passing through the gate unaccosted and being handed the day’s “first 15,000” premium. Instigating several pregame encounters with total strangers, reminding me fans at a ballpark share a special bond when we start our day in proximity to one another. An unexpected hi and how are ya to a couple of familiar faces. A few planned hellos that came off hitchless. Nine innings alongside someone who totally got what I was talking about and vice-versa. Understanding summer was ending, fall was coming, and dressing to handle both. Going to the final regularly scheduled Mets home game of the season for the thirtieth consecutive non-pandemic year.

Check, check, check. Except it’s not really a matter of fulfilling tasks on a to-do list. I’ll shepherd a streak to keep it alive, but the streak has to be something I want to ride until I can’t no more. Every Closing Day since 1995 still going as of 2025 is my streak of streaks. I wouldn’t have envisioned that stretching out thirty years ago on the Sunday I simply decided I had to be on hand for Game 162. I wouldn’t have thought to think about it.

-30-

The Mets of the moment as a ballclub are the essence of meh, and that might be a charitable interpretation. The Mets as an entity continue to lure me to their environs year after year, multiple times per year. This year, it was nine games, not a lot historically (I peaked at 44 in 2008), but it was enough. Besides, I finished strong, with three during the final homestand. Before Sunday, the Mets had gone 4-4 since settling in at Citi Field for a week-plus. Before Sunday, my 2025 record at Citi Field was 4-4.

We each needed a win to get over .500. Neither of us got it.

The Mets have bigger problems than righting a small sample size. The Mets have a chance to stop playing baseball by the end of this week, which, if that’s their goal, they made considerable progress toward it Sunday. And Saturday. And too many days to catalogue at the moment. From however many games ahead they’d been however long ago it was, the Mets have fallen an invisible percentage point behind the Cincinnati Reds for the last Wild Card spot available to them. They’re tied with the Reds, but Cincy has the tiebreaker based on the Mets having played too many games versus them the way they played too many games versus the Nationals, the way they’ve played too many games versus everybody, regardless of what the standings suggest a team is.

The standings suggest the Washington Nationals are a last-place club. Wouldn’t have known it this weekend, let alone in the series we played against them last month. The Mets treat everybody like a contender. Everybody except themselves.

That the Mets would find several bizarre ways to effect a 3-2 loss to the Nationals did not seem out of the realm of possibility Sunday morning. I wasn’t counting on it happening, but had I been informed in advance that…

Jacob Young would rob Brett Baty of an extra-base hit by letting a ball bounce out of his glove and off his foot before securing it cleanly…

and later Jacob Young would rob Francisco Alvarez of a home run with a leap and grab that appeared relatively mundane compared to the Baty play…

and earlier Cedric Mullins would get on base because the previous day’s designated dasher of destiny Daylen Lile would not hold onto a ball Mullins hit, yet Mullins would not advance while on base, because he had no clue at all what was going on (the ball was loose and Lile was down)…

and that Mullins, stuck at first rather than advanced to second, would get himself doubled off imminently (had he only been on second, he could have gotten himself doubled off there)…

and that the Nationals would see the Mets’ piggybacking efforts from Sean Manaea and Clay Holmes and raise them — and squelch Mets batters — with two starting pitchers with far higher ERAs than ours…

and whatever else the Mets were going to do badly or not do adequately…

well, I wouldn’t have been surprised, but I wouldn’t have stayed away.

We do love our Mets, for whatever reason we love our Mets. The Mets say 3,182,057 of us loved them or what they were supposed to do enough to buy a ticket to see them in 2025, the highest paid attendance in Citi Field history. We loved giving Pete Alonso, Starling Marte, and Edwin Diaz extra hearty ovations, aware, whether for business reasons or competitive reasons, we might not see them in front of us as Mets again. We nodded empathically at the surprisingly fresh recollection of the 1970 Pirates opportunistically trading for Mudcat Grant while the 1970 Mets added only Ron Herbel and Dean Chance (though that might have been just me responding to a very particular and appropriate prompt from my buddy Ken, who always has a few veteran moves up his sleeve). We allowed ourselves to get our hopes up in the ninth despite the previous eight innings indicating our hopes should stay stashed in our hoodie pockets. We lived up to what George Vecsey wrote about us in 1989’s A Year in the Sun:

“Met fans can be vulgar and unruly, but they have endowed that franchise with amazing goodwill and energy since the team was dropped on New York’s doorstep in 1962.”

Citi Field has mostly tamed the Shea Stadium out of us. We have our outbursts, but they’re not sustained. We mutter rather than maraud after our cheers prove less than inspirational. We show up willingly and joyfully. We go home undefeated. Thanks to a torpid stairway trudge from Promenade to Excelsior dovetailing with construction-altered LIRR timetables, my train strategy on the way out couldn’t execute as well as it had on the way in. Hence, I rode the 7 Super Express past Woodside all the way to Times Square and opted for the 1 to Penn Station before heading east. Lots of Mets fans did more or less same. There weren’t riots in the concourses over the Mets losing by one and the Reds winning by one. There wasn’t audible snarling before our tracks were announced. I did find a couple of empty mini vodka bottles on the three-seater I chose to plop myself down in, but I strongly believe those had been consumed by somebody else with a different agenda (perhaps Meadowlands-bound pilgrims in preparation for the evening’s Giants loss).

Yeah, the Mets are still a fun entity, especially when you share them with the likes of those with whom I shared them at Citi Field Sunday and throughout the week and all season. The Mets as a ballclub will be more fun if they commence a six-game winning streak in Chicago Tuesday night and cross their fingers the Reds lose once. I think they know that. Now they should just go do that.