Metsless October

The first week without Mets was predictably bumpy. The first week usually is, because life’s essential rhythm has been massively disrupted. There goes early evening’s certainty. There goes first pitch at 7:10. This year, there went the playoffs. Playoff time is already disruptive vis-à-vis established rhythms, because games start whenever TV says they start, and they’re not aired where you’re used to finding them, but you’ll accept the little differences in exchange for the gratification they bring. It’s the playoffs. It’s all about the little differences. October is the Royale with Cheese of baseball.

But these 2025 playoffs commenced sans Mets. Some Octobers that’s not even an adjustment. This didn’t start as one of those Octobers, not after the Mets hovered in a playoff spot for months on end, yet landed adjacent to the playoffs as afterthoughts rather than squarely in them as participants. All things being equal, you’d rather grind down to the 162nd game with a chance to go further than peter out well ahead of the end of the season — yet when you know for a while you’re not going anywhere, you can skip the part where you can’t believe you don’t have playoff baseball of your own on which to obsess, and just focus on not having any baseball of your own on which to obsess.

I’d see the brackets MLB and its broadcast partners posted on social media, and the Reds logo glared out at me from its little 6-seed corner. That’s where a Mets logo had been tacked to the virtual posterboard most of September. Why didn’t we use stickier tape to keep it attached? Honestly, being officially informed the Reds would be playing the Dodgers was a little insulting. You’re going to hold your party without us? Don’t you remember us being the life of your party last year?

Seasons change. Feelings change. Last year’s party was so much of a blast, I barely needed to be coaxed out the door when it was time for us to go. It did occur to me that it’s never good form to leave before making the most out of a postseason appearance, and maybe I should have more deeply regretted our expulsion following the NLCS, but who expected us to appear in the first place? We’d be back the next time they held one of these shindigs, we could tell ourselves by December of 2024, and we’d appear from first place.

Well, none of that happened. First place got away, and that last Wild Card got away, and I found myself peeking in on the Reds and Dodgers, the Dodgers immediately going about the kicking of the Reds’ asses, which made me feel both a little worse (“tell me we’d any less worthy an 83-win representative”) and a little better (“yeah, we probably weren’t going to beat L.A., anyway”). Soon enough, the playoff round the Mets weren’t quite unmediocre enough to qualify for was over, and the team that qualified ahead of them was out, too.

The League Division Series round — the one that still needs a better name — was on, and it still bugged me we weren’t involved. At least during Cincinnati’s short stay, ESPN’s announcers were obliged to mention the Reds were there because the Mets weren’t. One set later, we had faded further into the background. The Dodgers were still the Dodgers, and the Phillies were still the team that zipped past us by August. Anticipating Philadelphia’s first postseason game, I thought maybe seeing them still playing wouldn’t disgust me, for all the reasons I usually conceive for thinking I don’t innately hate the Phillies as much as I innately hate some other teams. Then I actually saw the Phillies, and I wondered what the hell I was thinking, because I really innately hate the sight of the Phlllies. I disdain the Dodgers, too, but they’re 3,000 miles away. The Phillies sit too close for rationalization.

Honestly, I don’t care for either of them (or very much for any National League team that gets to keep playing when we don’t), but on Saturday, when the Dodgers rallied from behind to stun Citizens Bank Park into delicious silence, I clapped not a little. Whatever happens the rest of the way, my anti-rooting interests in this quadrant of the postseason, the one the Mets would be in had they won one more stupid game, are clear.

Saturday evening was probably when the disappearance of the Mets resonated the deepest. I was preparing a turkey and avocado panini as I do virtually every Saturday evening, which from April through September usually means the Mets are on while I’m getting down to panini-ing. A lot of 4:10 starts at home, so the game is winding down by the time I’m messing around in the kitchen. Or maybe the Mets are on the road and just getting down to their own business. If they’re out west, I’m looking forward to whatever it is they’re about to do. This past Saturday evening, no Mets. The panini was satisfying, but it was missing something. I was missing something.

Sunday morning was different. I was out running a few errands and noticed somebody in a Mets shirt. I was wearing a Mets shirt, too. That other Mets fan was on a bike while I was driving my car, so he probably couldn’t see what I had on, and it didn’t seem worth the trouble of exchanging Let’s Go Metses, given that he needed to concentrate on his side of the road like I had to on mine. But I was thinking it was nice that although our shared team had gone down in fairly embarrassing fashion one week earlier, here we were, unashamed and unabashed in our clothing selection. There’ve been Octobers when I asked myself why the bleep I’m out repping this team of mine. Often it feels like courting grief, especially when another local team is still active. Three years ago, sometime after we were eliminated by San Diego, I had my Mets hoodie on and someone with whom I crossed paths offered me his LGM simpatico. I think my reaction was a polite version of “yeah, but they suck.”

That was 2022, which granted us postseason baseball, which was a blessing that morphed into a curse. When it was over, it wasn’t like 2024. I was one big walking recrimination that autumn, incapable of imagining I was going to dive soulfirst into another Mets season when Spring rolled around. Guess what happened: Spring rolled around and I rolled with it. Sometimes it defies belief you’re going to ramp up anew, but there you are, ramped and believing, having compartmentalized whatever made you miserable last fall.

Nice guys finish seventh on a tiebreaker.

Pressure may be a privilege, but on the morning after the first games of the LDS round, out on those errands, I realized that if the Mets were in playoff mode, I totally would have tooted my horn at that bicyclist, and we’d have given each other the thumbs up rather than some other finger. Yet before I could begin to miss the Mets and miss the Mets being in the playoffs, I thought about that churning I get in my stomach when the Mets are immersed in postseason play, and I realized, to my surprise, that I didn’t miss that part of an orange-and-blue October at all. I’d gladly give my postseason acids over to a Mets team that deserved them. This one didn’t.

I continue on as a Mets fan, as we all do, even if they are irrevocably idle. I like being reminded I am a Mets fan. I put on that shirt voluntarily Sunday rather than stuffing it back in the drawer from whence it emerged. When I thought I was done unpacking my groceries a bit past noon, the trunk wasn’t slammed shut a second when I said, “I think I left one soda in there.” My wife responded, “Did you just say you left Juan Soto in there?”

“What would Juan Soto being doing in our trunk?”

That exchange made me smile on contact. Being reminded the Mets still exist makes me smile in October when the only evidence we have of them are euphemistic personnel announcements and quick explainers from national voices who wish to clarify why exactly it’s the Reds who are getting stomped by the Dodgers. No game yesterday and no game today? Not ideal, but no antacids required. Sunday afternoon, I had the Giants losing to the Saints, with glimpses of the Jets losing to the Cowboys, and I was sports-sated if not particularly jubilant. Sunday night, I settled in with the Mariners and Tigers in the one ALDS I can bear to watch (I know the other one is going swimmingly, but my tuning into it strikes me as a no-win situation) and, for whatever reason, I looked something up on the 2025 Mets’ Baseball-Reference page. There they were again, in all their statistical glory or lack thereof, all of those 2025 Mets whose cause had been my cause for six months, right up to one week earlier. Not only the name-brand Mets who’ve bubbled up in my head during the past week, like One Soda, but the ones who had ceased occurring to me on a daily or hourly basis the way they do when I know there’s gonna be a 7:10 first pitch, or some final pitches as the panini hour beckons.

I skimmed their names, remembered how they performed, and I didn’t smile, not until I realized I was quite content to no longer be watching them or considering them in any kind of depth. I still love the institution, the entity, the overall progress I believe the franchise has made from where they were prior to current ownership, the genuine sense that things will sooner or later end in a less disappointing manner. But the 2025 Mets I had lately spent so much time dwelling on were now the 2025 Mets I was delighted to have moved on from. I didn’t hate any of the players whose names I skimmed, merely how they played as a unit. I will hope that can be corrected in 2026. The playoffs of the moment can be the playoffs in the Mets’ absence. Next year can be next year when the Mets are present, and I plan to be right there with them. This October, I can live just fine Metslessly.

Not that I have a choice on the Metslessness. It’s the coping that’s optional.