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ABOUT US
Faith and Fear in Flushing made its debut on Feb. 16, 2005, the brainchild of two longtime friends and lifelong Met fans.
Greg Prince discovered the Mets when he was 6, during the magical summer of 1969. He is a Long Island-based writer, editor and communications consultant. Contact him here.
Jason Fry is a Brooklyn writer whose first memories include his mom leaping up and down cheering for Rusty Staub. Check out his other writing here.
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by Greg Prince on 25 September 2025 11:27 am So often tempted to refer to any given Met loss as a “microcosm” of the portion of the season that has been defined by the club’s long, gradual decline from surefire playoff participant to accidental late-September survivor, I wondered if the bigger picture from which microcosm is derived is technically referred to as a “cosm”. It is not. The word I was looking for was “macrocosm,” though cosm would be more satisfying, given that it is a four-letter word, and certainly these Mets inspire a string of those.
I found Wednesday night’s 10-3 debacle versus the Cubs at Wrigley field just another piece of the Met macrocosm that has expanded out into the universe day by day, defeat by defeat, debacle by debacle, interrupted only by the anomalous wins that have — along with various Red and Diamondback inadequacies —mysteriously kept this 81-77 Met team clutching the final Wild Card position in the National League.
The final Wild Card position in the National League is a diplomatic way to say sixth-best record in the circuit. This is what is being fought over. Or actively eschewed by three so-called contenders, if we were suspicious types. The Reds lost in eleven innings Wednesday night. The Diamondbacks also lost in eleven. The Mets didn’t bother making it look close. If trying not to win is the actual aim of this clumsy scrum, the Mets haven’t yet proven themselves quite good enough to intentionally blow it.
We’ll take it on faith they were trying to win on Wednesday night and were not up to the task on almost any front. Starting pitching, via the Jonah Tong from a couple of outings ago, was not viable. Relief pitching, which included a couple of starters, was not effective. Defense, save for one sweet throw home from the reactivated Tyrone Taylor, was mostly absent. Hitting, sans Francisco Alvarez’s best longball efforts, lacked even momentary impact. The manager said some version of “we’re going through it right now” afterwards. That’s one of Carlos Mendoza’s pet phrases, like “traffic” to refer to baserunners and “we’ve got to be better” to refer to the state of things. All the Mets do is go through it. They’ve yet to come out of it.
A microcosm implies the elements of a situation have been distilled into a handy snack pack that allows closer examination and deeper understanding. Nah, losing as the Mets lost on Wednesday night is just one more glob of erratic futility that should have ended the Mets weeks, maybe months ago. But the sixth-best record is still out there for the taking, and the Mets still inexplicably hold it. Stave off explanations for four more games, accidentally win enough of them, and, in the face of the mysteries of the macrocosm, this baseball team actually becomes a bona fide playoff participant.
Will the wonders of the universe every cease? I guess we’ll find out by Sunday.
by Jason Fry on 24 September 2025 12:25 am In the bottom of the fourth, the Cubs tacked on a run when Pete Alonso couldn’t get properly set to take a Jeff McNeil throw from second. The error properly belonged to Pete but went on McNeil’s ledger, becoming his second miscue in as many plays.
More importantly, it made the score 6-1 Cubs, with what looked like a lot of bad road ahead. The Mets hadn’t exactly covered themselves in glory so far Tuesday night: David Peterson was terrible, looking again like a pitcher whose tank is on E, and didn’t make it out of the second; Juan Soto misplayed a flyball into a two-run double; and Francisco Alvarez allowed two steals while concentrating on framing and/or looking for rulings on checked swings.
It was not a crisp game, to say the very least — in fact, it looked a lot like too many games the Mets have played of late, lackadaisical and dispiriting. If you turned it off then and found something better to do with your night, hey, no judgments — that certainly looked like the right call.
I stayed with it, for a few not necessarily related reasons.
- The Mets had hit some balls hard, only to be victimized by buzzard’s luck and solid Cub defense, and I stubbornly thought that might prove important somehow.
- I was keenly aware that just six games remained on the regular-season schedule, and that getting to watch a bad game is marginally better than having no game to watch.
- I was mad at the Mets — my default state since mid-June — and figured I’d glower and mutter at them as long as they were around to absorb my wrath.
- I’m a Mets fan, which one could argue is a terrible life choice, but it’s too late for me. Watching the Mets is what I do.
Seiya Suzuki hit a grounder to Francisco Lindor, who flipped it to McNeil, who didn’t do anything requiring glowering and muttering this time. The Mets came out for the fifth and didn’t look all that different than they had so far — McNeil popped up with Starling Marte on first and then Alvarez hit a grounder to Dansby Swanson at short. A tricky hop, but one Swanson had corralled innumerable times before. It was going to be a double play, ending the inning and leaving the Mets with more misfires behind them than chances left ahead of them.
Except the ball went under Swanson’s glove.
With the Mets given new life, Lindor grounded out to cut the Cubs’ lead from five to an “eh that’s a little better” four; Soto walked; and Pete Alonso hit a sizzling drive to right that struck just below the basket for a very long RBI single that shrunk the deficit to a “hey maybe” three. Craig Counsell summoned Taylor Rogers, twin brother of the Mets’ confounding Tyler Rogers, to face Brandon Nimmo.
Nimmo has become something of a funny hitter since he made the decision to trade OBP for power. He can look hopelessly out of sync for a string of ABs, seemingly constantly on the back foot, but then one swing reminds you of how dangerous he can be — witness his bolt against the Braves in the Day After Game last year, or the one he hit off Wandy Peralta last week. Rogers’ second pitch to Nimmo was a sweeper that sat middle-middle; Nimmo connected for one of those line drives that’s immediately and obviously gone, with its trajectory suggesting it was struck by someone standing on a high-dive platform.
Just like that the Mets had tied it; an inning later they untied it on a Lindor single off Drew Pomeranz that capped a two-out rally. The Mets somehow had wrested a 7-6 lead away from the Cubs; the question now was whether they could keep it.
The answer, alas, was no: In the bottom of the inning Tyler Rogers relieved Gregory Soto with two out and a runner on first; Rogers then allowed a walk and an RBI single to Suzuki for a 7-7 tie. You may recall that the Rogers twins were traded on the same day ahead of the deadline, with Tyler going from the Giants to the Mets and Taylor going from the Reds to the Pirates, who then flipped him to the Cubs. “Mom was having a day,” Tyler said, which was amusing; one assumes Mrs. Rogers had a less amusing day Tuesday, as she had to watch both twins spit the bit in key spots.
It was 7-7, and given the Mets’ serial failings on defense and in relief, I was just holding on for dear life. The seventh passed without events of note and in the eighth Alvarez came up against Caleb Thielbar with Luisangel Acuna as the go-ahead run at first.
Alvarez has looked far more patient of late, largely resisting the urge to expand the strike zone. He ignored two Thielbar pitches just off the strike zone, took a called strike as Acuna stole second, then watched a four-seamer just outside, or at least that’s how it was called. Thielbar’s next four-seamer was in the middle of the plate and Alvarez didn’t miss it, sending it screaming into the bleachers and doing a little screaming of his own before show-ponying his way around the bases.
The Mets led 9-7, and the question was how they were going to get six outs. I hoped they’d go back to Brooks Raley, who’d thrown only five pitches in escaping the seventh, but the top of the Cubs’ lineup was nigh, and Carlos Mendoza opted to ask Edwin Diaz for a six-out save. It was the right call: Diaz looked borderline unhittable, riding a sharp slider to strike out two in the eighth and all three in the ninth.
The Mets won and the Reds finally lost, which puts the Mets back in the wild card, one up on Cincinnati and Arizona. A wonderful win, goodness knows — the team fought back instead of folding their tent, showing a defiance too little in evidence in this strange season. Even a win like that can’t erase everything that we’ve endured: The Mets remain fundamentally untrustworthy, both unpredictable and unreliable. But at least they’ve earned another day to try and change our minds.
by Greg Prince on 22 September 2025 1:47 pm 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.
by Greg Prince on 21 September 2025 10:05 am Having had them imposed on the game we love for only four seasons, we National League fans remain mostly unfamiliar with the behavior of designated hitters during games. We know they come to bat once per order, but unlike their teammates in the lineup, they disappear from our view and our thoughts until they stroll to the plate again. Most DHs, according to my sources (you can do your own research), hang back in usually restricted areas behind the dugout. The word their guild has put out is they’re in the batting cage, swinging away, staying loose, preparing to unleash one mighty swing. In fact, they’re usually playing solitaire, or checking their messages, or filing their nails. A few considerate ones arrange a postgame snack for the guys who’ve played hard in the field all day. David Ortiz was legendary for that, blending sweet and savory flavors that tasted just right, whether the Red Sox had won or lost.
Like any self-respecting designated hitter, Daylen Lile was going about his personal business in the clubhouse of the last-place Washington Nationals early Saturday evening, in his case catching up on his reading — the massive works of Rick Perlstein have been his seasonlong project — when he felt a tap on his shoulder. He figured Miguel Cairo had sent one of his coaches in to remind him he was scheduled to hit in the top of the eleventh. Daylen Lile didn’t need to be reminded by one of the manager’s lieutenants. DHs come equipped with a special pager that vibrates to alert them to their appointments, similar to what restaurants hand patrons when their table is ready. Like the iPads on the bench, it’s a dedicated MLB technology.
The tap, however, did not come from a Nationals coach. It was a figure in a faded orange and blue golf shirt who addressed the visiting DH.
“Daylen Lile?”
“Yes?”
“I require your help.”
Daylen Lile thought this was a misunderstanding. “You must want one of the clubhouse kids. I’m a ballplayer with the other team. Well, I’m a designated hitter. It’s like a ballplayer, but I only play half-ball.”
“No,” the figure said. “I know who you are, and I know what you do. You’re the one I need.”
Daylen Lile slipped a bookmark into his massive copy of The Invisible Bridge and stood up. He was confused.
“What do you want from me?”
“Daylen Lile, I am Destiny.”
“Destiny? Like that’s your name? Isn’t that more a girl’s name? I mean no judgments, man…”
“Destiny is just an identifier I introduce myself with so a ballplayer, even a designated hitter like you, can understand me completely. Consider me, Destiny, something akin to a state of mind.”
“What do you mean?”
“Daylen Lile, I am the Destiny that has been in the Mets’ own hands all season, and I am thisclose to slipping out.”
Daylen Lile wasn’t any clearer on what was going on.
“Look, Mr. Destiny…”
“No need for formality. You can just call me Destiny. Call me Des if you like.”
“Destiny, I don’t even know if you’re supposed to be in here during a game. I only get to be in here during a game because I’m a DH and half the time I serve no purpose.”
“Daylen Lile, you are to serve a great purpose to baseball in the coming minutes. You might even say it is your destiny.”
Daylen Lile looked around. No other Nats personnel or Mets staff was in sight. He saw no choice but to listen.
“Daylen Lile, I am the Destiny that has been in the Mets’ own hands all season…”
“Yeah, you said that.”
“And now I shall continue to say it. The New York Mets have treated me with utter disdain.”
Daylen Lile didn’t have any fewer questions as a result of this explanation.
“If you’re in the Mets’ own hands, Destiny, what are you doing in here right now?”
“Major League Baseball instructs clubs to put their destiny aside once a game starts, so I snuck over from across the way hoping to find you. And now I have found you to ask you to do me a favor — a solid, if you will.”
“What’s that?”
“Get me out of the Mets’ own hands.”
“Huh?”
“I don’t want to be in the Mets’ own hands anymore. At first, I was willing to go along with them happily. I have had a good relationship with the Mets historically, at least in small spurts. These current Mets are not a bad bunch of guys and they’re not a bad bunch of ballplayers.”
“I can see that. We usually have trouble with them, especially up here.”
“Fine, fine gentlemen, really. But when it comes to me being in their own hands, they are clumsy, they are mindless, and it is clear to me that they just don’t care about what their destiny will be.”
“Well, yeah, I guess they have had a tough couple of months, and certainly today’s game…”
Destiny slapped its forehead. “Oh, Daylen Lile, if you only knew. The record the Mets have had since the middle of June! The recurring seven-game losing streaks! The sense that ‘everything’s gonna be fine now’ when they win a couple, the constant refrains of ‘we know we’re better than this’ when they don’t, excusing themselves because the ‘other team’ has good players, too.”
“You know, other teams do have good players,” Daylen Lile interjected. “I mean our record might not show it, but we have good players.”
“Of course you do, Daylen Lile, but does your team have Juan Soto?”
“We used to, I think.”
“Do you have Pete Alonso and Francisco Lindor?”
“OK, I get your point. I guess that is a good team they have over there, or at least they have some big-name players. It’s not surprising that they might go to the playoffs this year.”
“Might? MIGHT?”
Daylen Lile didn’t mean to upset Destiny but apparently had. “Did you know this same New York Mets club your Washington Nationals are playing at this very moment used to lead this division.”
Daylen Lile couldn’t remember back that far, but it was true. Once upon a time, the Mets were comfortably ahead of the Philadelphia Phillies, the same Philadelphia Phillies who clinched the National League East earlier in the week with little stress.
“And, Daylen Lile,” Destiny continued. “Did you know that the teams that have taken turns closing in on the Mets for the third — not the first, not the second, but the third — Wild Card were once each so distant in the Mets’ rearview mirror that no Mets fan except for the most paranoid among them bothered to monitor the scores of their games?”
This was news to Daylen Lile, who played for a team so far out of contention that he had to confess he didn’t exactly know who was where in the standings. As a designated hitter, he tried not to bother himself with the details of a baseball season, but he had thought he’d heard some of the players who play the field saying something about the Cincinnati Reds, the Arizona Diamondbacks, and the San Francisco Giants apparently gaining ground on the New York Mets lately. And when he was in the dugout, Daylen Lile had noticed the Mets not playing a very crisp game this very Saturday.
“Oh, Daylen Lile,” Destiny implored. “Consider what has gone on around you only today.”
“Yeah, we’re playing ’em tough!”
“Young Daylen Lile! I’m talking about the Mets! Their wild pitches!. Their errors! Their wasting of another fine effort from young Nolan McLean! Their failure to generate a single run until the eighth inning! Their tying the game in the ninth but failing to win it when they had the bases loaded and one out! Daylen Lile, how many times this season do you suppose the Mets have entered a ninth inning trailing and came back to win?”
Daylen shrugged. “Gotta be a few, right? That’s a good ballclub, and besides, everybody lucks into one of those now and then.”
“NEVER, DAYLEN LILE! NEVER HATH THE 2025 NEW YORK METS COME BACK TO WIN A BASEBALL GAME IN WHICH THEY HAVE TRAILED THEIR OPPOSITION AS THEY ENTERED THE NINTH INNING!”
Daylen Lile could see this was a big deal to Destiny. “It was right there for the taking in the bottom of the ninth,” Destiny detailed. “Mendoza was being uncommonly aggressive. Pinch-hitting his backup catcher because he saw a better matchup. Pinch-running for his backup catcher when that worked. Getting lucky when Lindor was hit, but not hit too much. Soto placing the ball perfectly. Siri…”
With that there was a female voice audible in the Washington Nationals clubhouse.
“Yes, I’m Siri. What can I help you with today/”
“HUSH SIRI, I WASN’T ADDRESSING YOU!” Destiny demanded of the Artificial Intelligence application that only wished to assist. “Sorry, Daylen Lile. Jose Siri has played so little this year, that the devices at Citi Field still think we’re asking for the other Siri when we invoke the little-used outfielder. Anyway, where was I?”
“Um, Soto placed the ball perfectly…”
“Yes, thank you, Daylen Lile. Juan Soto singled, Jose…you know his last name…dashes home from second, the game is tied, the Mets have runners on second and first, then Lindor and Soto execute a double-steal, Alonso is intentionally walked. How did they not win it then and there?”
“Our pitcher is pretty good.”
“Daylen Lile, your pitcher is not the point. The point is I am Destiny, I have been in the Mets’ own hands throughout this endless season of dismay and disappointment and downright disgust, and the Mets still don’t know how to deploy me. Nimmo strikes out! Marte strikes out! They don’t win in the ninth! Even with the inane automatic runner and getting away with what was probably batter’s interference in the tenth inning, they couldn’t score!”
“Listen, I feel ya, Destiny. But I’m still not sure what this has to do with me.”
“Daylen Lile, you are due up second in the top of the eleventh inning.”
“I know. Hitting against Diaz is gonna be tough.”
“Daylen Lile, you will not hit against Edwin Diaz.”
“Miggy’s taking me out? But I’m slashing better than eight-hundred!”
“No, Daylen Lile, you remain in the game. Carlos Mendoza has taken out Edwin Diaz.”
“What? But that dude threw only…couldn’t have been too many pitches.”
“Edwin Diaz threw only seven pitches in the tenth inning.”
“He was nasty, from what I could tell on the monitors in here when I looked up from my book. Did he pitch last night or something? You can’t overuse your closer, you know.”
“He got up in the bullpen briefly. That will be Carlos Mendoza’s excuse eventually.”
“You can tell the future, Destiny?”
“I can tell what Carlos Mendoza is going to say. He says the same things all the time. And I can tell you now that you will face Tyler Rogers in the eleventh inning.”
“Rogers isn’t bad.”
“Daylen Lile, this is not a matter of one reliever being adequate on a given day. This is about a journey in which I, Destiny, would gladly be with the Mets if the Mets would have me, I mean REALLY have me and embrace me as theirs. But they mishandle me so. I want nothing more to do with them.”
“Did you bet on the Reds or something? I keep noticing commercials where a lady in a bubble bath says you can do that.”
“This is not about the ‘Reds,’ Daylen Lile. The Reds are only a vessel for what is due the Mets for how they have approached 2025, for how they have shamed me while all but letting me go of their own volition.”
“Fine. I’m gonna hit against Rogers. What am I supposed to do.?”
“It is your destiny, Daylen Lile.”
“Huh?”
“Swing hard, Daylen Lile. A runner will be on base. Swing hard, Daylen Lile. Be bold, and mighty forces will come to your aid.”
“Am I gonna hit one out of the park?”
“You don’t have to, Daylen Lile. Just hit it to deep center, and your destiny will take care of itself. Someday, The Daylen Lile Game will be spoken of in varying tones up and down the Northeast Corridor.”
“Um, OK.” Daylen Lile felt his DH pager vibrate, so he grabbed his batting gloves and prepared to return to the visitors’ dugout. “One thing, though, Destiny…”
“Yes, Daylen Lile?”
“Even if I do what you say I am destined to do in the top of the eleventh, the Mets will have a chance to bat in the bottom of the inning. We already used our best reliever for two innings. Isn’t it possible that my teammates in the field won’t stop them from winning?”
“Daylen Lile, how long have you been in the league?”
“I’m a rookie.”
“Oh, Daylen Lile. You have much to learn in the way of the New York Mets and their conduct within seasons like 2025. Now just go out there and help release me from the Mets’ own hands. I am Destiny, and at the rate they are going, I cannot be there for them much longer.”
by Jason Fry on 20 September 2025 8:57 am Defiance isn’t really in our wheelhouse as Mets fans.
Hope? Sure. The sunny version sometimes, though generally that’s only seen in the abstract. Stubborn, scared, trampled but still inexhaustible hope? Now we’re talking — whenever Tug McGraw‘s famous YA GOTTA BELIEVE is invoked, I hear not just the hope but also the desperation — the burden being carried by GOTTA. (To say nothing of the snark — McGraw was totally mocking the highly mockable M. Donald Grant, and despite later mythmaking, at the beginning that’s all he was doing.)
But hey, we contain multitudes. Sometimes defiance gets its day.
In the top of the third Monday night against the Nats, the Mets turned in the kind of inning that contributed to their long post-June swoon. Brandon Sproat started off taking aim at his own foot, walking Paul DeJong and throwing away a little swinging bunt by Jorge Alfaro, with DeJong scoring after Juan Soto didn’t show particular interest in backing up the play. That tied the game, but just wait: CJ Abrams doubled to bring home Alfaro; Josh Bell hit a drive to left-center that hit Jose Siri in the glove and popped out, scoring Abrams; and someone named Daylen Lile hit a single to center that Siri approached with the kind of route generally taken by foraging rodents or bees. That scored Bell, and everything Siri did from that point on was generously doused in boos by the Citi Field faithful.
(Poor Siri. I mean, he’ll now almost certainly lose his half-job to Tyrone Taylor, just spotted rehabbing at Syracuse, and that’s not unjust. But up until now he was the Met whom fans would probably forget on a Sporcle quiz, and by the middle innings he’d thoroughly failed to do the only things he was on the roster to do and being forgotten would have felt like bliss. Also: It’s not good when something happens in center field that makes you pine for Cedric Mullins.)
4-1 Nats, and on Bluesky I offered a digital boooo but added this: “Fuck them, we’re still gonna win.”
Not as t-shirt worthy as YA GOTTA BELIEVE, but you roll with what the dice give you.
Part of my defiance was the Mets have been hitting and the Nats’ pitching has been execrable. Part of it was that the Nats were also having a burn-the-tape game on defense, with poor Dylan Crews playing every ball in his vicinity like it was a live grenade. And part of it, I suppose, was that the season’s down to a week and change, so why not spit in the eye of fate?
The Mets took a run off the Nats’ lead in the bottom of the third, aided by some more shaky defense, then unleashed hell in the fourth, with the culmination a three-run homer from Soto to dead center. I’m closing up the house in Maine, so I bounded around the living room hollering FUCK YOU! over and over again, with no neighbors to bother except possibly a querulous chipmunk or two. (Squeaky little voice emerges from a burrow: “It’s sleepy time … actually fuck you!”)
A shaky Huascar Brazoban outing aside, that fourth inning killed the Nats, a young team whose tank looks like it’s on E despite innings left to travel. Brooks Raley cleaned up for Brazoban, Ryne Stanek looked good, Tyler Rogers looked great, and Ryan Helsley had an honest-to-goodness solid inning, a 1-2-3 inning with no asterisk needed for line drives or other red flags. Chris Devenski had some trouble finishing up, but by then I’d obeyed the chipmunks and was out cold on the couch, so all was well from my perspective.
The Reds won, reshuffling the deck of wild-card pursuers to move ahead of the Diamondbacks (who lost), the fading Giants (ditto) and the at this point mostly theoretical Cardinals (who won). We’ll keep an eye on all that of course, but if the Mets keep winning — or just win enough — all should be well, or well enough to move on to the next existential fan crisis.
Eh, that sounded a little mealy-mouthed. Will work on getting back to defiance before the afternoon game.
by Greg Prince on 19 September 2025 11:30 am There was a midweek day game peeking out at me from behind a corner. That’s usually how I peek in at midweek day games. The TV in my office isn’t something I can watch full-on directly from my desk; thanks to the modern-enough set’s placement inside an ancient, undersized “entertainment center,” I can only be so entertained while I’m working. It’s probably better that way. When 1:10 PM rolls around, even if the Mets are playing, I’m usually supposed to be engaged by what’s on this screen, not distracted by what’s on that screen.
Yet once in a great while, you have to leave behind both screens and see what’s going on from whence the images are emanating. That is to say that for the first time in a couple of seasons, I allowed myself a midweek afternoon game in person.
In September, no less. This September, which isn’t just any September, because no September is just any September when something is riding on the outcome of every game, whatever day it’s scheduled, whatever time it starts. In other Septembers, it’s almost a badge of honor, however perverse, to engage in your team’s evaporation from sight. “You’re gonna go see the Mets today? Why? They’re out of it!” In those Septembers, the horizon is barren. You’ll miss baseball when it’s gone, you’re pretty sure, but you won’t miss this team that’s playing out the string.
In this September, the 2025 Mets of right now are still figuring out what tableau will fill their immediate horizon — emptiness or October. Every game all year counts the same. These games in late September suddenly count more than anything else. Hence, what could have been one last fun detour from the everyday mundane became what we within our obsession call important.
I don’t know if the kid on the platform at Jamaica understood the Wild Card implications of the Mets and Padres at 1:10 on a Thursday afternoon. He just knew his dad was taking him to a game when other kids’ dads weren’t doing the same for them. The kid, 5 or 6 years old at most, wore a jersey that said deGROM 48 on the back. The dad wore HERNANDEZ 17. As we awaited the connection at Woodside, the dad asked my advice regarding the next transfer. Would I be on the LIRR that takes you to Mets-Willets Point, or the 7 that takes you to essentially the same place? I recommended the 7 in this case, given the wait time for the Port Washington train whose stop near Citi Field is convenient only if it gets you there for first pitch. The next one of those wouldn’t.
When this game loomed on the calendar, and my friend Jeff told me he was coming up from the DC area and suggested we get together for it, the LIRR’s availability took center stage. There was talk of an engineers strike starting on September 18. How the hell do I get to a game without the LIRR? I studied bus routes and road maps, and wondered if I was capable of driving to a ballgame for the first time in twenty years. But then the LIRR issues were submitted to some sort of panel in Washington, and if there’s going to be a strike, it won’t be this season. The trains, as they say, are being made to run on time, or as close as the LIRR ever gets to it. Either way, I told the dad that he and his kid were better off taking the 7. The dad asked if they could follow me. I said sure. It’s just a flight of stairs here and a flight of stairs there, but I don’t mind being my fellow Mets fans’ pregame commuting security blanket.
The kid, I noticed, was making like the midweek day game itself, peeking out from behind a corner, specifically one of the pillars on the platform on Jamaica, while his dad and I spoke. He seemed more excited than wary of his day at the ballpark, but a stranger is a stranger and a kid is a kid.
“Is this his first game?” I asked the dad.
“No, not his first, but it’s our first ‘just the boys’ game,” meaning him and his son. The dad delighted in telling me of his scheme. He snuck out to the car and left the deGrom jersey inside. Then, when the kid got in the vehicle and saw the jersey, Dad informed him, “You’re not going to school today.” The kid had been asking all season to go to a game. His wish was coming true. The dad’s dad did this for him once, surprising him with sanctioned truancy at Shea Stadium, and now it was his turn. The dad loved the story so much, he repeated it to a pair of young women who wandered by a moment later.
Me, I got chills just thinking about it. My dad never pulled me out of school to take me to a game — we weren’t “boys,” exactly — but he got me home from a serendipitously arranged eye doctor appointment the morning of October 16, 1969, so I could see clearly the conclusion to Game Five of the World Series. Oh yeah, I’d lead these boys up that first flight of stairs at Woodside, wait for them to get their OMNY cards, wait for them to tap themselves through the turnstiles, and then lead them up that second flight of stairs until they were on the same 7 train as me. That kid was going to go a Mets game on Thursday if I had any small thing to do with it.
Getting to and inside the ballpark for a day game is a string of small things, from clearing one’s own decks, to divining and achieving transit connections, to negotiating the entrance labyrinth (security plucking and confiscating my sealed 20-ounce bottle of diet carbonated beverage product in May appears to have been a one-time affront to my soft drink sensibilities, as it and I were left alone this time) to deciding whether, in a day when everything’s a little rushed, if I have a minute to stop off at a lineless concession en route to the seats. It was past one o’clock. I wanted to make first pitch, but I didn’t want to greet Jeff emptyhanded. Plus, you know, it’s a ballgame. “Two hot dogs, two pretzels, please.” I can miss a batter. I prefer not to miss lunch.
When I met up with Jeff, I quickly sat down so nobody behind us would have to strain to clearly see Jonah Tong working to Padres batters. Sounds unremarkable, right? You’d think. In the next half-inning or the half-inning after that, somebody in the row in front of us decided that rather than swiftly finding his seat, he’d greet his friend who rose to meet him with a good, lengthy standing conversation. Jeff first, then I, requested a lowering of their bodies into their chairs so we could witness the hitting and the pitching down below. The late arriver among the two of them gave us two backwards flicks of his right wrist, the not necessarily universal symbol for “just give us a sec, OK?” It was rather rude, but it did gift us a handy gesture to activate every time he walked by us the rest of the day.
Pete Alonso’s own gesture involves swinging a bat mightily and sending a ball far. One-nothing in the bottom of the first. Tong’s right hand in the top of third was busy putting Fernando Tatis in scoring position via a single, an errant pickoff, and a wild pitch. Tatis came home on a Luis Arraez sac fly, facilitated by a ragged throw from Brandon Nimmo. The next sound you heard was Manny Machado whiffing on strike three for the third out and Jeff and me applauding heartily.
In the bottom of the third, something approximating a Met attack gets underway versus Randy Vasquez. The lately useful Cedric Mullins singles. Francisco Lindor singles to right. Mullins races to third. Lindor trails to second. Tatis believes he’s going to nab Lindor at second. He does not. Juan Soto makes the most of a groundout. He makes it into his 100th RBI of the season, scoring Mullins and pushing Lindor to third. Pete’s gesture is limited to a silent thank you toward Vasquez for a full-count walk. Nimmo is about to come up with runners on first and third and a chance to make us forget about that throw.
“How many runs do they get out of this?” Jeff asked me. “Zero, one, two, or three?”
I was thinking zero, but I said two to be optimistic.
We got three. Nimmo homered. We were up, 5-1, and to the extent Mets fans can relax in September of 2025, we almost did. Jonah apparently did. That one silver-platter run he served up to the Padres in the third stayed lonely. Whatever loss of confidence in his fastball that overcame him the previous Friday was restored in the interim. Tong went five and positioned his team and himself for a win. He positioned us to leave our seats with enough faith that the lead would still be there when returned.
 A couple of the boys, peeking around one of the corners at Citi Field and seeing a Mets win. Why get up from a game going well? Because somebody asked me to. About ten minutes after Jeff told me he’d be getting us tickets to this game, I heard from another good friend, Matt, that he had come into a pair for September 18, and would I like to join him? Couldn’t be in two seats at once, but we could say hi. Matt suggested the Shea Bridge for a stop ‘n’ chat. It was a real throwback. In the early days of Citi Field, when nobody knew anywhere else to go, it was “let’s meet on the bridge” in some appointed inning. I’ve mostly stopped doing that in recent years partly because now Citi Field is as familiar as the back of my dismissive wrist-flicking hand, partly because my fascination with getting up midgame and walking around has faded. That was the one thing I immediately embraced about Citi when I wasn’t resenting it for not being Shea, that you could meet somebody and stand somewhere and follow the game and not have people unleash their own trademark gestures at you.
One thing I’d forgotten about Shea Bridge during a midweek day game is, if it’s not bitter cold, it’s unbearably hot. Ah yes, the many climates of Citi Field. Where Jeff and I sat, in Greg-endorsed 326, we reveled in shade and comfort, wrist-flicking jerk notwithstanding. On the bridge, the sun beat down on us like that Twilight Zone episode where there are two suns. The meeting with Matt was delightful and, by unanimous consent, brief.
It was the kind of day when five splendid innings from the starter — this starter in particular — would bring about no regrets that it wasn’t six or more. Tong recovered so nicely from his prior meltdown, it was like it never happened. He struck out eight Padres before Carlos Mendoza opted to trust his bullpen. What choice did we have but to trust those relievers, too? Tyler Rogers in the sixth, Brooks Raley in the seventh, Gregory Soto (who got dinged but not dented by balls hit at him) in the eighth, and, with the lead up to 6-1, Edwin Diaz in the ninth to close it. The “Narco” entrance doesn’t really hit as hard in daytime as it does at night, but Alonso and Nimmo had hit hard, and Diaz didn’t take anything off his pitches, no matter what time it was. It was a one-two-three save in everything but name, a win for the boys in orange and blue, whether they wore their own names down on the field or were the father and son cosplaying hooky as Hernandez and deGrom on the train.
Jeff and I flicked our wrists and high-fived before finding our own respective trains, his the LIRR back to Penn Station en route to Amtrak, mine the 7 to Woodside for the 4:24 eastbound. I encountered a later-in-life version of my friend from the Jamaica platform on my brief ride west. There was a guy, probably a little older than me, wearing a contemporary road jersey stitched with AGEE 20 on the back. I complimented him on his choice of player. “My favorite,” he said. He was part of a group of other men of a certain age. Midweek day games seem to bring out such crews en masse. This one was in a good mood after the Mets’ 6-1 victory and all its playoff chase implications, even the one Padres fan in their tribe. His role was to absorb good-natured ribbing over his choice of team, which he did with a smile. Boys being boys, regardless of age, their self-imposed mission was to decide whether they wanted to make the same train I was aiming for at Woodside, or if they wanted to extend their good times at a bar in Woodside. Something about me on Thursday emitted “he looks like he knows where he’s going” vibes, because like the dad asking about the 7 train, they looked to me for advice.
“How far to Woodside?”
“Two stops.”
“Are there bars in Woodside?”
“There’s nothing BUT bars in Woodside.”
“We’ll just follow you.”
I wasn’t going to take them to Donovan’s, but staircases were my specialty, so I shrugged, “sure,” and didn’t flick my wrist at any of them. When we landed at Woodside, the Agee guy found his way down the stairs and into the station on his own. The others were behind me last I looked. I reached the concourse level and nodded at the Agee guy. The other fellas had not yet emerged from the crowd. Or maybe they spied a bar through a window and bolted down the back staircase to 61st St.
“Hey,” the Agee guy asked me. “Where did they go?”
I shrugged again. The game was over and I had the 4:24 to catch.
by Jason Fry on 17 September 2025 11:27 pm Here’s a sign of progress: The Mets lost, and I wasn’t mad at them.
Last week? I was incensed to an unhealthy degree by everything they did wrong, waiting with teeth bared for them to shoot themselves in the foot again. But Wednesday night? Yes, David Peterson gave up a grand slam to turn a 2-2 tie into a 6-2 Padres lead that would prove insurmountable, and no, Peterson shouldn’t do things like that. But he gave it up to Manny Machado, who’s an awfully good player and an even better one with the bases loaded.
Even down by four, the Mets kept scratching and clawing, working good at-bats against a parade of San Diego relievers — and coming within a whisker or two of pulling out an unlikely victory.
Whatever else you say about it, that was a deeply weird baseball game.
Dom Hamel escaped the first-ever run put on his big-league ledger when Luis Arraez got thrown out at second a moment before Elias Diaz‘s foot touched home plate — and Diaz had broken it down because Machado, who thinks everything is best done cool and casual, indicated he should ease up. (Congratulations to Hamel on escaping ectoplasm as a Mets ghost — and for becoming the Mets’ MLB-record 46th pitcher used this year. I’ll contain my excitement about the record, though, because cycling arms on and off the roster is the new normal and you can bet someone will use 47 pitchers next year.)
Francisco Alvarez got the Mets within two runs by driving a ball off the very top of the orange padding in right-center, a ball that bounced straight up before coming back, Dave Augustine-style, to Fernando Tatis Jr. The umps conferred and ruled it a home run, for reasons best left unexplored if you’re a Met fan, because I still have no idea what it hit that wasn’t orange padding or how the umpires determined that.
Then there was Juan Soto, who came up as the tying run in the seventh against Mason Miller, who really probably could throw a ball through a wall if he chose to. Miller got ahead of Soto 1-2 on a trio of fastballs all north of 100 MPH, changed Soto’s eye line with a slider below the zone, and then went back to the gas. That’s a time-honored way of getting anybody out, but Soto isn’t anybody: He whistled the ball down the left-field line, two or three inches on the wrong side of the foul pole. (Miller, undeterred, came back with a perfectly placed slider on the outside of the zone to fan Soto, then got Pete Alonso on an all-slider diet. Dude is good.)
And oh that ninth inning: Brett Baty turned in a very solid AB against Padres closer Robert Suarez, rapping a leadoff single on the seventh pitch. Alvarez, who looked compromised by his various busted fingers, made an out, as did Mark Vientos, pinch-hitting for Cedric Mullins. (A bit of an odd decision: Vientos couldn’t tie the game and is much slower than Mullins.) Francisco Lindor worked a walk to give Soto another chance to tie the game, and Soto turned Suarez’s fifth pitch into a bullet up the middle — one that, alas, Suarez corralled with some combination of glove, hand and midsection.
That’s a loss — an unfortunate one, to be sure, but not one where the Mets let the roof cave in on them or seemed to sleepwalk through the proceedings. They pushed and pushed in a game that felt like it gave us everything — well, everything except the W.
by Jason Fry on 17 September 2025 12:03 am Did any fanbase need a laugher more than we did?
OK, maybe Tuesday night wasn’t exactly a laugher — call it a chuckler, perhaps — but a five-run first and a pair of homers in the second took away a lot of the tension, allowing us to monitor the “piggyback” experiment that saw Sean Manaea take over for Clay Holmes with relative dispassion. (And it went pretty well!)
Facing Michael King — like Holmes a Yankee reliever turned starter for someone else — in the bottom of the first, the Mets singled four straight times to take a 1-0 lead. Mark Vientos (who hit in buzzard’s luck all night) then spanked a ball right back to King, kicking off a 1-2-3 double play that seemed like it might scuttle hopes for a big inning. But not so fast: Jeff McNeil doubled in two and Brett Baty crashed a homer into Carbonation Ridge for a 5-0 lead. An inning later, Francisco Lindor homered off King and Pete Alonso absolutely annihilated a baseball, sending it into the rarely explored second deck above the Great Wall of Flushing.
The Padres poked at the Mets with a pair of solo shots off Holmes and another one off Manaea, but the game never felt particularly in doubt, and after three months of pretty much nothing but doubt, that felt pretty good.
* * *
Emily and I briefly interrupted cheering on the Mets to switch over to Milb.tv, where the Brooklyn Cyclones were playing for the South Atlantic League title in Spartanburg, S.C., against the rather amazingly monikered Hub City Spartanburgers. The Cyclones won, 2-1, and are league champs.
It was an odd year for the Cyclones: They crushed the Sally League’s northern division in the first half with a 46-20 record, then went 26-39 in the second half. That first half was largely engineered by guys who moved on to Binghamton (which also has its eyes on a title), but it gave their successors a playoff berth, and they played beautifully when it mattered, going on a 4-0 run against Greensboro and Hub City for a title. Flags fly forever; here’s to seeing a new one fluttering over Coney Island next year.
by Jason Fry on 15 September 2025 12:36 pm We’re all exhausted, so let’s hurry through the first seven or so innings of Sunday’s desperate affair against the Rangers: A young pitcher was great, the Mets hit a little though not a lot, Carlos Mendoza made an understandable though anxiety-provoking move to get aforementioned young pitcher out amid early signs that the roof might be weakening, and none of it mattered because normally at least moderately reliable members of the bullpen blew the lead.
That was the script on Saturday and on Sunday too, with only the names changing Mad Libs style. On Saturday it was Brandon Sproat (blameless young starter); Pete Alonso, Francisco Lindor and Juan Soto (fitful sources of offense); and Tyler Rogers and Edwin Diaz (blowers of lead). On Sunday it was Nolan McLean (blameless young starter); Francisco Alvarez, Soto and Brandon Nimmo (sources of fitful offense); and Brooks Raley and Reed Garrett (blowers of lead).
On Saturday the game sputtered from 2-0 Mets to 2-2 to 3-2 Rangers; on Sunday we got the same descent from 2-0 Mets to 2-2, and if you didn’t see 3-2 Rangers coming, well, I guess you’re lucky to have been in a coma for the last eight games, and perhaps since mid-June.
And the Mets tried their damnedest to engineer a ninth straight loss: In the ninth, Diaz immediately hung a slider to Kyle Higashioka to give the Rangers a leadoff baserunner, with pinch-runner Ezequiel Duran piercing through the usual Diaz Maginot line to steal second and then getting bunted to third by the pesty Cody Freeman. Disaster was at hand, but equally pesty Josh Smith lined a ball straight into Lindor’s glove and Duran was trapped off third. Double play, and the Mets had survived.
That felt like deliverance, except nothing feels like deliverance when you’ve lost eight straight and 999,999 out of a million, or whatever the post-June 13 record is now. Again, going back to Saturday, hadn’t the Mets seemed to catch an enormous break when hefty wrecking ball Rowdy Tellez saw a lead-grabbing double take a right-turn bounce into the stands, allowing Diaz to escape the eighth with the game merely tied? That reprieve lasted all of an inning, so the jubilation on Sunday was understandably muted.
(Incidentally: Was this weekend’s timely hitting and smooth fielding from the dismissed-as-Vogelbachian Tellez an indication that I haven’t appreciated his contributions as a player, or a symptom of the kind of things that happen when you’re losing 999,999 out of a million? Show your work, class.)
The Mets did nothing in the bottom of the ninth, though Cedric Mullins did record a single (not a misprint!), and so the game was handed off to Ryne Stanek for the 10th, with Smith beamed down to second base from Rob Manfred’s brain. Smith promptly scooted over to third on a flyout, after which Stanek couldn’t seem to decide whether he wanted to pitch to Joc Pederson or not, eventually walking him. I’d say I didn’t want to face Pederson with the Rangers another fly ball away from grabbing the lead, but I didn’t want to face anybody at that point.
But Stanek then changed speeds and location with textbook execution against Adolis Garcia, fanning him on a slider in the dirt. That brought Tellez to the plate, because of course it did … and he hit a harmless pop-up to Mark Vientos, because baseball loves when you try to outguess it. Stanek stormed off the mound shaking his mane and screaming, and this time it didn’t seem like even the slightest overreaction.
Lindor headed for second as the Stupid Runner Dreamed Up by People Who Don’t Like Baseball, with Soto and Alonso on tap and the Rangers turning to someone named Luis Curvelo. Curvelo eyed Soto and sensibly sent him to first with four imaginary pitches, giving us the answer to the oh-so-modern trivia question of “How can someone be the first pitcher in an inning and face runners on first and second without having thrown a pitch?”
We were in a baseball situation where the Mets could win the game in an assortment of ways, including ones that didn’t feature another hit. It’s one of those scenarios that’s interesting and delightful on a sleepy summer afternoon when you’re not gasping for your postseason life, which meant on Sunday it was the furthest thing from interesting or delightful.
In a vain effort to keep my anxiety in check I started riffling mentally through the possibilities as Alonso took a slider that nicked the bottom of the opposite edge of the plate for strike one (not ideal but fine) and then spat on a bait pitch lower and farther outside and meant to entice him into expanding the zone and putting himself in a hole (a good sign).
I reshuffled the deck of possibilities: fly ball deep enough for Lindor to take third; little squibber of a fielder’s choice that moves the runners up; double play but Lindor moves to third; single that loads the bases; Curvelo holds onto one too long for an HBP…
As I was cataloging, Curvelo went to the sinker, leaving one in the middle of the plate.
Oh yeah, Pete could also hit one over the fucking fence. That would work too.
After the game, the narrative was about Alonso once again saving the Mets’ season, which was probably unavoidable but struck me as a little overheated. That was October and this is trying to get there; there are still an alarming number of days left on the calendar, a series of tough opponents, and the weight of that post-June 13 record still pressing down.
The Mets survived; until Tuesday let’s settle for describing it that way. But hey, at this point survival would be strategy enough.
by Greg Prince on 14 September 2025 12:07 pm The fans try so hard. I can say that as an observer rather than as a participant on Saturday, sitting as I was in the zone of detached decorum known as Citi Field’s press box. I couldn’t react, except in my head, to every entreaty from the A/V squad that urged the crowd to keep urging on the Mets. All day the call and response was effective in that the sound system and video board called for cheers and the cheers materialized. When you’re watching or listening from home, you might question your engagement, never mind your sanity. Your team has lost seven in a row. Your team is almost actively eschewing a playoff spot. Your team is doing its version of its best to overcome a one-run deficit that materialized after your team had very recently led by two; it would have been so much easier to have continued leading, but that is no longer here nor there. It is your team and you have opted to be in their midst. You 41,000 or so are on hand to enjoy and, when enjoyment becomes less accessible, engage.
“Let’s Go Mets!” and associated noises considered helpful to the home-team cause rose as requested. They might have arisen, anyway. The fans are familiar with the chant. They invented it in 1962 at the Polo Grounds. They kept it going in good times and less good times, both of which permeated Shea Stadium prior to its closing in 2008 and Citi Field since it opened in 2009. The undercard to Saturday’s game was a friendly clash between Team Shea and Team Citi in the Mets Alumni Classic, a stylized version of Old Timers Day. Old times weren’t so old when you realized more than half of the alumni were Mets at Citi Field or had returned as opponents to Citi Field. Even those whose career splits are exclusive to Shea didn’t go back as far as Shea itself did. A handful from Team Shea played in the majors in the 1980s. A bunch more showed up at Shea in the 1990s. That’s apparently not recent, somewhat to my dismay. I’ve lodged an unofficial protest that the 1990s can now be accurately classified as relatively ancient. We’ll see how that goes.
No doubt many among the 41,000 or so were on hand specifically to enjoy the Alumni Classic. I know I was in the press box for that reason. Who wouldn’t want a chance to see dozens of former Mets put on Met uniforms? Who wouldn’t want to see how gray in the beard complements the white of the unis? Who wouldn’t want to be reminded that the Mets in the past quarter-century have provided a base of operations to several superstars and strings of supersubs, all meshing enough so that they may have lost ballgames but never our faith? We rooted for all those guys. Quietly, I continued on Saturday to root for those guys. No rooting aloud where I sat, but we all had a good laugh when a pop fly Josh Thole should have had fell in on the infield in the mini-game the older fellas played and the official scorer got on his mic and announced, with a wink in his voice, “E-2.”
Josh Thole is an older fella now. He’s a whole lot younger than I am, but we know how baseball works. The kids become veterans, and the veterans become old-timers, and we at heart stay kids, even if we were 46 when we first saw Josh Thole catch. One night in 2012, Josh Thole did all he was supposed to, as did Mike Baxter, as did Johan Santana, and one afternoon in 2025, we were glad to see them again in the same place that they combined on the no-hitter we had dreamed of since we’d really been kids. There was a lot of that kind of confluence with the alumni present. Prior to the game, a few answered questions about what it was like in the good times — which for a few of them referred to most of 2006 — and the less good times — which meant 2007 for those same guys. Funny how the shortfalls of September 2007 would come up inside Met walls in September 2025.
Jose Reyes, Carlos Beltran, and Carlos Delgado all lived beyond September 2007. They seemed happy to be back representing Team Shea. They seemed enamored of being with one another and mingling with the others on the press conference podium: Curtis Granderson, Benny Agbayani, Ike Davis. Loosening up on the field were the likes of Mike Piazza and Kelly Johnson and Pedro Martinez and Kevin Plawecki and R.A. Dickey and Jay Payton and Matt Harvey and Rey Ordoñez and Bartolo Colon and Josh Satin. Even if they weren’t all teammates back in the day (or technically today, given the Shea vs. Citi motif), they were all Mets once and they were all Mets now. Some won awards. Some won pennants. Some never exactly excelled nor moved the needle in the standings. Everybody was applauded, including former managers Jerry Manuel, Terry Collins, Willie Randolph, and Bobby Valentine, each of whom was told at some point to clean out his office at Shea or Citi. Festivities of this nature are an opportunity to remember the best and only the best of those who relished putting on a Mets uniform again.
 “Don’t collapse.” Still, hard not to look at a few of those guys who didn’t hold onto an in-the-bag division title in 2007 and not think of that. Those who collapsed as Mets got up as people and expressed empathy for the Mets who are unwittingly in the process of repeating their history. Each among Jose and the Carloses preached positivity, a one-day-at-a-time approach, and playing hard. If only advising made it so, but athletes of all vintage thrive on steadiness and confidence. The Alumni Classic game itself didn’t necessarily exemplify the hard-playing ethos (Edgardo Alfonzo is beyond the age of diving for grounders to third), but fun is fun and this was fun. I saw Rick Reed pitch to Juan Lagares. If I were ranking surreal scenarios, this would lead the league.
Sixty-three years since “Let’s Go Mets” was first emphatically suggested across the bleachers, the box seats, and the grandstand where the franchise first cleared its throat, those three little Team Polo words inevitably come up on their own at Mets games, because it feels good to say and it feels like a contribution to make happen what we want to happen. We can’t hit, hit with power, run, throw, or catch — nor can the Mets when it matters most this month, you are tempted to add — but we can chant with purpose and shout with encouragement. It’s not the sort of thing you do at home. But you’re not home. You’re in a ballpark where noise is made intentionally. You want the Mets to make noise not synthetically but actually.
In the bottom of the ninth, you want Juan Soto to touch home. He’s on third, having done his job very well his last couple of at-bats. The Mets had led, 1-0, since the fifth, when Francisco Lindor’s friskiness on the basepaths blended beautifully with some Texas Ranger clumsiness on a ball Pete Alonso had lifted to the not very deep outfield (“E-4 on the throw” was announced with a straight voice). The Mets hadn’t won a 1-0 game since July of 2024. Mets fans would have settled for that modern rarity. Brandon Sproat did all he could do give it to them. In his first Citi Field start, Sproat exhibited nothing but command. Seventy pitches, all but seventeen of them for strikes over six innings. You could have seen him keep doing what he was doing and have plenty to cheer organically about.
But Sproat was removed after six (something was muttered about his velocity dropping), and the 1-0 lead was passed to Brooks Raley for safe keeping in the seventh, then expanded upon by Soto when he homered toward College Point Blvd. in the bottom of the inning. Nobody who has watched every game Juan Soto has played as a Met would term his day-to-day performance spectacular, but an examination of his productivity belies impressions. That home run was his fortieth of the season, accomplished the same week he ran past thirty in the stolen base department. In 2025, Juan Soto messed around and got a 40/30. Just another year at the office.
Soto’s blast made it Mets 2 Rangers 0. The best efforts of Tyler Rogers and Edwin Diaz, combined with some not great moments from others stationed away from the mound, didn’t prevent making it Rangers 3 Mets 2 by the bottom of the ninth. That’s where things stood in the ninth when Soto came up with one out and singled. Yes, Juan was doing his job very well his last couple of at-bats. Ronny Mauricio did his job extremely well in his one and only at-bat, which came with two outs. Gathering dust most days, Ronny was pulled from the shadows to pinch-hit. He lined a single to right. Soto, who usually uses his deceptive speed to steal, dashed from first to third, carrying with him the winning run if he could be driven a final ninety feet. And if Mauricio could get an uncommon jump, and Brandon Nimmo could lash the ball somewhere that would let Ronny get on his horse, well, that’s what all the cheering was for. The call was for noise. The response was absolute. Everybody being urged to urge on the Mets urged on the Mets.
Nimmo no doubt understood the urgency and attempted to respond in kind. Brandon’s played in front of Mets crowds longer than any contemporary Met, not to mention a lot of those Classic alumni. His Met tenure exceeds those of Fonzie, Mike, and Al Leiter, to name three Mets Hall of Famers who had soaked in their share of applause hours before. He’s been on the right side of myriad Let’s Go Mets chants, the programmed kind and the spontaneous kind.
Saturday, when he struck out with the tying run on third and winning run on first, he heard boos. Nobody told the fans to boo. They figured it out for themselves. The Mets had just lost their eighth in a row. They had, for a few hours (until the Dodgers crushed the Giants), lost their fingertip grip on the final Wild Card slot. They had transformed a beautiful day at the ballpark into yet another chapter in their ongoing horror story.
 A true-life story. The fans try so hard. Ultimately, however, they can only respond to what they see, not what they are told.
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