I refuse to stop believing; Let’s Go Mets

For the first time this postseason, I am worried the New York Mets may be over matched. That feeling is absolutely and utterly terrifying. After months of clamoring about New York being the best team in baseball it’s beginning to hit me this may be a year too early for my favorite ball club to go all the way. To make matters worse, I opened my big, fat, mouth before the NLCS, exclaiming how confident I was heading into the series against a Dodgers pitching staff that was both literally and figuratively limping through the postseason.

That pitching staff has now shut out the Mets in two of the first three games of the series. New York has scored 7 runs. 4 of them came on a Mark Vientos grand slam. That is not very good. On the other side, the pitching staff that had been so furiously fantastic over the final months of the season has mostly regressed to the mean. Sean Manea shoved again in Game 2, while Luis Severino bulldogged his way through 4 2/3 of 2-run ball in Game 3 (it could have none if not for a ‘LOL Mets’ defensive inning in the second stanza), but the bullpen, which continues to be the “plantar fasciitis” of this team, has been horrid.

This 2-1 series defecit isn’t a bullpen problem though. It’s not a lineup problem either. It’s not on Carlos Mendoza, or a Francisco Alvarez, or J.D. Martinez. It’s a credit to the Los Angeles Dodgers and the superstar lineup they possess. This is the deepest team in the league, and the likely World Series champion. Los Angeles averaged 5.2 runs per game this season. That number was behind only Arizona for the most in the league. In the postseason, that number has risen to 5.5 runs per game. Dave Roberts isn’t exactly penciling in the 1927 Yankees onto this lineup card every night, but he does have the closest thing to Babe Ruth the league has ever seen.

Now, I’m not stating the above to make excuses for the Mets inability to compete in most of penultimate series of the season. I am however stating the above to make what I’m about to say sting moderately less. The New York Mets are not supposed to be here. Nearly a third, yes a third, of the 2024 payroll is retained. Max Scherzer, Justin Verlander, James Mcann, and Omar Narvàez, and Jake Diekman, and Adrian Houser are making $80 Million to sit on their couches this postseason.

The Mets are far from an underdog, but this team was not supposed to be in the postseason, let alone the championship series against the team that came into 2024 as the odds-on favorite to lift the “piece of metal” that is the World Series trophy. So then how did they get here? Well, besides a stretch in June and early July, its nothing short of a miracle. New York has won more games than any team in baseball since June 1 but it hasn’t been because of good baseball.

The Mets have been the “best” team in MLB for over four months because of miraculous moments fueled by a team that believes they are alive until the 108th seam of the baseball strikes the webbing of the oppositions leather glove. Attribute it to Grimace, or Seymour Weiner, OMG, Hawk-Tua, Jorge Lopez (who is also getting paid $5 Millon to sit on his La-Z-Boy), the playoff pumpkin, or whatever gimmick you choose, but something about these Mets has felt different from the jump. Everyone talks about the late summer and October heroics, but let’s not forget this team was staring 0-6 down the barrel until Pete Alonso hit a ninth inning home run in an empty ballpark to help start a walk off rally in April. The Mets could have sat back and accepted another loss in a cold ballpark. Pete, and later Brett Baty and Tyrone Taylor, did not.

You can take this as me coping or spewing optimistic gibberish but I’m not going to give up on this team until this team gives up on themselves. From everything I’ve seen in 2024 the latter part of that sentence is not going to happen. This season is not going to end badly. If it ends prematurely, it won’t be because the Mets stopped believing – so why should I?

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