Why Mets fans shouldn’t be so despondent

Eagles coach Nick Sirianni says he wants tickets to the Phillies’ first home playoff game in a decade on Friday night, and with his team 5-0, it’s a good bet he’ll be showing up in a luxury box on Fox TV sometime about the third inning. Everyone loves a winner, even in Philly.

Sirianni’s Eagles play Dallas on Sunday night, and I wonder how many fans would rather the coach was watching game film of the Cowboys instead of Bryce Harper on Friday night. Maybe Sirianni agrees with Buddy Ryan, who once bragged that he didn’t need to watch film over and over again because he understood what he was watching the first few times he saw it. It would have been easier to believe Buddy had he ever won a playoff game.

Supporting the neighborhood is the least Sirianni can do, given that Harper has shown up at an Eagles game or two over the years. Think there’s any chance that if the outfielder were still in Washington, he’d be hanging out at Commanders games?

The Phillies were one of the four wild-card series winners last weekend, and one of the eight teams still left in the 2022 MLB tournament. The first round lived up to its name, and gave fans everything but social media posts whining about busted brackets.

That’s good for interest and ratings, bad if you’re a fan of the Mets. No team took a harder fall; 10-and-a-half games ahead on June 1, the Mets’ season was finished before five teams which won fewer games. Sirianni’s new favorite was one of them, even though the Phillies were 14 games worse than the Mets overall and 5-14 head to head.

It’s not that there’s no justice in baseball, but there isn’t much in a random and expanded playoff system. If the San Diego Padres got to play the part of Princeton in the 1996 NCAA basketball tournament during wild-card weekend, guess who was UCLA?

Mets fans know disappointment, since it’s been 36 years since they’ve won a World Series. One could argue they don’t know anything but given some of their shortcomings over the years, from blowing a seven-game-lead with 17 to play in 2007 to Matt Harvey talking Terry Collins into pitching the ninth inning of Game 5 of the 2015 World Series to Davey Johnson leaving Doc Gooden in to throw Mike Scioscia’s home run in Game 4 of the 1988 NLCS (where was Kevin Cash when he was needed?) to some.216 hitting Cardinals catcher hitting a home run and some rookie pitcher fanning Carlos Beltran looking in the ninth inning of Game 7 of the 2006 NLCS, to, if you’re old enough, trading Nolan Ryan for a couple of less-than-vintage Jim Fregosi seasons.

At least Yadier Molina, and perhaps, Adam Wainwright, the Cardinals catcher and pitcher in question, won’t be around to torment Mets fans any more.

The Padres, like most winners, prattled on Sunday about character and unity, though neither was what won on Sunday night. Joe Musgrove did that. Given the choice of some ephemeral quality like character, or Musgrove’s one-hit pitching over seven, I’m pretty sure the Padres would choose the latter.

But in New York, the Mets’ loss was interpreted as some kind of ultimate failing.

“It’s OK to be bummed that the Mets aren’t moving on,” wrote Craig Calcaterra in his newsletter Cup of Coffee, “but thinking that the Mets are bad … because they lost two out of three games to another pretty good team is pure idiocy. It’s a total lack of perspective. It’s the unreasonable elevation of ‘the playoffs are everything’ and a denial of months and months of otherwise good memories. It’s a recipe for 29 of the 30 fan bases to resign themselves to abject disappointment every year and for them to claim that their 29 teams are all fraudulent failures and that seems silly to me.”

He’s right. At least three, and probably all four, of the teams which wore their October Rise T-shirts and espoused their character as if they had a patent on it last weekend, will, like the Mets, lose before these playoffs are over.

The Mets won 101 games in 2022, more than 60 of the 61 seasons they’ve existed. And they have ownership which backed them; this isn’t management which would trade Mookie Betts because he’s too expensive.

The Mets had the highest payroll in MLB in 2022, spending $282 million, nearly $18 million more than the team in the Bronx, which has a long history of paying any price, $7 million more than the Dodgers, who had the highest payroll in 2021. That doesn’t always win World Series, but it does mean they’re trying to.

The Mets spent $43 million on one player in Max Scherzer, which is nearly as much as the Athletics spent on their whole team. We can debate the wisdom of that transaction after Scherzer pitched more like an Athletic in Game 1, but we can’t question the Mets’ willingness to win. Steve Cohen dreams of the day he’s accepting the championship trophy from the commissioner, champagne spraying, and he can bray on about how the Mets’ character brought them to that moment, rather than their talent and his checkbook.

Monday dawned dismally for Mets fans no matter where they awoke, and understandably so. And the rest of the playoffs will be bitter, especially as long as the Phillies and Braves are in them.

But the 2022 Mets, who had eight losing seasons in the 11 previous to this one, won 101 games. That’s 24 more than they won in 2021 and more than 29 other teams.

They have decisions ahead — Jacob deGrom and Edwin Diaz, two of the main reasons their pitching is special, are free agents. But they have a sturdy lineup, and ownership willing to spend to improve it.

Like the groundball 36 years ago which rolled under the legs of the opposing first baseman that enabled their last World Series title, this, too, shall pass.