The Mets Went Out Like Chumps

The New York Mets—slowly and surely, improbably and inexorably—crashed out of the playoff race, and now there are no more games left to get back in it. This in itself is not unique. Many teams miss the playoffs. Some miss the playoffs every year! Likewise, there have been previous rosters that have found their Octobers surprisingly free despite an ownership hellbent on spending for hardware, possibly even to the level of the Mets' $340 million or so payroll, once inflation has been accounted for. There have even been nosedives as steep as New York's, which saw them go from the sport's best record in June to a mere 83 wins when all the beans were counted.

Perhaps Mets fans would be feeling a little better today about the long winter ahead if it had just been the collapse; the three-and-a-half monthlong fracturing, buckling, and subsidence of a contender, which seemed to have so many of the right pieces but no sense of how to fit them together. From that day in Mid-June when they were 21 games over .500, only two teams had worse records than the Mets: the woeful Nationals, and the I-wish-I-hadn't-just-spent-that-adjective Rockies. But it wasn't only the collapse. It was that you could see it coming from so far away, the lip of the abyss approaching and the Mets powerless to change course. They went out like chumps.

Chumps! It's chump behavior to lose both season series to the thoroughly mediocre Reds, especially one in early September when, after taking the opener, the Mets had a six-game lead on Cincinnati. Only chumptastic teams close out their season by going 7-14 after that, especially when it took an eight-game losing streak in there to make the wild card race actually competitive. Only chumpaholics hopelessly addicted to chumping would manage to drop a series to the fully checked-out Nationals on the penultimate weekend. Only the lord of the chumps, Sir Chumpstein of Chumpenburg, would have spent the season's final weekend sputtering in must-wins against the feisty but irrelevant Marlins.

Dropping the series opener on Friday put the Reds in the driver's seat, but because Cincinnati ended up losing their No. 162 on everybody-plays-at-the-same-time day as MLB tries to recapture the magic of 2011, the Mets' fate was, ultimately, theirs to decide in one game. It took them five pitchers to get through four innings, including a disastrous fourth when the Marlins put the game's only four runs on the board, three of them with two outs.

The Mets could not scratch out one measly run with their season on the line. They left 10 runners on base. They went 0-for-8 with runners in scoring position. They loaded the bases for their franchise's all-time home run leader, who is once again set to become a free agent. He got ahold of one. Still no runs.

"This was a team that was built not only to get into October, but to play deep into October," manager Carlos Mendoza said, after losing 4-0 to the Marlins to close September and their season. "We’re pissed, sad, frustrated."

The diagnosis isn't an especially tricky one, especially now that the patient has flatlined. The Mets' starting pitching came apart, with injury and/or ineffectiveness striking down basically every man in a rotation that had been the best in the game for a couple of months. They were reduced to starting three rookies down the stretch, and for a while they were New York's best arms—an indictment more than an achievement. Perforce, they went with a bullpen game in the season finale. This did not look anything like a team with fall classic aspirations. This looked like a deeply flawed squad trying to tape together enough body parts to get through the grind. The big hitters mostly hit, though not nearly opportunistically enough: the Mets were an astonishing 0-70 when down after eight innings. As meekly as they went while trailing, they went as the walls crumbled as summer turned to fall.

They will spend this winter, because Steve Cohen spends. They will probably fire their manager, and try to resign Pete Alonso and Edwin Diaz when they opt out—Alonso has already said he'll be doing so—and spend on the starters' market. That should help, but none of that guarantees a spot in the postseason. Nothing guarantees that, save the one thing the Mets couldn't do quite enough of. "We have everything we need," Juan Soto said. "I say we have just got to win games. That’s the only thing that has got to change—win games."