Last year should have been the Mets’ year. Their stars — team leader Francisco Lindor, former batting champion Jeff McNeil, franchise outfielder Brandon Nimmo, slugger Pete Alonso — were all peak age, in their late 20s or just over 30. The 2024 Yankees were probably the worst American League champion in decades — bad baserunning, bad fielding, bad managing. If the Mets had beaten the Dodgers in the National League Championship Series, they would have had the easiest World Series any team could ask for.
Yet 2025 came in with even higher expectations, because in the offseason, the Mets signed the biggest star in baseball, Juan Soto, to the biggest contract in baseball. Our payroll hit $323 million.
Yet they didn’t even make the playoffs. Why not? Because they didn’t just lose games they could have won. They lost games they should have won. They didn’t beat the bad teams.
The Mets were tied on the last day of the season with the Cincinnati Reds, the third-place team in the NL Central division, who had a payroll about one-third of the Mets’. The Reds in July were “sellers” — they were trading away their current talent for future prospects, because they had basically given up on the season. Had the Mets won on that last day of the season, they would have made the playoffs, where anything can happen.
On that very last day of the season, when a win would have secured the Mets the final playoff spot, Lindor, the beloved team leader who repeatedly had played the hero, grounded into a ninth-inning double play to end the game and the season.
It was pretty awful, to be sure. And not just the last game, but the whole season. On June 12, the Mets were in first place in their division, and they boasted the best record in all of baseball. They also had the highest payroll in baseball. Given that, just having to compete in September for the last spot in the newly expanded playoffs was embarrassing enough. But it’s a bit more painful than that. The Mets finished tied with the Reds for the last spot. But the Reds beat the Mets in four of their six games this year, so they had the tiebreaker.
When you miss the playoffs because of a tiebreaker, that means that every single loss you suffered that year, each of the 79 losses, was the loss that kept you out of the playoffs. Every blown lead — every game lost on an error, every game lost on a blown call, every game lost on a bad coaching decision, every game lost because one player didn’t hustle — cost you the season.
The only thing that could have made it worse is if Lindor had kept the inning going and let Soto, with the most expensive contract in baseball history, make the final out of the season. Soto ending the season in the on-deck circle was a rare mercy for Mets fans, whose suffering is unique because it is mixed with so much vain hope.
In 1973, one of the times the Mets lost the World Series, pitcher Tug McGraw made famous a chant: “Ya Gotta Believe.” The motto has persisted for five decades. In 2024, it was an apt cheer, as the Mets climbed from the cellar to the NLCS.
But as a rule, this mantra is a curse. The Mets last won the World Series in 1986. The median age in the U.S. is less than 39, so the Mets haven’t won a title in the lifetime of most living Americans. Yet as Mets fans, we are not allowed to give up. We are never let down easily. We are always strung along and knifed in the most painful way possible.
For Mets fans, belief is a purgatory, hope is a trap. The history of our fandom is a long story of dashed dreams. A year ago, the Mets finished the 2024 season with an incredible second-half turnaround. They posted the best record in baseball after Memorial Day, two great playoff series victories, and the toughest challenge the world champion Dodgers faced. Even while Mets fans last October congratulated the team and consoled ourselves with talk of “a great run” and an amazing fall, there was a sadness that came out only in quiet moments, out of earshot of Yankees fans or other gentiles.
This year, with the playoffs so closely lost, there are dozens of “if-onlies.” In the seventh inning on April 27, to pick just one game, the Mets had a 7-1 lead over the Washington Nationals, who spent the entire season in last place in the NL East. The Mets somehow lost the game. It was of a piece with our beloved, disappointing team’s record. The Mets lost six games to the sad-sack Nats this year, four of them by one run and a fifth in extra innings. If any one of those four games went the other way — if Brandon Nimmo or Starling Marte or Ronny Mauricio had gotten a hit with the winning run on third in the ninth or 10th inning — the Mets would have made the playoffs.
I could go on, but enough Mets fans have written these stories.
And of course, this wasn’t the worst season ending for the Mets in recent decades. In 2015, the Mets lost the World Series, despite leading four of the five games in the seventh inning. Game 5 was lost after an error on a throw that should have made the final out of the game. Game 1 was lost on a blown save by their closer, which is also what happened to the Mets in the 2000 World Series against the Yankees.
In 2007 and 2008, the Mets blew massive leads in the NL East in September. In 2006, the Mets blew a lead in Game 7 of the NLCS.
But as always, fans were given reason to hope — to believe. The Mets that 2006 night loaded the bases in the bottom of the ninth, with the tying and winning runs on base, and their best hitter up, Carlos Beltran. He struck out looking, and the Mets lost 3-1.
THE LOSS OF CIVILITY AND THE RYDER CUP
That was also the final score on Opening Day 2025. The Mets were losing 3-0, the offense looking sorry. But somehow, the bottom of the Mets order rallied in the ninth. They got in a run and, with two outs, brought the go-ahead run to the plate in their new, $765 million man. Soto, who could have won the game with one swing, worked the count full before striking out — an Opening Day loss. Just one loss. How much could that matter?
Fans didn’t know at the time that Soto’s strikeout would keep the Mets out of the playoffs, because, for our sins, we had to believe.
Timothy P. Carney is the senior political columnist at the Washington Examiner and a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
