The Mets have surged into contention since the All-Star Break, depantsing all those rational thinkers who made fun of the Marcus Stroman trade and throwing terror into the hearts of Dodgers fans, who likely see their two newly most-likely NLDS opponents’ rotations of Scherzer/Strasburg/Corbin and deGrom/Stroman/Syndergaard as some kind of sick joke by God, especially with the Astros rising down here in Texas like an oil-fueled monster in a cartoon about global warming for kids.
And you know what, yes, this is further evidence that the Mets are baseball’s closest thing to the NIT.
They’re a mess. They’re kind of good. They’re often at the fringe of contention, and for a brief while were the best show in town, but they’re now completely overshadowed by their neighbors. They reside in New York. Mr. Met and his family are their mascots.
The roller coaster of hope, desperate bargaining with deities, utter horror, complete and abject fury, fleeting triumph, and simultaneous nostalgia and longing for (respectively) the past and future is symptomatic of being a fan of a team headed to the NIT. It’s also the experience of Mets fanhood, or our best guess as to what that feels like, as outsiders.
But beyond even these characteristics, there are a number of other happenings putting the Mets in the same cosmic sphere as the NIT:
- The Mets are located near an airport.
- That airport is utterly reviled.
- The Mets are owned/run by a guy named Fred.
- That guy is utterly reviled.
- The Mets are located in Queens, the borough which provokes complete indifference from anyone not from New York.
- The majority of the Matt Harvey epic took place with the Mets.
- The Mets’ bullpen is awful.
- At one point this season, a pitcher on the Mets tried to fight a reporter, allegedly because the reporter told his manager he’d see him the next day.
- Are we missing some context with that last bullet point? There is no way to know.
- At one point this season, the Mets had to clarify that their highest-paid player did not fall off a horse.
- We still don’t know what that player fell off of.
The list goes on.
The point of all of this is that the Mets have driven their circus right into the thick of the National League Playoff Race™, an event that’s a circus in its own right (the other primary participants in the Mets’ tier include The Team Who Just Had a Pitcher Barf on the Mound for the Second Season in a Row, The Team Whose Left Fielder Has a Habit of Climbing the Wall Before Letting the Ball Hit the Warning Track, The Team Whose Best Reliever Pooped His Pants Last Year, The Team Who Won a Bunch of Games Then Kept Their Ace at the Deadline and Now Is Basically Out of It, and The Team Who Spent $500 Million This Offseason to Probably Not Make the Playoffs).
And we could not be happier to have them here.
