The Mets have finally met their fate.
These last few games of the World Series were brutal. It was as if I was watching the slow, slow death of a pet.
In a fairytale season that saw disappointment, literal tears, utter joy, unforeseen successes, a rare big trade and disappointment again, as Mets fans we felt like this was our year. And quite frankly, it should have been. A few breaks here and there, and maybe the Mets are champions. Maybe if the bullpen didn’t absolutely wet the bed. Maybe if Daniel Murphy, Lucas Duda, Yoenis Cespedes and David Wright didn’t make crucial errors. Maybe if manager Terry Collins made the right personnel decisions. But that’s baseball. The Royals capitalized on the little things in every game they won — one bad pitch, one bad hop, one horrible throw, one misplayed fly ball — to take the World Series with ease.
Unfortunately, now we can only take solace in the fact that Bryce Harper was sitting on his couch for all of October.
In all seriousness, what a remarkable season. On July 23, the mighty duo of John Mayberry Jr. and Eric Campbell, with batting averages of .170 and .179, respectively, batted in the four and five spots of the Mets’ lineup. The Mets sat at 49-47, three games behind a highly touted Nationals team that was just starting to show signs of major weakness. The Mets’ pitching staff, spearheaded by flamethrowers Harvey, deGrom and Syndergaard, kept us in the ball games; our hitting kept us out of them.
Enter Yoenis Cespedes, Juan Uribe and Kelly Johnson. Add a few tears from Wilmer Flores and the offensive reemergence of Lucas Duda, Curtis Granderson and Daniel Murphy, along with the return of David Wright and Travis d’Arnaud. Suddenly we go 41-25 with a run differential of +85 for the rest of the season. It wasn’t uncommon for the quality of our hitting to far surpass the quality of our outstanding pitching from August through October.
Having experienced the collapses of ’07 and ’08, Mets fans tread lightly at the team’s success through September. The Nationals were reeling, however, under heavy expectations. Eighty-four wins would have been enough to take the NL East; the Mets got 90.
The Mets were just happy to make the playoffs. “Everything else is gravy,” Collins said about the deciding Game Five of the NLDS.
Well Terry, there sure was a hell of an amount of gravy.
As a Mets fan from Los Angeles, friends back home gave me the same old Dodgers rhetoric in anticipation for the NLDS. “We have Kershaw and Greinke. Dodgers in four,” was the abridged version of how the standard Dodger fan I knew talked about the series.
The Mets played a hard fought five games against the Dodgers in the NLDS. Behind Jacob deGrom’s gem in Game One and his utter determination in Game Five, and behind the bats of Granderson and Murphy, the Mets moved on in a series that could have gone either way.
As for Grienke and Kershaw? They gave up three home runs to Murphy, including a game-winning one in Game Five.
The Mets then absolutely dominated the Chicago Cubs in a four-game sweep of the NLCS, a series the Cubs never led. Those two series saw the rise of Babe Ruth — I mean Murphy — who hit an absurd .421/.426/1.026 with seven home runs through the nine games.
The team made the World Series when no one expected them to win 80 games. To echo Collins’ sentiments, that’s enough to call this season a major success.
Regardless, there’s reason to be angry about the result. The losses, on baseball’s biggest stage, were brutal and mind-numbing.
But there’s reason for optimism in Queens.
Expect the Mets to make some moves this offseason. If Murphy or Cespedes leave in free agency, expect the Mets to make strong moves to replace them. The Wilpons are notoriously cheap, and as noted by ESPN's Adam Rubin, 2016 is the first year that the Wilpons must pay $37 million as reparation for their role in the Bernie Madoff scandal. Nonetheless, in the wake of the Mets’ 2015 success, expect them to be suitors for Colby Rasmus, Jason Heyward, Darren O’Day and Ben Zobrist this offseason.
More importantly, with the rotation of deGrom, Harvey, Syndergaard and Matz, along with the hopeful return of Zack Wheeler in July 2016, the Mets are on course to have the best starting five in the league next season.
"This game, and I truly believe this, it's about having good starting pitching. It's going nowhere […] The future is pretty bright still,” Collins said.
Despite some bad luck and mental errors in the World Series, Mets fans should not be dejected by the end result of this season.
The Mets will be back.
Great season, boys.
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