The Mets have reached the point of their season in which a numbing, repetitive loss to the Braves, the team’s fifth in a row, gets a game story that’s mostly about a prospect who’s the son of an old Yankee. So it goes. There’s not much more you can say about the carnage at this point.
But you can try to put it in historical perspective. Faith and Fear in Flushing asks this morning: Has it ever been this bad before?
Record-wise, it’s obviously not the worst season. If the Mets can win four more games — which is possible! — it won’t even be the worst of this decade; they lost 95 games as recently as 2003. But this year had hopes, it had dreams, it had a pretty new stadium everyone couldn’t wait to have open. And then this happened.
On the level of disappointment, Faith and Fear gives us five nominees: 2009, 1974, 1979, 1991, and 1992 (the best team money can buy!). You can make a compelling case for 1992; Jason Fry from FAFIF writes, “There has never been a more noxious collection of human beings wearing Mets uniforms at the same time. Daniel Murphy may have his problems at first base, but I have faith that he will never injure a two-year-old girl with a quarter-stick of dynamite.” Good point!
But this was supposed to be the redemptive season, the one that made up for the evil endings of the last two Septembers. Instead, the whole enterprise imploded in a poof! of injuries, awkward press conferences, and someone named Wilson Valdez. When was the last time you even thought about the Mets?
We still have to go with 1992, though. The Mets at least have a small possibility that they’ll be better next season, especially if everyone nurses themselves back to full health. That 1992 team was full of awful humans and set off a near-decade-long slide that happened to coincide with the reemergence of the Yankees. So, no. It’s probably not the worst, or most disappointing, season in Mets history. Don’t you feel better now?