Now that the Mets have blown what looked like a comfortable seven game lead by losing 12 out of their last 17 games, they’re out of the playoffs. It’s too painful for some fans to say yet, but we have no choice except to wait ‘til next year.
While some are calling it an historic collapse, the worst ever, and the most painful thing a team has ever done to its fans, it doesn’t even make the top five disappointments Mets fans have endured in the past 20 years.
So don’t be despondent, and don’t let the smug cockiness of Yankees fans get to you. Life is not that bad. There are worse things than this collapse. In no particular order, here are five Mets disappointments bigger than the collapse of 2007.
2006: Denial
You don’t have to go too far into the past to find a worse outcome to a Mets season. Just go back one year.
In 2006, the Mets were tenacious, exciting, and inevitable. They could hold leads and come from behind. They never left you feeling the game was out of reach.
The ’06 Mets rolled into the playoffs with everything going right, only to be stunned by a Cardinals team that didn’t seem to be that good. That hurt more than what happened this September.
The difference between these last two seasons is that this year, the Mets couldn’t hold a lead and couldn’t come from behind. They didn’t deserve to play in the postseason and would not have gone far. This year was disappointing, but not undeserved. The timing of the slump was bad: if it had happened early in the year and they surged at the end, only to fall a game short, we’d all feel a lot better right now. Or not. I’ll know better when the shock of it wears off. I’m still in denial about what happened last year.
2000: Anger
Add up the runs scored in the five game subway World Series of 2000 and you get 19 runs for the Yankees and 16 for the Mets. That shows how close this series was, but the Yankees won four out of the five games to win their third World Series in a row. Close isn’t good enough.
For Mets fans, losing to the Yankees in the World Series is more painful than losing to the Nationals or the Marlins in the regular season. Most of the time.
1988: Bargaining
If you can’t win in the regular season, you don’t deserve to be in the playoffs. But no level of success in the regular season can protect you from being upset in the playoffs. Last year was tough, but 1988 was tougher. Nothing’s worse than looking indestructible, being heavily favored, and then stumbling unexpectedly. Just ask Yankees fans about the 2004 ALCS. When you’re the Yankees, up 3 games in a 7 game series against the Red Sox, you’re not supposed to lose.
The Mets won 100 games in 1988, and won the NL East by 15 games. They faced the Dodgers in the playoffs, a team they had beaten 10 out of 11 times during the regular season. But they couldn’t win 4 out of 7 in the playoffs.
Still, at the time the Mets were solid, and “wait ‘til next year” didn’t seem like such a bad thing…
1989-1996: Depression
In ’89, the Mets didn’t make the playoffs. Within a couple of years, the team that had looked so solid turned into a bunch of overpriced underperformers with attitude problems. Those were hard years for Mets fans. They should be forgotten.
It was almost as if the collapse in the playoffs after a great regular season made 1989 a little less important. If you can’t come out to the ballpark every day, and play like it matters, good things stop happening. The fans notice.
I hope we’re not heading in that direction. There’s talent and heart on this team, though there are definite weaknesses and some changes need to be made.
You can’t go into a season with a pitching staff full of question marks, and expect it to hold up for 162 games.
1987: Acceptance
After winning the World Series in 1986, the Mets found themselves chasing the Cardinals late in the season. From more than 10 games out, on September 11 they were only a game and a half behind, starting a crucial three game series at Shea. The Mets grabbed an early lead thanks to a first-inning Darryl Strawberry home run.
In the ninth inning, they were still up 4-2. Roger McDowell was on the mound to hold the lead. There was a runner on with two outs. A win here, and Mets fans knew the team would be only a half game out with Gooden set for the second game of the series. You just knew the Mets would be in first soon.
Then Terry Pendleton hit a 2-run homer and the Cards won it in extra innings. The Mets fell two and a half games back, and never got closer.
I was there that night. I went with my best friend, and we sat in the upper deck, where you can watch the planes landing at La Guardia Airport between innings.
My friend liked to keep score. Every game we went to, he’d pick up a scorecard and a pencil and diligently fill in the results of each at bat. I don’t know why he did this, because after every game, he’d toss the scorecard in the back seat of my car and forget it there.
We were excited and confident, and when Strawberry hit his blast in the first inning he turned to me and gave me a high-five. He did it with the hand that was holding the pencil. I spent the rest of the game holding a napkin, to stop the bleeding.
After my hand healed, I noticed there was a piece of pencil lead lodged under the skin. It’s not really lead, it’s graphite, and there’s no health risk that I’m aware of. It’s there as a reminder of the most bitter Mets defeat I’ve ever witnessed.
It doesn’t matter if the Mets can’t hold every lead. I’ll always hold one for them.
Wait ‘til next year.