Something interesting happened in Arlington, Texas on Wednesday night: For the first time in 619 days, the New York Mets played what could be called a “significant” game.
What’s even crazier is that nobody noticed it before or while it was happening — even when the NBA’s seven-game winning streak came to an end with a 5-3 loss to the Texas Rangers, there was hardly any hand waving or fist pumping.
After all, it’s mid-June, not the beginning of October.
Nothing particularly significant will happen in June.
However, right after the Mets took a 3-1 lead in the top of the sixth inning, SNY aired the National League Wild Card standings, and I immediately noticed two things: While the Wild Card standings usually only show five or six teams, there were 10 teams shown. 10 teams!
And even before Gary Cohen and Keith Hernandez did their obvious math, one thing was clear when looking at this graph: If the Mets had been able to get the final 12 outs of this game, they would have woken up Thursday morning tied for the playoff spot, which is almost hard to believe when you remember how the Mets looked through most of April and May.
They ended up not getting an out, Sean Manaea threw a no-hitter, then lost the lead, and then Drew Smith gave up a meatball to Reedy Taveras and that was it.
“The fact that we were able to play good baseball, especially after what we went through in May, shows we have a good team,” Mets manager Carlos Mendoza said after the game. “We have guys that are going to continue to compete.”
And the Mets’ hot streak (seven straight games, 11 wins of 13 before Wednesday, 11-4 in June) is the biggest reason to even look at the standings. They were in such bad shape on June 2, blowing a ninth-inning lead to Arizona and falling to 11 games below their worst .500 mark of the season.
The season may have been completely out of control at that point, but that was understandable, because nothing was going right or right for the Mets at that point. They also fell a season-high 6.5 games out of the final wild card spot that day, a pretty big number for early June, since there were eight teams between them and the wild card.
We can have a lot of fun at the expense of the three wild cards (and we’ll do so in a paragraph or two), but even the promise of three consolation prizes doesn’t mean much when it comes to terrible teams. There hasn’t been a moment of false hope this year for White Sox or Rockies fans, for example, and Mets fans easily joined that ranks on June 2nd.
Okay, well, not long ago we wrote that the Mets would be playing 35 games just days after the All-Star break, which would include 33 games against teams with a winning percentage under .500. Of course, the caveat here is that all of the losing teams were equally eager to play the Mets.
But now, after nine games, the Mets are 7-2 and head to Wrigley Field and the Cubs, who are 36-39, one percentage point better than the Mets, who are 35-38.
There’s a lot of work to be done, a long season left, and the season hanging in the balance, always a quiet warning that a sixth straight loss could be on the way.
Now… let’s talk a bit about wild cards.
And there are still plenty of baseball fans who long for the days when only the first-place team made the postseason, and for a long time that was the sole feature of the game. Then a wild card was added to each league. And then another, and another, and another.
It’s still rare for a team that wasn’t even sure it would have a winning percentage above .500 for the first 158 games to finish the season with a playoff berth.
Years later, the ’73 Mets, who finished with an 82-79 record and a five-team playoff chance in the NL East until the final week, still have the fewest regular-season wins of any playoff team (tied with the ’05 Padres, who were 82-80).
What’s interesting is that these teams were all division champions and all first-place finishers, along with the 2006 Cardinals, who went 83-79. The worst Wild Card teams of all time were the Diamondbacks and Marlins, who went 84-78 last year.
The Braves currently hold a comfortable 5 1/2 game lead in the wild card position, with nine teams — the Cardinals, Nationals, Padres, Diamondbacks, Pirates, Cubs, Giants, Mets and Reds — all vying for the remaining two spots, all 1 1/2 games back.
Now, is this ridiculous? Probably. It’s also possible that one of these teams will finish with a 20-5 record and surely slide into the second wild card. But these teams are all very similar to each other, and not just in terms of records. This could be a crazy step to the finish line, and it’s definitely five teams, if not eight.
Is that silly? Maybe, but would it seem so silly if you were rooting for a team that somehow managed to win, say, 81-81?
impossible.
