The New York Mets managed to put together a perfect season last year, despite failing to win the World Series. This should be impossible — a title seems like a prerequisite for perfection — and for any other franchise, for any other fan base, it would be. But when you root for a team that’s won just two championships in its 63-year history, and none since 1986 — a team famous not just for losing but for losing with cartoonish flair and bottomless invention — you learn to be a little flexible.
For Mets fans, 2024 offered an unfamiliar combination: a feeling of accomplishment unlike anything we’ve experienced in decades (that’s easy — very low bar) and the total absence of accompanying anguish (that’s much, much harder). Yes, the Mets wound up getting brushed aside by the stacked Los Angeles Dodgers on that team’s march toward its own championship, but a crucial part of what made 2024 so magical is what didn’t happen to the Mets along the way. There was no epic collapse or humiliating blunder, no scapegoats, no lingering resentments. The Mets had a crazy run of historic moments that I’ll be rewatching on YouTube for the rest of my life, and then we just got beat by a better team.
Then, somehow, the mood got even better. In December, Steve Cohen, the team’s billionaire owner, tempted the off-season’s marquee superstar, Juan Soto, into ditching the Yankees, our hated crosstown rivals. Then, for good measure, Uncle Steve splurged and brought back Pete “The Polar Bear” Alonso, a fan favorite. Mr. Cohen and his front office deftly navigated two wildly different contract negotiations — a leaguewide bidding war for a generational player and an awkward staredown over a homegrown hero — and came away winners both times. Pause on that for a moment: Mets fans can actually trust the Mets front office to make smart decisions! It’s no wonder that, three months into 2025 with spring training in full bloom and a new season nearly upon us, Mets fans are floating on air.
And that’s where our troubles begin.
A popular misconception is that the Mets are irredeemably, unremittingly bad, but that’s not true. (You’re thinking of the Pirates.) What separates the Mets from ordinary run-of-the-mill losers is the team’s long, albeit sporadic, history of winning every bit as theatrically as they lose, dating all the way to the so-called Miracle Mets who improbably won the World Series in 1969. Four years ago, I wrote a history of the Mets told through the prism of the one thing our dear franchise has always done better than everyone else: losing, in ever more imaginative and excruciating fashion. Because with our team, you truly never know. You only probably know.
Now I find myself heading into this baseball season grappling with what feels like an existential dilemma. What if the Mets have suddenly emerged as something they’ve never been before — a competent, well-run organization, stocked with enough resources to compete with any team in baseball? What if — and yes, I know what I’m tempting here, perhaps even guaranteeing, by putting these words out into the world — the Mets are actually good now? I’m not sure how to be a Mets fan if the Mets are no longer the Mets.
Thankfully I also believe, in the grander sports-as-metaphor-for-life sort of way, that my Metsian prism on the world is fundamentally the correct one. Which is to say, we’re all losers most of the time. We’re all a little Metsy some of the time. We may have success, yes, but we can’t completely avoid failure and the sooner we embrace it, the happier we’ll be. There’s a reason so many Mets fans, myself included, remain delusionally optimistic after all these years, despite all the horrors we’ve seen and the LOLs we’ve endured. The highs are high, and the lows are low, and no matter how high things get we believe with religious fervor that a new low is just around the corner. But also, right behind that, possibly another high. It’s not a terrible way to go through life.
Maybe this is simply self-sabotage. I know from extensive conversations with Yankees fans that they very much believe this is a loser’s mentality, that we’re somehow manifesting a disappointing ending.
Fair enough, but it’s been a minute for the Yankees, too, and their fans are tortured about it. Mere minutes after the Mets officially poached Mr. Soto, an old friend who’s a Yankees fan bombarded me with a string of angry, nasty texts, going into full-scale meltdown mode. I savored every letter of it. I screened-shotted the texts to save and share. During a February podcast interview with David Stearns, the Mets’ new, endearingly competent president of baseball operations, the journalist and lifelong Yankee fan Pablo Torre confessed that he was “jealous” of the Mets. Jealous! For a long-suffering fan like me, the admission was intoxicating but also deeply unsettling. I worry that this is how we start turning into what we hate most — the humorless bully who takes success as a given and pouts the moment anything goes wrong.
The Yankees made the World Series last fall — they had, objectively, a better season than the Mets — yet every Yankees fan I know was miserable the entire season while Mets fans had the time of our lives. The arrival of Mr. Soto in Queens demands a change in our metric for success — you don’t spend nearly a billion dollars on one player just for sunny vibes, you do it to win a World Series — but that doesn’t mean the Mets have to fundamentally change. In the end, I’d rather lose like us than try to win like the other guys. Being a Mets fan has always looked like more fun because, while also undeniably torturous, it is more fun. I’m not about to let a little thing like winning ruin that.
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