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.
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