Edwin Díaz, the New York Mets’ All-Star closer, is no stranger to unusual injuries. A couple of years ago, he tore the patellar tendon in his right knee while jumping up and down to celebrate a win in the World Baseball Classic. Still, the condition he described after exiting a game in late April was one for the books. “Yesterday, my legs—one was longer than the other one,” he said, offhandedly, before adding that a trainer had “fixed it.” Asked to elaborate, he replied, “I don’t know. I didn’t ask. He just did it, and I was feeling better after.” His quotes circulated widely, shared by bloggers and fans on social media with a bit of puzzlement and delight but with little follow-up or explanation. The real story was perhaps not so strange—there was, evidently, a strength imbalance in his hips—but his more startling description probably seemed plausible enough to those who root for his team. Of course one of Díaz’s legs was longer than the other. He is, after all, a Met.
The Mets’ association with absurdity has long been inextricable from the team’s identity, something I spent a lot of time thinking about before the season, when I wrote a long story about the franchise, and its rivalry with New York’s other team, the Yankees. When Steve Cohen, the hedge-fund billionaire, bought the team, in 2020, he pledged to rebuild the organization so that New Yorkers could wear Mets hats with pride instead of vague embarrassment—the default sentiment for many Mets fans ever since the team’s founding, in 1962, but particularly after the previous owners, the Wilpon family, were discovered to be among Bernie Madoff’s biggest clients. And, recently, Cohen’s vision seemed to be coming to fruition. There was a thrilling run into October last season, then the signing of Juan Soto, who was lured away from the Yankees with the biggest contract in baseball history. There was a general sense of competency surrounding the team. Even Díaz’s mysterious condition and rehabilitation suggested a change—a weird thing had happened, but the training staff had addressed it! Almost immediately, his pitching became nearly untouchable. On June 12th, the team was at the top of the standings, with a five-and-a-half-game lead in the National League East.
Since then, the team has seen twenty-three wins, and thirty-six losses—one of the worst records in the majors. The starting pitching has been terrible. The bullpen has been unreliable. The bats have been anemic. The Mets have had more than twenty blown-lead losses since June 13th. Almost every part of the team has been underperforming. From time to time, there have been signs of the World Series contenders they used to be not so long ago: a seven-game win streak in July; a three-game unbeaten stretch just last week. On Friday night, they had twenty-one hits and scored twelve runs to beat the Atlanta Braves. But whatever momentum they manage to build quickly craters—most recently, in a series loss to the Washington Nationals, one of the worst teams in the M.L.B. “Feels very normal,” Nick O’Brien, a Mets fan whom I’d met on the berm in Port St. Lucie, at a spring-training game, in March, told me, when I spoke to him on the phone last week. “There’s a little bit of a trauma response in there,” he added. On Reddit, Mets fans were busy arguing about which squads in the franchise’s history had suffered the worst collapses.
Some of this is premature. Good teams have bad weeks, even bad months; the Mets started horribly last season, and romped into the National League Championship Series. Because of the team’s healthy start, their winning percentage remains comfortably above .500, and they’re clinging to a slim lead over the Cincinnati Reds for the final wild-card spot in the National League. Attendance at Citi Field has remained strong. When I reached out to another fan I met at spring training, he responded from Washington, D.C., where he’d brought his son to see the Mets on the road—he sent me pictures of the two of them, decked out in Mets gear, at the Nationals’ stadium. Kyle Gorjanc, O’Brien’s girlfriend, said, “Everybody’s doing their job, doing what they can, and it just sort of feels like, Well, you win some, you lose some! It doesn’t really feel like a disaster.” O’Brien interjected to say that it would be a disaster if the team failed to make the playoffs.
Still, there are silver linings, even as the losses pile up. There is a degree of reassurance, after all, in knowing that the team hasn’t become unrecognizable. “That underdog mentality is something that’s kind of indomitable,” O’Brien said. “There’s a little sense that you can’t buy your way out of it.” Gorjanc and O’Brien attended a game earlier this season during which David Wright, the team’s beloved former captain, had his jersey retired. “The David Wright thing was cool,” O’Brien said. “He mentioned the Wilpons during the speech, and everybody booed.”
If those fans needed any more reasons to boo—they only needed to look north, to the Bronx, where the Yankees were in the midst of an even more spectacular swoon. The Yankees entered the season as the second favorites to win the World Series, behind only the Los Angeles Dodgers. At the end of May, they held a seven-game lead in the American League East, over the Toronto Blue Jays. But since June 13th—also the date when the Mets’ major misfortunes began—the Yankees have had a losing record, and have tumbled out of first place. They are currently in a battle with the Boston Red Sox for the top wild-card spot. It’s been a disappointing season for a lot of supposed juggernauts: even the Dodgers are having a down year of sorts, relative to expectations, though they still lead their division. Every team that makes a credible attempt at the post-season is up against the vagaries of luck and the vulnerabilities of the human body. In this respect, the only teams that aren’t underdogs, you could say, are the ones whose fates are fixed because their owners are too stingy to even try.
Whatever comes in September and beyond, the Mets’ front office will face a tricky off-season. It’s rumored that Díaz, perhaps the team’s best player this season—at least since his mysterious condition was resolved—will test the free-agent market, and the Mets’ popular slugger Pete Alonso, who recently set the franchise record for most home runs, could opt out of his contract. How far Cohen is willing to go to change the team may depend on how far he’s willing to go to keep them. As for Soto, he’s having a “Met year,” as Gorjanc put it. But Francisco Lindor, the team’s shortstop who, until Soto’s arrival, had claim to the team’s richest contract, struggled at first, too, before turning into the team’s M.V.P. “Maybe Soto just needs a Met year before he ripens,” Gorjanc said. Or another fourteen, I offered—the length of the rest of his contract. ♦
