A New Bad Feeling

The Mets aren't off to a disastrous start bopping around .500, but it sure isn't good, and having it happen in year two of the Steve Cohen era hits different

Thirty-three of the New York Mets' 61 seasons have been losing ones. That's only 54 percent of the catalogue! When I first discovered this, I was shocked too. 

In any case, the Mets starting off 17-18 is not fun, a not-funness equal to those 33 losing seasons, but with a different flavor to it. 

The "vibes," people have said, have been "off" or simply "bleh" for awhile now in Queens. Maybe it started when Carlos Correa stopped being a Met after five fun minutes. Maybe it was when Edwin Díaz suffered a freak season-ending leg injury in the World Baseball Classic. I think it goes deeper than that. It happened gradually. 

It's the payroll. The huge, historically bigly team payroll. With the estimated 340 million smackeroos comes major expectations. By this metric, no Met team has ever underwhelmed this much in history.

Think about those 33 losing seasons. In only a few of those years were the Mets "supposed" to be good: 1991 (77-84), 1992 (72-90), 2017 (70-92). Then there are the technically "winning" seasons where the Mets massively disappointed: 1987 (92-70), 2001 (82-80), 2007 (88-74), and 2008 (89-73).

All of those aforementioned years happened under the watch of Fred Wilpon, either as half or majority owner. It's simplistic to blame one person for failure, while at the same time not incorrect to do so in this case. There was an obvious scapegoat, is the point. For some it was Wilpon, for others it was bad injury luck, which sometimes could be traced back to Wilpon (he was responsible for hiring Mike Barwis, for one thing.) 

2023 is another animal. The owner isn't a cheapskate. He hasn't tweeted anything negative in awhile. The fault is hard to pin on anyone.

It's unlikely Buck Showalter already lost a clubhouse he won over just a year ago (he was Max Scherzer's very public pick to manage, if you recall)

Billy Eppler put together a senior citizen starting rotation, it's true. It's also accurate to say he would have been pilloried had the Mets signed neither Scherzer nor Justin Verlander when it was financially possible, and Carlos Rodón hasn’t exactly been working out for the Yankees, or pitching at all.

Instead, fans can only resort to booing Tomás Nido, or a clearly not 100 percent healthy Starling Marte. Instead, fans have to sit there and listen to pundits carry the water of the owners who pocket their massive profits and sing, "See? Money doesn't buy championships!" It's a place Mets fans haven't been before, where all they wanted to travel to as a semi-foreign destination was the World Series winner's podium.