Panic! At The Other Side Of Town

The Mets have tied their season-worst losing streak, and could fall out of first place today for the first time since April, but it's not the beginning of September that will decide their season

By Jesse Spector

To be around Mets Twitter and the Willets Pen Discord the past few days – and that’s how I’ve consumed the Mets, having taken a Labor Day trip to Baltimore to watch the Orioles continue their playoff push, a real thing that is happening. I have photographic proof…

…anyway, to not be watching the Mets without watching the Mets over the past few days (they were already down 4-0 last night before I got to the TV, so I didn’t bother), you’d think that this team hadn’t lost three games in a row before.

Well, they have. At the end of June, and then again split across the All-Star break. And now, the past three. I don’t know all the gruesome details of the past three, and I simply won’t, because there’s no need. An SNY graphic, which our Roger Cormier tweeted last night, told the story plenty.

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What's your point?

You know going into a season that a team, even a really good team, is going to lose a couple of times a week. A 97-win team loses 40% of the time. But the thing about averages is that you don’t usually lose a couple of times a week. There are peaks and valleys. These Mets, though, have been remarkably stable. They haven’t won more than seven games in a row all year. They’ve just gone out, won series, and ground their opponents to a coarse slurry.

They don’t steamroll teams the way that the Astros do, or Atlanta at their best. It’s a methodical kind of dominance, and psychologically taxing to their opponents. You can tell from Spencer Strider’s grousing, or from Randy Levine having the Mets’ name in his mouth yesterday.