ATLANTA — And so here the Mets are again, with one day set to determine a season’s legacy.
Four days ago, the Mets departed Atlanta with 1,536 possibilities in the National League wild-card race. They arrived back here late Sunday night with only three permutations left and a considerably simpler mandate: Win once in two tries Monday and they will play in the postseason.
Baseball’s promise is that it resonates more in the aggregate — that over eight months and 162 regular-season games, you can dismiss certain granularities because, hey, they’ll even out over time.
The Mets, bless their hearts, have taken a sledgehammer to that premise in recent days and in their recent history. Monday will mark the sixth time in the past 27 seasons that the Mets will either qualify or miss the postseason by a single game. (It’s happened to the average team less than twice in that span; Monday will break New York’s tie for the league lead with the Astros.)
And that distinguishing one of 162 goes a long way toward forging our memories of a baseball team. You do not wax poetically about 1998, about John Olerud hitting .354 and Mike Piazza arriving to supercharge the offense. No, because needing one win in the last five days of the season, that team took an 0-fer in Montreal and Atlanta.
You do get all nostalgic thinking about 1999, though — guilty as charged. Instead of that winless road trip the second to last week of the season, you remember Melvin Mora scampering home on the final day of the season and Al Leiter ending a decade-long playoff drought one day later.
That’s what’s at stake for the Mets on Monday. Win once and join the too select group of postseason teams in franchise history, one that’s played well enough for long enough to pose a threat in a flat National League. With a victory, you can keep that OMG sign forever, an artifact of a season that extinguished a fan base’s hard-earned cynicism — a season of, dare we say, humor and whimsy and joy.
Lose twice, though, including once when it doesn’t mean anything to Atlanta, and you’ll wince every time you see a McDonald’s for the next decade, your emotional armor hardened again against believing that this Mets team can be different.
The stakes are large for individual Mets, as well. This core group has been unable to shake the notion that its best work is saved for the season’s less important moments — a criticism that’s found fertile ground in the September slumps of Pete Alonso and Brandon Nimmo. Tylor Megill and perhaps Luis Severino have the chance to step up as Leiter did a quarter-century ago, or as David Peterson did a few hours ago. Francisco Lindor can put the finishing touches on as good a position player season as the Mets have ever seen by delivering one more signature moment.
And David Stearns and Carlos Mendoza can put a stamp on the first season of their era of Mets baseball. They defined success throughout the winter and into the spring as qualifying for the postseason. So here it is, baseball’s single-ply line between success and failure, laid out in an afternoon in Atlanta.
This roller-coaster season has saved its wickedest twists for the final stretch — the momentum of an excellent homestand undone by a trio of poor performances on the road, until Sunday’s encouraging palate cleanser. This kind of whiplash should be unhealthy in a baseball season, but if you know the Mets, you know this is how it is.
The season has come down to one day. How will these Mets be remembered?
(Photo of J.D. Martinez: John Fisher / Getty Images)
