NEW YORK, NEW YORK - MAY 29: Pete Alonso #20 of the New York Mets reacts after being hit by a pitch ... [+]
The New York Mets were officially founded on Oct. 17, 1960, which means Wednesday marks the 23,236th day in team history. In that span, the Mets have lost 346 more games than they’ve won. Their first manager, Casey Stengel, wondered aloud if anybody could play this game when the Mets lost 120 games in 1962, a level of futility that has not been reached in the major leagues since.
Thirty years later, the Mets were the subject of a book titled “The Worst Team Money Could Buy.” One season later, they had a pitcher throwing bleach on to reporters and a player throwing firecrackers into a crowd.
They will be paying Bobby Bonilla, a main culprit in the aforementioned book, $1.2 million every July 1 until 2035 because they first made the mistake of bringing Bonilla back after the 1998 season and then agreed to the deferrals instead of just giving him the $5.9 million he was due when they released him following the 1999 campaign.
In the last 10 years alone the Mets have, in no particular order: Fielded subpar rosters because the Wilpon family had $500 million invested with Bernie Madoff…left a player to cry on the field thinking he was about to be traded….had their mascot caught flipping off a camera…had a player conduct postgame interviews with a sex toy visible in a locker…saw Yoenis Cespedes’ career end when he went AWOL in the middle of the pandemic season…and employed one manager and two general managers whose careers ended due to their disastrous off-field behavior.
This is only a partial list of Mets debacles, which is another way of saying that trying to identify the most embarrassing day in Mets history is a lot like trying to find an eyelash in a stack of ashes.
But day no. 23,236 is in the conversation.
The Mets lost to the Dodgers, 10-3, Wednesday afternoon to complete a three-game, two-day sweep in which they were outscored 18-5. Edwin Diaz went on the injured list before the game with a shoulder ailment and Pete Alonso exited in the first inning after he was hit on the hand by a pitch.
These are the Mets, though, so it’s not simply enough to lose players while losing a game. Steve Cohen buying the team from the Wilpons in 2020 was supposed to usher in an era of Dodgers-esque prosperity in which the Mets built an east coast superpower and regularly challenged the Dodgers for the NL pennant.
The Mets seemed to be ahead of schedule in those pursuits when they won 101 games in 2022. But the Mets are just 97-120 since the start of last season, the third-worst record in the NL, and are on a 65-97 pace this year.
The extended downfall serves as a reminder that the breakout 2022 was fueled by outsiders who arrived with an edge (Buck Showalter, Max Scherzer, Chris Bassitt) and/or with experience on winning teams (Mark Canha, Eduardo Escobar, Starling Marte). Every one of those additions is gone except Marte, who has posted a WAR of -0.6 since undergoing surgery on both his groins after the 2022 season.
The Mets’ struggles this season has magnified the existential nature of the question inherited by president of baseball operations David Stearns: Can the core that was in place prior to 2022 — homegrown players Alonso, Jeff McNeil and Brandon Nimmo and imported veterans Diaz and Francisco Lindor, each of whom were acquired when they were in their 20s —be the core of a winning team in New York?
Lindor called the dreaded team meeting after Wednesday’s loss, which dropped the Mets to 7-19 this month and ensured they’d win fewer than 10 games in May for the first time since 1993, when the the sequel to The Worst Team Money Could Buy finished 59-103.
These are the Mets, though, so it’s not enough to simply lose so badly and often that players feel compelled to call a meeting. The meeting that overshadowed the Diaz and Alonso injuries became the meeting that was overshadowed by Jorge Lopez being designated for assignment following a bizarre-even-by-Mets-standards sequence of events involving Lopez.
The right-hander, who entered Wednesday as the Mets’ most effective reliever per WAR at Baseball-Reference.com, was ejected during the Dodgers’ six-run eighth inning for arguing with third base umpire Ramon DeJesus, who didn’t overturn a ball three call on Freddie Freeman. Lopez threw his glove over the netting hanging above the Mets’ dugout and then told reporters he didn’t regret the toss while acknowledging he might have looked like “…the worst (expletive) teammate in baseball,” though some interpreted that comment as Lopez saying he was on the worst team in baseball.
The Mets irony of all this he’s at least the third Mets player to chuck a glove into the stands, following in the footsteps of beloved pitchers Bob Ojeda and Turk Wendell, and that the Mets have retained and/or not punished players who acted and/or performed much worse than Lopez.
Vince Coleman was acting reprehensibly long before he tossed a firecracker into a crowd at Dodger Stadium in 1993. Bonilla and Rickey Henderson were playing cards as the 1999 season ended with an agonizing loss to the Braves in Game 6 of the NLCS, but it took until Jan. 3, 2000 for Bonilla to be released (with his infamous deferrals, of course) and Henderson remained a nuisance until he was finally released May 13, 2000.
Rey Sanchez was traded July 29, 2003, months after he got a haircut in the clubhouse during a game. Neither Lindor nor Javier Baez sat out a game after flashing “thumbs down” gestures in response to being booed on Aug. 29, 2021.
And despite committing baserunning gaffes and his maddening lack of urgency at the plate, Daniel Vogelbach remained on the roster last season, when he served as a reminder of the philosophical gap between Showalter and Billy Eppler.
Stearns, who was a kid in Manhattan for many of these transgressions and completing his gap year last season as a consultant with the Brewers, can’t be criticized if he wants to set a tone with the Lopez release. But this is also an executive who is fielding a team without a backup middle infielder even though McNeil and Lindor are hitting a combined .219. Deciding to weaken an already thin area of the team to make an example of Lopez is a questionable idea even without taking into account Lopez’s poignant backstory.
Lopez has pitched his entire career while taking care of his son Mikael, who has two autoimmune diseases and needed a bone marrow transplant in 2021. Lopez also spent time on the injured list last season dealing with mental health issues. Maybe being designated for assignment was too severe a punishment for a player who committed a regrettable outburst and then tried explaining himself in his second language.
Regardless, the problem for the Mets remains the same no matter where Lopez spends the rest of this season. Simply being mediocre or worse is never enough for the Mets. On- and off-field debacles like Wednesday are a part of the franchise’s DNA. Changing players never helps. Changing general managers never helped. Changing owners hasn’t helped yet. Stearns, hired as the Mets’ first president of baseball operations and tasked to build Dodgers East, has so much more to do than that.
“We have to create our own identity, our own organizational way and be elite in a way that is unique to the New York Mets,” Stearns told ESPN.com during spring training.
They’re unique all right. Maybe they can start doing the most unique thing of all on day no. 23,237, and just get through it without embarrassment.
