The slogan peppers everything surrounding the Mets: TV ads, radio ads, in-house ads on the Shea Stadium scoreboard. It seemed pretty presumptuous even when times were good. And it wasn’t all that long ago that times were very good.
“Your season has come,” the ads proclaim.
Now, on the day after Father’s Day, Mets fans are officially allowed to wonder if that catch phrase shouldn’t be modified to something that more appropriately reflects where the season currently sits.
Something like: “Your season has come . . . and gone.”
Yes, yes, yes. It’s early. It’s only June. There are still 95 games left in the season (although, if they’re all remotely as excruciating to watch as last night’s abysmal 8-2 loss to the Yankees was, that’s hardly a reassuring thing). They’re still in first place. They’re still in first place, in fact, by three games in the loss column. The Yankees have already proven what a long season 162 games can be.
Etcetera. Etcetera. Etcetera.
Blah. Blah. Blah. Blah. Blah.
“We’re going to keep playing,” Willie Randolph said. “We have to keep grinding. We’ll get through this and, when we do, this will all seem like just fodder, just scuttlebutt, the kind of things every team goes through.”
That’s one way of looking at it. Here’s another: Perhaps this isn’t a blip, isn’t an aberration. At some point, we have to ask a very hard question about a team that fully expected to be lapping the National League East by now:
How good are the Mets?
At some point, you stop tapping your toes, stop tapping your watch, stop waiting for the turnaround that everyone believes is inevitable, and start wondering if we haven’t already seen the best of this team. It’s a fair question.
At the start of this brutal slide, the Mets lost three games to the Phillies that were legitimate gut-wrenching, stomach-turning heartbreakers. Hard losses to deal with, sure. But at least there still seemed to be a fire flickering behind the Mets’ collective eyes.
But starting last weekend, in Detroit, and extending to a forgettable stop in Chavez Ravine and continuing through this weekend in The Bronx, the Mets have looked like something else entirely. They have looked beaten. They have looked enfeebled.
They have looked lost.
“We’ll get it back,” Randolph said, sounding as if he were trying to convince himself as much as anyone else.
There was a time not long ago when the word that best defined this group of Mets was professional. They didn’t have an All-Star at every position. They weren’t a perfect team. But they played hard. They played smart. They ran everything out. They threw to the right base. They hit the cut-off man. They didn’t give extra outs. You do that enough, over 162 games, you’ll win a lot more than you’ll lose.
The Mets won 97 games that way a year ago. Just two weeks ago, they were on pace to win 105 more. Winning had become an assumption at Shea. It had become the expectation.
That all seems as if it happened a decade ago now but it was only two weeks. You can throw a batch of excuses onto a conveyor belt if you’d like, trying to explain away the 2-11 skid they’re on. They’ve been hurt. They’re in the midst of the equivalent of an NFL first-place schedule. They’re in the midst of what might be called a “correction” on Wall Street. Etcetera, etcetera, blah, blah.
The eyes tell a different story. The eyes see indifferent at-bats, and they see lackadaisical play slowly infecting the roster. The eyes see dropped cut-offs and dreadful clutch hitting and woeful pitching. The eyes see a team that looks as if it’s fighting for sixth place, not first.
Maybe the Mets are better than this. And maybe, in a National League that has never looked more like the junior varsity, they don’t need to be much better than this. The Cardinals, after all, looked just as bad last year as the Mets do this year. And that was September.
But unless the Mets can rediscover the core essentials on which they built their success, September may be little more than a cruel joke for them. A reminder of a season already come. And already gone.