The new skipper had seemingly galvanized a veteran team. The starting pitching was borderline ridiculous: every day someone was throwing a five-hitter. Even the offense, so often a question mark, had been consistent, pounding out clutch hits all across the first weeks of the baseball season.
Yep. The 2022 Mets have been quite a show so far.
But we aren’t talking about the 2022 Mets. We’re going in the wayback machine 50 years, all the way back to 1972. On Saturday, May 20, Jon Matlack threw a five-hit gem at the Phillies at Veterans Stadium in the first game of a doubleheader, the Mets won the game 3-1, and improved to 23-7 after the first 30 games of the Yogi Berra Era.
For good measure, Jerry Koosman won the nightcap and Tom Seaver finished off the sweep by outdueling Steve Carlton the next day. They were 25-7, meaning that ’72 team set franchise records for best won-loss mark after 30, 31 and 32 games. They were six full games clear of the Pirates, and seemingly on their way to an encore of 1969.
They finished 83-73, 13 ½ games back.
“I thought we had a team that could go all the way,” Yogi said after the season finale, a 3-1 win over the Expos on Oct. 4. “But then we went from charmed to snakebit.”
In a lot of ways, that was the first year the Mets ever truly felt the pangs of a promising season gone to seed. The first seven years, of course, were nonstop losing. Then came the majesty of ’69, and the afterglow shone bright enough that even back-to-back 83-79 seasons in 1970 and ’71 were tolerable.
But ’72? That was a season that started with baseball’s first-ever work stoppage which shortened the season anywhere from to six to eight games for different teams. Gil Hodges had died on Easter Sunday. Early in spring training, Hodges was hitting ground balls to Jim Fregosi who wound up breaking his thumb. Fregosi wasn’t only hampered by that. His year was a stark contrast to the man he was traded for — Nolan Ryan went 19-16 with a 2.28 ERA and 329 strikeouts for the fifth-place Angels.
And injuries began to pile up, none more damaging than Rusty Staub being plunked on the wrist by future teammate George Stone on June 3. The Mets were 31-12 and still up five on the Bucs and Rusty was off to the hottest start of his career at .313/.399/.491.
Yes. Early-season Mets-fan angst was born there. So it is understandable the balance most Mets fans have tried to maintain as this year’s club has broken so quickly from the gates (the Mets, 20-10 heading into Tuesday’s game at Washington with a six-game lead in the NL East, twice as large as anyone else in baseball already).
Now, sometimes fast starts can be harbingers. The 1986 and ’88 teams were both 22-8 after 30 games, the 2006 Mets 21-9, the 2015 team 19-11. All went on to better days in October.
Sometimes they can be fool’s gold. The ’72 team speaks loudly to that. But no Mets team proved this more eloquently than the 2018 Mets who started 11-1 but had already begun to descend to earth after 30 games (17-13).
And sometimes good teams are late bloomers. Your defending champion Atlanta Braves will serve as a season-long reminder of that, for every day they hold the title of world champs. And it’s best to remember that as amazing — or amazin’ — as the ’69 Mets were at the end of the season they started off ice cold — 3-7 after 10 games, 9-11 after 20, 14-16 after 30.
So yes: Mets fans will continue to enjoy the early-season prosperity for as long as it lasts, and maybe it really will last a while. It’s happened here before.
“Just take care of business every day,” Francisco Lindor said in Philadelphia last week. “Keep building on what we’re doing. Then we’ll be all right.”