You tell yourself over and over again, and it just doesn’t matter. You know how long the baseball season is. How many twists and turns there will be that make most definitive statements today look like blather tomorrow.
Yet we are seduced into the statements anyway, as if no other baseball season has ever been played.
If you want yet more corroboration of this, let me take you way back in baseball history … to June 11. I waded through the teletype and black-and-white photos to recall the Mets had returned from winning the second of two games in London in stirring fashion and were trying to build upon those good vibes. Instead, they lost, 4-2, to the Marlins., fell to 28-37, and that triggered yet the latest spasm that this team was just not worth caring about, and David Stearns was a small-market executive without feel, and it was time to start shipping players out.
The Yankees that day crushed the Royals, 10-1. They moved their MLB-best record to 48-21 and furthered comparisons to the 1998 Yankees.
Today, the Mets are the toast of New York, and the Yankees just toast.
“It is why it is a cliche, but you do try to stay on an even keel because you understand over the long season just how many ups and downs there are going to be,” Francisco Lindor said.
“It [the roller coaster] is kind of the fun part,” Gerrit Cole said, noting, “We undulate all year.” For those not in contact with a dictionary, that means going up and down.
And after a majority of a season in which the Yankees were up, they are in a disturbing down period in which multiple holes in the roster have been exposed. It looks so bad that it is easy to forget they went into Wednesday night’s Citi Field Subway finale first in the AL East with the majors’ third-best record.
The Mets, conversely, have had the marauder about them, their offense in particular becoming the kind of blunt object that the Yankees were for much of this year. They are scoring and winning with such regularity now that they went into Wednesday still on the outside of even a six-team NL playoff field.
“We live in a ‘what have you done for me lately’ world,” Adam Ottavino said. “We live with recency bias. All of these things are human traps. And I bite into them sometimes, too. It’s an emotional life. And right now, it sure feels that way, like we are headed to the moon. But nothing is guaranteed tomorrow.”
The case involving Cole is perhaps most informative of just how wrong our in-the-moment gut feelings can be. When the Yankees’ ace was lost in mid-March to elbow inflammation, there was a feeling of doom about the Yankees. Cole felt indispensable. There were lots of calls to trade for Dylan Cease or sign Jordan Montgomery or Blake Snell.
Except the Yankees through June 18 — the day before Cole’s 2024 debut — had the majors’ best record (51-24) to some large extent because their Cole-less rotation led the majors in ERA at 2.86 while Cease, Montgomery and Snell had pitched to a collective 5.41 ERA in 34 starts.
So imagine how good the Yankees would be once they added Cole to this team. The answer has been terrible, at least for a week.
Conversely, we have tried to find meaning in how the Mets have transformed so suddenly. There was a lot of talk that it began with a team meeting Lindor called after the club fell a season-low 11 games under .500 on May 29. But the Mets went 2-2 in their next four games to stay 11 games under. Was this like a time-released result to a meeting, taking a few days to work? That loss to the Marlins that sent a fan base into further despair also came after the meeting.
Or maybe it was Grimace throwing out a first pitch. Yeah, it was certainly Grimace. Or … just try this on for size — the lineup got the group benefit of Lindor going to leadoff, J.D. Martinez settling in after a mostly missed spring training, Mark Vientos being promoted and Francisco Alvarez getting healthy.
I remember something that Ottavino said at a low Mets time in which he acknowledged playing poorly for first the 50 games and said he believed the team could play equally well for 50 and set the Mets up for a 50-ish game sprint to the finish. That is basically what is occurring, reiterating the reality of Lindor’s simple statement: “It is a long season.”
No doubt. It is going to keep changing a lot. I have no idea if, for example, DJ LeMahieu will ever stir for the Yankees. But he was pretty much written off in the first half last year when he hit .220 with a .643 OPS before awakening to look close to vintage LeMahieu at .273 and .809 in the second half. So I understand why the Yanks don’t just want to give up on him and Gleyber Torres or the Mets on Edwin Diaz and Jeff McNeil. Well, that and you can get a lot of stuff on Amazon, but not a third baseman or closer.
It is so much easier to resonate today with bold and audacious statements. The 162-game schedule has been replaced by 162 one-game mandates. And in the last two weeks, the New York narrative has flipped completely. It probably will a few more times.
You won’t trend on social media mentioning it is a long season. It is trite.
But also true.
