My kinda team, Charlie. It's my kinda team.

A deep sigh the size of Grimace. 

Well, the amazing run of the 2024 New York Mets came to a grinding halt Sunday night. When such unlikely, would-be storybook seasons run their course without your team winning the last game of the season, there is solace in numbers. A strength in communal sadness. It's almost as if... misery loves company.

Yep, here we go again, but the '24 version of MLC had the Sox dribbling to mediocre conclusions and the Mets making us cue up some Whitney. As rob said in his parting shot, the Beantown boys went 16-24 after MLC Redux kicked in. The Mets, meanwhile, went a startling 25-14 to run out the regular season. They still needed some 11th hour heroics to make the playoffs, and boy did they get them:

The MLB playoffs are longer this year than ever, so for clubs that scratch their way into the lower tiers of the postseason, you have to knock off four teams for a title now. First came the division-winning Brewers:

Then the powerhouse Phillies:

Ultimately, the super-stacked team with the best player in baseball and the best record in baseball (those pesky L.A. Dodgers) proved more worthy of a trip to the Fall Classic. So the Mets won 7 out of their 13 playoff games, good enough for some national acclaim, some killer fun nights for the fans, and a slew of outstanding memories -- but not good enough to move on.

My takeaway: Not just at the well-documented 0-5 mark to start the season; not just at the oft-mentioned June 2 mark when the club was flailing away at 24-25; but even when my buddy and I agreed on August 18 to run MLC back at GTB for fun, when the Mets were hanging around at 64-59... if you had told me the Mets would play 13 playoff games in 2024, I'd have thought you were insane and taken that deal 100 times out of 100. 

Folks have different reactions. My brother-in-law Pat lamented yesterday via text that "if you don't win the whole thing it doesn't really matter... you're just another loser if you don't win it all."

My young cousin chimed in at that and said, "You are allowed to enjoy things, Patrick."

Hear, hear. I cursed a whole lot over the last three weeks. Really nasty stuff directed at innocent human beings just trying to play a kid's game as a profession. I threw my hat down and across the room. I stomped and fumed, I gave up and got sucked in again. Not a ton of emotional intelligence on display.

But I reveled as well. Cheers and rooted and hoped and exulted and leapt and ran and high-fived and hugged. I communicated with Marls and rob a lot. I planned nights with friends around town or, as Sunday night's final moments, at my house. Grand slams and go-ahead homers and blown leads and comebacks and Grimace and OMG and LFGM and whatever the hell that arm gesture thing was. 

I definitely "enjoyed things." And I still will.  

Chatter amid Mets Township has immediately and predictably moved to thoughts of payroll, who stays and who goes, and what this team will look like in 2025. It will be different for sure. We have $190 million moving off the books just like that. Pete Alonso is the hot stove name du jour in Queens, but there are others. Sean Manaea, Jose Quintana, and Luis Severino, aka the majority of the starting rotation down the stretch and guys who threw the team on their backs at times during the late run. It will be interesting, and you can hope to build on the clubhouse culture that propelled this whole team to far, far exceed the sum of its parts, but turning over a lot of those guys will have its effect.

Maybe we'll do this again, rob and I. I loved it, for obvious reasons. It was less appealing for him, but he was a great sport. We move on now to Yankees vs. Dodgers in what should be an all-timer. Worth a look. 

Thanks, Metsies. That was fun.

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Marls here with a little addendum.  At the risk of pissing off Rob (something something about post count) I’ll just add my brief thoughts to Whit’s much more eloquent musings. 

It may sound like an overstatement but this team let me love baseball again. I texted Rob and Whit at one point that since October 9th 1988 I have been conditioned to expect the Mets to ultimately lose in the most excruciating way possible. It is hard to be a fan and enjoy games while constantly expecting the other shoe to drop. To be honest, it kind of makes you an asshole to be around (more so than normal) and impacts others ability to enjoy the games. But the improbable ways that this team won games, texting with good friends, and the ability to see it though the eyes of my six year old, who actually just expects them to win, was freeing. If they lost, so be it, the ride itself was turning out to be the real joy.  

This Summer, Mrs. Marls and I saw Big Head Todd & The Monsters at Wolf Trap with Blues Traveler. Blues Traveler was not great mainly because John Popper is a shell of his former self both in terms of girth and ability to carry a show. However, BHT brought it and was much more enjoyable than I expected. A bit like this Met team, I went in with low expectations and left feeling lucky to have been witness to it. I also can’t help think of BHT’s biggest hit as it encapsulates the feeling that Whit expressed, Howie Rose noted, and that I felt on Sunday night after the last out.  It is bittersweet, but more sweet than bitter.  The Mets didn’t win it all, but it was a hell of a ride that I got to share with friends and family in person & via text. 

I know this is age speaking, but in the end, the text threads with Whit, Rob, Mark, TJ and lots of others (especially one conducted at 35k feet over Wyoming as Pete Alonso homered against the Brewers) are worth more than an actual championship.

Thanks Metsies for a fun ride.  LFGM.