An Amazin’ Reinvention

The New York Mets have been on an amazin’ run that has, after yesterday’s victory over the Philadelphia Phillies, taken them to the National League Championship Series. Having beaten the 93-win Milwaukee Brewers, champions of the National League Central, and the 95-win Phillies (who won the National League pennant in 2022 and came within a game of another pennant last year), winners of the NL East, they could face the NL West champion Dodgers in the NLCS. Beating the Dodgers would be a tall order. On the whole, in the regular season, the Mets were 9–16 against the three division champs.

This, for a team that was 13 games under .500 on June 2 (after which they posted the best record in baseball) and 17.5 games out of first place on June 11. On June 12, the McDonald’s mascot Grimace threw out the first pitch at a game at Citi Field, becoming in the process an inadvertent talisman for Mets fans the remainder of the season. One now sees fans in Grimace costumes at the games.

The big story in yesterday’s 4–1 victory was the game-breaking sixth-inning grand slam by shortstop Francisco Lindor, who has had a storybook season, the best of his four years in Flushing. The homer broke a 1–0 Phillies lead in a game where the Mets had blown multiple bases-loaded opportunities. Lindor himself was a big part of the turnaround: He hit .032/.184/.032 through the season’s first eight games, and was batting .193/.268/.348 on May 20. He hit a blazing .309/.377/.566 the rest of the way, and battled back from a back injury that sidelined the normally indestructible Lindor for nine games. Lindor is signed through 2031, when he will be 37 years old, and the odds are strong that he and his $34 million a year salary will become a liability at some point by the end of that contract. But this season and this playoff run put him in the rare company of Mets such as David Wright, Mike Piazza, Gary Carter, and Keith Hernandez, who were never begrudged their decline after everything they’d given the team and its fans.

In eleven games since his return from the back injury on September 27, Lindor has scored ten runs, driven in eleven, and hit .295/.396/.636. If anything, that understates the impact of his bat. On September 29 in Milwaukee, in the 160th game of the year, with the Mets scrapping for a postseason berth, they beat the Brewers for the only time in the regular season; Lindor scored the first run, drove in the third, and put the game on ice with a sixth-inning homer. In the next game, against the Braves — the first of a rescheduled September 30 doubleheader in Atlanta after the rest of baseball had completed their seasons — the Mets trailed 3–0 entering the eighth inning, in which Lindor drove in and scored a run as part of a 6-run rally. When Mets closer Edwin Diaz blew that lead, Lindor smacked a two-run homer in the top of the ninth to win the game 8–7 and put the Mets in the playoffs — and back to Milwaukee to play each of the next three days without a breather. Lindor scored the game-tying run in Game One’s come-from-behind win, and walked to start the rally where Pete Alonso hit the winning home run trailing 2–0 in the ninth in Game Three. In Game One against the Phillies, Lindor scored the go-ahead run in the eighth inning. In the Mets’ 7–6 loss in Game Two, Lindor scored a go-ahead run on a Mark Vientos homer in the third and scored again on Vientos’s game-tying homer in the ninth.

If the heroics of Lindor and other Mets hitters have been the headline, however, what is really striking is the reinvention of the Mets roster. For a decade, the Mets were defined by front-line starting pitchers, and their whole philosophy was built around getting those starters the chance to dominate a game. There were home-grown hot prospects (such as Jacob deGrom, Matt Harvey, Steven Matz, and Jon Niese), guys acquired as hot prospects (Noah Syndergaard came in a deal for R. A. Dickey, Zack Wheeler in a deal for Carlos Beltran), and elite veterans and imports brought in to shore up the staff (Max Scherzer, Justin Verlander, Kodai Senga, Chris Bassitt, Marcus Stroman, Bartolo Colon, Taijuan Walker). Of these, only Senga remains, and injuries limited him to a single start in the regular season. Instead, this team’s starting rotation has been built largely around reclamation projects who weren’t in high demand (Sean Manaea, Luis Severino, Jose Quintana), or homegrown late bloomers (David Peterson, Tylor Megill, José Buttó). The result has been a team that allowed at least a half a run more per game than in their pennant-winning run in 2015 or their 101-win season in 2022. But they’ve gotten the job done well enough to get deep into October without the aces.

Author’s note: This post has been updated to reflect that the Phillies won the NL pennant, not the World Series, in 2022.