{"id":171886,"date":"2025-08-24T14:21:10","date_gmt":"2025-08-24T14:21:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/171886\/"},"modified":"2025-08-24T14:21:10","modified_gmt":"2025-08-24T14:21:10","slug":"the-dog-days-of-new-york-baseball","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/171886\/","title":{"rendered":"The Dog Days of New York Baseball"},"content":{"rendered":"

Edwin D\u00edaz, the New York Mets\u2019 All-Star closer, is no stranger to unusual injuries. A couple of years ago, he tore the patellar tendon in his right knee while jumping up and down to celebrate a win in the World Baseball Classic. Still, the condition he described after exiting a game in late April was one for the books. \u201cYesterday, my legs\u2014one was longer than the other one,\u201d he said<\/a>, offhandedly, before adding that a trainer had \u201cfixed it.\u201d Asked to elaborate, he replied, \u201cI don\u2019t know. I didn\u2019t ask. He just did it, and I was feeling better after.\u201d His quotes circulated widely, shared by bloggers and fans on social media with a bit of puzzlement and delight but with little follow-up or explanation. The real story was perhaps not so strange\u2014there was, evidently, a strength imbalance in his hips\u2014but his more startling description probably seemed plausible enough to those who root for his team. Of course one of D\u00edaz\u2019s legs was longer than the other. He is, after all, a Met.<\/p>\n

The Mets\u2019 association with absurdity has long been inextricable from the team\u2019s identity, something I spent a lot of time thinking about before the season, when I wrote a long story<\/a> about the franchise, and its rivalry with New York\u2019s other team, the Yankees. When Steve Cohen, the hedge-fund billionaire, bought the team, in 2020, he pledged to rebuild the organization so that New Yorkers could wear Mets hats with pride instead of vague embarrassment\u2014the default sentiment for many Mets fans ever since the team\u2019s founding, in 1962, but particularly after the previous owners, the Wilpon family, were discovered to be among Bernie Madoff<\/a>\u2019s biggest clients. And, recently, Cohen\u2019s vision seemed to be coming to fruition. There was a thrilling run into October last season, then the signing of Juan Soto, who was lured away from the Yankees with the biggest contract in baseball history. There was a general sense of competency surrounding the team. Even D\u00edaz\u2019s mysterious condition and rehabilitation suggested a change\u2014a weird thing had happened, but the training staff had addressed it! Almost immediately, his pitching became nearly untouchable. On June 12th, the team was at the top of the standings, with a five-and-a-half-game lead in the National League East.<\/p>\n

Since then, the team has seen twenty-three wins, and thirty-six losses\u2014one of the worst records in the majors. The starting pitching has been terrible. The bullpen has been unreliable. The bats have been anemic. The Mets have had more than twenty blown-lead losses since June 13th. Almost every part of the team has been underperforming. From time to time, there have been signs of the World Series contenders they used to be not so long ago: a seven-game win streak in July; a three-game unbeaten stretch just last week. On Friday night, they had twenty-one hits and scored twelve runs to beat the Atlanta Braves. But whatever momentum they manage to build quickly craters\u2014most recently, in a series loss to the Washington Nationals, one of the worst teams in the M.L.B. \u201cFeels very normal,\u201d Nick O\u2019Brien, a Mets fan whom I\u2019d met on the berm in Port St. Lucie, at a spring-training game, in March, told me, when I spoke to him on the phone last week. \u201cThere\u2019s a little bit of a trauma response in there,\u201d he added. On Reddit, Mets fans were busy arguing about which squads in the franchise\u2019s history had suffered the worst collapses.<\/p>\n

Some of this is premature. Good teams have bad weeks, even bad months; the Mets started horribly last season, and romped into the National League Championship Series. Because of the team\u2019s healthy start, their winning percentage remains comfortably above .500, and they\u2019re clinging to a slim lead over the Cincinnati Reds for the final wild-card spot in the National League. Attendance at Citi Field has remained strong. When I reached out to another fan I met at spring training, he responded from Washington, D.C., where he\u2019d brought his son to see the Mets on the road\u2014he sent me pictures of the two of them, decked out in Mets gear, at the Nationals\u2019 stadium. Kyle Gorjanc, O\u2019Brien\u2019s girlfriend, said, \u201cEverybody\u2019s doing their job, doing what they can, and it just sort of feels like, Well, you win some, you lose some! It doesn\u2019t really feel like a disaster.\u201d O\u2019Brien interjected to say that it would be a disaster if the team failed to make the playoffs.<\/p>\n

Still, there are silver linings, even as the losses pile up. There is a degree of reassurance, after all, in knowing that the team hasn\u2019t become unrecognizable. \u201cThat underdog mentality is something that\u2019s kind of indomitable,\u201d O\u2019Brien said. \u201cThere\u2019s a little sense that you can\u2019t buy your way out of it.\u201d Gorjanc and O\u2019Brien attended a game earlier this season during which David Wright, the team\u2019s beloved former captain, had his jersey retired. \u201cThe David Wright thing was cool,\u201d O\u2019Brien said. \u201cHe mentioned the Wilpons during the speech, and everybody booed.\u201d<\/p>\n

If those fans needed any more reasons to boo\u2014they only needed to look north, to the Bronx, where the Yankees were in the midst of an even more spectacular swoon. The Yankees entered the season as the second favorites to win the World Series, behind only the Los Angeles Dodgers. At the end of May, they held a seven-game lead in the American League East, over the Toronto Blue Jays. But since June 13th\u2014also the date when the Mets\u2019 major misfortunes began\u2014the Yankees have had a losing record, and have tumbled out of first place. They are currently in a battle with the Boston Red Sox for the top wild-card spot. It\u2019s been a disappointing season for a lot of supposed juggernauts: even the Dodgers are having a down year of sorts, relative to expectations, though they still lead their division. Every team that makes a credible attempt at the post-season is up against the vagaries of luck and the vulnerabilities of the human body. In this respect, the only teams that aren\u2019t underdogs, you could say, are the ones whose fates are fixed because their owners are too stingy to even try.<\/p>\n

Whatever comes in September and beyond, the Mets\u2019 front office will face a tricky off-season. It\u2019s rumored that D\u00edaz, perhaps the team\u2019s best player this season\u2014at least since his mysterious condition was resolved\u2014will test the free-agent market, and the Mets\u2019 popular slugger Pete Alonso, who recently set the franchise record for most home runs, could opt out of his contract. How far Cohen is willing to go to change the team may depend on how far he\u2019s willing to go to keep them. As for Soto, he\u2019s having a \u201cMet year,\u201d as Gorjanc put it. But Francisco Lindor, the team\u2019s shortstop who, until Soto\u2019s arrival, had claim to the team\u2019s richest contract, struggled at first, too, before turning into the team\u2019s M.V.P. \u201cMaybe Soto just needs a Met year before he ripens,\u201d Gorjanc said. Or another fourteen, I offered\u2014the length of the rest of his contract.\u00a0\u2666<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Edwin D\u00edaz, the New York Mets\u2019 All-Star closer, is no stranger to unusual injuries. A couple of years…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":171887,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[41],"tags":[591,2502,1884,1266,592,1305,2228,62,67,132,68],"class_list":{"0":"post-171886","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-mlb","8":"tag-baseball","9":"tag-los-angeles-dodgers","10":"tag-major-league-baseball","11":"tag-mlb","12":"tag-national-league","13":"tag-new-york-mets","14":"tag-new-york-yankees","15":"tag-sports","16":"tag-united-states","17":"tag-unitedstates","18":"tag-us"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115084190617166403","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/171886","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=171886"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/171886\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/171887"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=171886"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=171886"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=171886"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}