For three months, the song was the same: Meet the Mets, beat the Mets. For literally half-a-season, the Mets were losing to everybody. Now come three victories this week — starting with the one Sunday when a great Met named Pete Alonso saved them again — when they looked as if they might have it in them to beat anybody.
Maybe whatever they are going to be across the rest of September and then into October really did start with Alonso’s walk-off homer against the Rangers. Now he’s hit home runs in four consecutive games and the Mets have won three of the four. And the way they’ve looked in winning those three games makes the season they’ve played to here, one that has officially become the Coney Island Cyclone, more of a mystery that it already was.
But it is a mystery for which they are going to get the chance to write a satisfying ending. And perhaps even finish it the way they started it, looking as good as anybody in baseball.
For this one nearly perfect baseball afternoon at Citi Field, the Mets saw the kid, Jonah Tong — just one of their kid pitchers — bounce back big and pitch brilliantly across five innings, striking out eight. After that they saw one guy after another out of the bullpen, all the way through Edwin Diaz, doing their jobs and shutting down the Padres.
If you have closely followed this legit theme-park ride, you know the story. They were 45-24. But then came the three months when they were only better than two teams: Rockies, Nationals; three months during which even the White Sox were better than the $340 million Mets; during which the Phillies at one point had picked up 18 games in the standings. Yeah. Meet the Mets, watch just about everybody beat the Mets.
Then came Sunday afternoon, and what every Mets fan in town hopes is the beginning of a last stand, for a team that had begun to look ready for last rites. But again: Maybe it figures, even with the season Juan Soto is having at the plate, that it was Alonso who made the big swing. Last April, Alonso golfed one out of the ballpark against the Tigers in the ninth, tied a game his team ended up winning, kept the ’24 Mets from starting 0-6.
And of course everybody remembers the top-of-the-9th swing he made against the Brewers in Game 3 last October, when the Mets were as close as they were to going home. He sent a Devin Williams pitch over the rightfield wall and before we knew it, the Mets were a couple of wins away from the World Series. So there Alonso was last Sunday, stopping an 8-game losing streak.
He has kept hitting them since. Soto has kept hitting, on his way to a season as remarkable as any Met has ever had. He’s gone past 40 home runs. Alonso is chasing 40 again, and already has 121 RBI. If Steve Cohen and David Stearns let him walk away when this season is over, they’re both nuts. He’s not Aaron Judge. But he’s the Mets’ Judge.
Say it again: Alonso, homegrown, made for this city and for this team and big moments, is one of the great Mets. Always he is there when the Mets need him and has been again this week, when it had begun to look as if the sky was falling.
So he hit another one Thursday. Brandon Nimmo hit his 24th, a three-run shot that broke the game open. Tong came back from an unspeakably bad start against the Rangers — six earned runs, didn’t make it out of the first — to look as dazzling as he did against the team chasing the Dodgers in the National League West.
“[Tong] was doing amazing today,” Nimmo said when it was over, on a day when the Mets did some amazing themselves, with their starting pitching and relief pitching and with their hitting.
“We’ve gone back to doing the little things,” Nimmo said on the field.
Somehow the Mets haven’t won a single game this year when trailing after eight innings. Somehow they have had two seven-game losing streaks and then the almost unwatchable eight-gamer that Alonso ended Sunday. Somehow they went from being 21 games over .500 on June 12 to 16 games under since then, even having won these three out of four.
But they haven’t fallen out of the Wild Card race, mostly because they’re being chased by the Giants and Diamondbacks and Reds. They’re trying to end the regular season right with three kids in their rotation who were still in the minor leagues at the All-Star break: Nolan McLean, who has become their ace; Brandon Sproat; Tong. If you can ever remember anything like this happening in September with a New York City playoff team, send up a flare by all means.
You now see how they look when McLean starts. You saw how they looked on Thursday with Tong getting out of trouble early and pitching the way he did after that. Everybody can see how dangerous the top of the order still is: Francisco Lindor, Soto, Nimmo, Alonso. That is why, as bad as they have looked since June — and they have frequently looked awful since June — they are still a good bet to do those big things in October, provided what we’ve seen over the last few days isn’t just another head fake from them.
“You always want to play your best baseball at the end of the year,” Alonso said after the Mets won, 6-1.
He’s right. And is doing more than just talking all about it. Alonso has been at his best this week. Soto has been at his best for over a month.
Meet the Mets. This week’s version, anyway. Maybe from little things, as a song once said, big things someday come.
