Picking up the pieces

Well… we lost. That’s it in a nutshell. Now how did we get here? With 17 games left in the regular season the Mets enjoyed a comfortable 7 game lead in NL East. And it was confidently noted that no team with such a lead and 17 games left had ever blown it. Ummm…yea.

Being on the left coast I was spared actually witnessing the collapse (we don’t usually get east coast games out here). But reading it in the papers was enough to get the gist. The New York papers and for that matter all of the talking heads on the various sports shows are now trying to dissect what went wrong. I am not going to get into all of the numbers or who did (or did not) do what. Others are doing that quite well enough thank you. My diagnosis is simple.

We lost because we deserved to. Somewhere in the early part of September the team essentially went on auto-pilot and just figured the season was over in all but name. Thus we have the bizarre numbers alluded to above. Some players were acting as though they were entitled to the division pennant. I have heard more than a few people observe that the Mets essentially stopped playing serious ball. That’s probably a fair assessment.

But it is not the whole story. I have heard some people say that the Mets essentially gave the pennant away. That is not fair. The Phillies won the pennant. It was not given to them. While the Mets went on paid vacation for the last several weeks of the season the Phillies never gave up. If it had just been a case of the Mets folding in the last few weeks they would still have won. But the Phillies never gave in to despair. They were hungry and they played like their lives depended on the outcome of each game. In short the Phillies deserved to win as much as the Mets deserved to loose. And while I don’t like loosing; I tip my hat to Philadelphia. They proved in many ways that they were the better team.

As one might expect there is a lot of talk about hubris and humble pie going around. I can confirm that I have been taking a lot of not so gentle ribbing from various (cough cough) friends. Most of these are fans of the other team from New York (the name escapes me). And I must say that it’s not fun. One can only imagine what the guys on the team are feeling right now. I can think of some words that probably are good descriptives like pain, humiliation, guilt and anger. And that is all for the good.

Frankly I hope that they are getting their noses rubbed in it. Not just because they deserve it. Rather, because they need to remember how they felt Sunday afternoon for the rest of their lives. What happened over the last few weeks was unprofessional and inexcusable for players who are being paid as much as them. They were playing like the keystone cops in baseball uniforms. And if they are smarting from their own failure then again, that’s a good thing. They need to dine on some crow and get razzed and suffer with being the laughingstock of the National League. And they need to remember Sunday afternoon every day between now and April, and thereafter every time they stand in the batters box or play in the field.

David Wright (one of my favorite players and one of the few who honestly bears little blame for the collapse) observed a couple days before the end that he did not want this on his resume. Well sadly it’s there. If any member of this team died tomorrow somewhere in the first paragraph of his obituary would be something to the effect of “blank was a member of the 2007 New York Mets who suffered the most spectacular late season collapse in the history of major league baseball.” Nothing any of them can do will ever completely remove that line from their resume or obituary. But what they do in the future can help determine where that line fits in their resume, i.e. at the top or buried somewhere underneath a long list of remarkable accomplishments. For the Mets the long road to redemption (and maybe a little good old fashioned revenge) needs to start today. For the Mets, today needs to be treated like the first day of April.