The New York Mets won 101 games last year, and even though they didn’t make it past the first round in the playoffs, they were a really solid team.
Things, however, didn’t go the way they planned in 2023.
They lost Jacob deGrom to free agency, one of their aces (Justin Verlander) started the season on the injured list, the other (Max Scherzer) was also hurt and couldn’t gain consistency, and so on.
Long story short, they sold at the deadline, got rid of some veterans (including Verlander and Scherzer), got some prospects, and started a re-tooling process with the hope of competing again within the next two years.
Naturally, the on-field performance has been bad, so much so that they have already assured a losing season with a handful of games left to play.
To see a team go from a 100-win powerhouse to a sub-.500 performance in the span of a season is almost unprecedented.
“The Mets, at 71-82, are now guaranteed a losing record. Excluding shortened seasons, they are the fourth team in Major League history to post one the year after winning 100+ games, joining the 1986 Cardinals, the 1971 Reds and the 1932 Cardinals,” Mets insider Anthony DiComo tweeted.
The Mets, at 71-82, are now guaranteed a losing record.
Excluding shortened seasons, they are the fourth team in Major League history to post one the year after winning 100+ games, joining the 1986 Cardinals, the 1971 Reds and the 1932 Cardinals.
— Anthony DiComo (@AnthonyDiComo) September 22, 2023
There you have it: the Mets are now one of four squads to go from winning 100 games one year to posting a losing season the next.
The last team to do that was the 1986 Cardinals.
Fate is such a beautiful and terrible thing at once: that’s the last year the Mets won a World Series.
They will probably come back stronger in 2024 and could potentially contend, but their most realistic chance of putting together a real powerhouse is in 2025.
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