When the Mets dealt Max Scherzer at the trade deadline last season, team owner Steve Cohen was frank with the future Hall-of-Famer, saying that 2024 would be a transition year.
He was right, but not in the way it was originally billed.
Instead of transitioning between leadership regimes or attempting to build a bridge toward maybe contending in 2025, the Mets have transitioned into a National League power that looks primed to sustain the odds-defying run they just went on; pushing the powerhouse Los Angeles Dodgers to six games in the NLCS.
Of course, the exceeding of expectations does not necessarily help with the sting that came with Sunday night’s season-ending 10-5 loss at Dodger Stadium.
“It doesn’t feel good to lose,” superstar shortstop Francisco Lindor said. “This is going to sit with me for a while. I wanted it for this group, I wanted it for myself, I wanted it for the organization, I wanted it for the city of New York. I wanted it for everybody, and everybody felt and feels the same way.”
But within the disappointment was the very tangible realization that this is just a starting point for the Mets, who appear to be on the verge of sustainability for the first time in franchise history.
“We’re going to miss each other, but we accomplished a lot as a team, as individuals, and we became a family,” Lindor said. “We overcame a lot of things, and we stuck together. I truly believe that there’s something good happening here.”
Consistent postseason appearances are a foreign concept for the now-63-year-old franchise. The Mets have only made the postseason in consecutive years twice (1999-2000, 2015-2016) amongst 11 playoff berths.
But the franchise finally appears to have the right people in charge. Cohen has brought in president of baseball operations David Stearns, who built a team on the verge of a pennant in his first year in charge. Stearns, in turn, hired Carlos Mendoza, who was nothing short of brilliant as a rookie manager.
What has become one of the more memorable seasons in franchise history should now be the norm moving forward.
“This sets another standard,” Brandon Nimmo, the longest-tenured Met, said. “I really think that this is the jumping-off point. We want to set this as the standard moving forward, but it’s hard to get here. We definitely want to try and be here and get back and finish the job.”
“We raised the bar, the expectations,” Mendoza added. “This is what we should be striving for every year, to be playing deep into October. We understand we’ve got a lot of work to do. But we took a big step in that direction this year.”
They certainly will not be short of motivation considering they were just two wins short of meeting the crosstown-rival Yankees in the Fall Classic, which begins on Friday in Los Angeles.
“You have to come in next year and can’t take anything for granted,” Lindor said. “That’s one of the things that this group did; we held each other accountable, and we pushed each other to our limits. If we do that next year, we’ll see where that ends up.”
