How will the Mets respond to being the favorites in the NL East?

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If you’re a teenage Met fan, you’re having a brand new experience. If you’re in your 30’s, you can recall what it was like nine years ago. If you’re in your 50’s, like me, you can think all the way back to 1987. The Mets are coming off a great regular season, capped by a semi-surprise National League pennant. By all accounts, with their stellar young pitching, their at worst “sufficient” offense and confident attitude, they are primed to repeat as division champions and make another deep run in the playoffs. They just got to spring training and a lot of the talk coming out of camp is “Champions or bust.” For a fan, it’s great to hear this kind of bravado, this swagger. It’s been missing for a while. Heck, even reserved, cautious, borderline-taciturn GM Sandy Alderson has said he “hasn’t been this upbeat about a team in a long time.” Heady stuff, to be sure, but for a long-time fan, one must watch out of the corner of one’s eye: historically, the Mets haven’t handled these kinds of situations well.

1970: Fresh off their 100 win season and ultimate-surprise World Series victory, the Mets were the toast of the town. They were wined and dined all winter. Non-local players stuck around the City until camp opened to reap the benefits of being a young star in the big town. Californian Tug McGraw is an example. He shared a house in Long Island with fellow flake Ron Swoboda and their wives and ended up wrecking his ankle when the two knuckleheads crashed a toboggan in the snow. Couple some of that minor fatcat-ism with the idea that they weren’t sneaking up on their opposition anymore made 1970 a much tougher slog than 1969 had been. Individual performances suffered accordingly. Tom Seaver went from 25 wins to 18. Gary Gentry went 9-9. Jerry Koosman battled arm trouble all year and went 12-7. Cleon Jones went from a .340 hitter to .277. The Mets went from 100 wins to 83, battling to the end, but finishing third behind the far superior Pirates and wounded Cubs. They would stay around that 83 win mark until the late-‘70s, when the bottom finally fell out.

1987: The Mets were primed to be the next New York dynasty. They had demolished their competition the year before and had seemingly only strengthened their squad with the addition of All-Star outfielder Kevin McReynolds. The rest of the team was intact. The sky was the limit. Until the spring training morning that Dwight Gooden tested positive for cocaine, that is. He was suspended, lost to the team until June 5, their 51st game of the year, at which time they were 25-25. Other than Gooden’s problems, injuries had taken their toll on the pitching staff as a whole. Stalwart Bob Ojeda could only pitch 10 games. Green kids like David Cone and John Mitchell were called upon to take up the slack and they ended up getting hurt. And in a game with the divisional pennant on the line, Ron Darling injured his thumb and had to leave in the sixth. Roger McDowell ended up surrendering a back-breaking three-run home run to the Cardinals’ Terry Pendleton in the ninth, symbolically laying the title defense to rest. The Mets finished with 92 wins, down from 108 the year prior. They won the division in 1988, but a playoff loss to the Dodgers plunged the team into the doldrums for the next 10 years. The Yankees became the dynasty instead.

2007: The Mets had powered their way to the division title in 2006. Carlos Delgado, David Wright, Paul Lo Duca, Carlos Beltran, Jose Reyes… This was the rare successful Met team built on offense, with just-good-enough pitching. Their loss to the Cards in the NLCS was regarded around here as nothing short of a crime. They’d be back, for sure, with the same team in place. Besides, they had won their division by 15 games and nobody else had improved themselves by that much. Except that something was off all year. They roared out like a team possessed in April and May, but hit a dreary patch in the middle of the year and nobody could figure out why. On May 29, having beaten San Francisco 5-4, they stood at 33-17, five games ahead of the Braves and eight games up on the Phillies. By the All-Star break, they were 48-39, only two games up on Atlanta and four-and-a-half up on Philadelphia. There was nothing to point to, other than a general malaise and lackadaisicalness about the team, a feeling they could coast and turn it on when they had to. Except, they couldn’t. They managed to hold onto first place by their fingernails until late September, but the Phillies blew by everybody, proving to be the team to beat. The Mets choked away a seven game lead and didn’t really recover psychologically until last year.

It’s time for the Mets to rewrite that history.

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