Quote of the Day (Jimmy Breslin, on the Original Mets as Lovable Losers)

“You see, the Mets are losers, just like nearly everybody else in life. This is a team for the cab driver who gets held up and the guy who loses out on a promotion because he didn't maneuver himself to lunch with the boss enough. It is the team for every guy who has to get out of bed in the morning and go to work for short money on a job he does not like. And it is the team for every woman who looks up ten years later and sees her husband eating dinner in a t-shirt and wonders how the hell she ever let this guy talk her into getting married. The Yankees? Who does well enough to root for them, Laurence Rockefeller?” —Pulitzer Prize-winning American columnist and novelist Jimmy Breslin (1928-2017), Can't Anybody Here Play This Game?: The Improbable Saga of the New York Mets' First Year (1963)

In the late 1970s, when Jimmy Breslin accepted an award from my college newspaper, he described the astounding experience of covering the 1962 New York Mets, or, as he called them, “the worst baseball team in the history of the universe.”

As the above paragraph indicates, that version of the Amazin’s acquired a certain cachet as classic underdogs. Nothing could help them, as they staggered to a 40-120 record, 10^th and last in the National League, and so far from first place (60½ games!!!!) that they could have used a telescope to find it.

As this year’s major league baseball trade deadline approaches, the 2026 squad doesn’t remotely approach it in ineptitude, but it doesn’t come near it in lovability, either. 

As I type this, their record stands at 44-62, placing them last in the National League East, 18½ games behind their divisional rivals, the Atlanta Braves. With hyperexpensive (signed to a 15-year, $765 million) right fielder Juan Soto going on the injured list for a second time this season, the squad is extremely unlikely to make a late-season run for anything except the exit ramp.

Owner Steve Cohen must be gnashing his teeth over his dismal return on investment. Their sorry mid-season mark comes for a franchise that, at $367.9 million, ranks second only to the World Series champion Los Angeles Dodgers as having the highest payroll in major league baseball, even surpassing that of their hated crosstown rivals, the New York Yankees.

The 1992 Mets season was so disappointing (a $45 million payroll combined with a 72-90 record) that few people could argue with the title that sportswriters Bob Klapisch and John Harper came up with the following year for their account: The Worst Team Money Could Buy. One hates to think of the title for any prospective postmortem of this year.