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Does this season's crumminess as its midpoint rapidly approaches feel disturbingly familiar? It should. The Mets are under .500 after 74 games for a third consecutive season, the first time the Mets have strung together these kinds of doldrums at this precise juncture of the schedule three straight years since 1994 through 1996 (actually 1992 through 1996).
2017: 33-41
2018: 31-43
2019: 35-39
There's not necessarily a speck of significance to the 74-game mark that couldn't be attributed to, say, the 75-game mark, other than that's how many games the Mets have played up to this moment, yet it surely signifies that it's no longer so early that you can slough off results to date to a small sample size. If you're of an optimistic bent, you're still scrounging around the GB column in both the division and Wild Card races and telling yourself it's not too late, particularly if you fancy the Mets just one decent hot spell from getting back to .500. And, of course, that's true -- we even have a primo example in our own family album, from 1973, to tell us not to give up despite a blahful record that seems to get a little more blah every week (we were 33-41 after 74 games that year).
Nevertheless, we recognize a going-nowhere late-June vibe when we feel it. And when we feel it literally year after year after year, well, it weighs on the collective fandom. That this particular run has ensued with three distinct GM/Mgr combos -- Alderson-Collins; Alderson-Callaway (which became Ricco/Minaya/Ricciardi-Callaway); Van Wagenen-Callaway -- makes it all the more vexing, because you can't lay the blame for the whole thing at the feet of a given entity in the traditional "fire this guy" sense. Yes, you can rail all day and all night at the organizational fungus that grows from the ownership suite, but unless you've got a whole lot of green, it's gonna be tough to dislodge those gentlemen.
The 74-game mark is not destiny, but only a few outliers haven't really announced their intentions across Met history by now. Only the 1973 and 2001 clubs below .500 at this point finished above .500. The 1991, 2002 and 2010 Mets were the only ones above .500 who finished below it. Five teams were at exactly .500; four (1976, 2005, 2008 and 2015) would rise above; the other, 2009, was about to drop below for good.
I guess as long as there's a 1973 embedded in my consciousness, as long as there remain a handful of players from the 2015 team who I remember seeing in an actual World Series, and as long as 88 games remain, I'll buy a little into the outside chance that this season isn't already what it's going to down as. But probably not that much.
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