Mets shedding underdog label for top dog status

People continue to call the Mets an underdog team, now more than ever because Francisco Lindor made what Pete Alonso called “the swing of a lifetime” -- the grand slam swing that put the Mets into the National League Championship Series for the first time in nine years. But they’re not an underdog team, and they haven’t been for nearly five months. They were against the Phillies at Citi Field on Wednesday what they have been since the end of May:

The best team in baseball.

The Padres got hot after the All-Star break. The Tigers got hot in August. But say it again today, as loudly as you want as the Mets get ready to play either the Dodgers or the Padres in the NLCS:

It is the Mets who have had the best record for more than 100 games.

They were 67-40 after their season seemed to have cratered at 22-33 with a 10-3 loss to the Dodgers on May 29, at which point they were four games out of last place in the NL East and 16 games behind the first-place Phillies. Since June 1, the Mets went 65-40, outplaying the Phillies who had a 55-49 record from that point on.

Now they have added five more postseason wins to all that.

“What a story, I keep saying it,” Mets manager Carlos Mendoza said.

But that is the story on the 2024 Mets, ongoing. Famously, there was a players-only meeting after that loss to the Dodgers at the end of May. Then, early Wednesday evening, there was a different kind of team meeting -- one that included owners Steve and Alex Cohen -- for a joyful team picture in the middle of the diamond at Citi Field, where the Mets had just clinched a playoff series there for the first time since the place opened in 2009.

Is there some magic to this team because of everything that has happened since Lindor made another swing -- in the ninth inning, on what became the last day of the regular season in Atlanta just 10 days ago -- to officially put the Mets into the postseason against the Braves? There is a ton of October magic going on here, the same kind of magic the Mets got from Alonso when he made his own swing of a lifetime, also in the ninth inning, to beat the Brewers in the NL Wild Card Series last week.

There is the kind of home run magic the Mets got from Daniel Murphy in 2015, the last time the Mets made it to a League Championship Series on their way to the World Series. When the Mets swept the Cubs to make it to the Series that year, Murphy hit a home run for the sixth straight playoff game, one of seven he hit that October, in the eighth inning that day.

“I can’t explain why the balls keep going out of the park,” Murphy said in October 2015. “But they do.”

“Francisco Lindor ... may have just outdone himself!” was part of the home run call from the great Mets radio announcer Howie Rose, who has to keep outdoing himself, because this is another Mets team that keeps hitting balls out of the park in October.

Lindor may not win the National League MVP Award and may end up finishing second to Shohei Ohtani. It doesn’t change the fact that he has been every bit as valuable to the Mets as Ohtani, even in a 50-home run and 50-stolen base season, has been for the Dodgers. It doesn’t change the fact that no Met has ever put together a more complete season -- from both sides of the plate and as a brilliant shortstop and on the bases and in the clubhouse as the team’s leader -- than Lindor has.

And when they needed one more swing from him in the sixth, still down 0-1 to the Phillies and knowing that if there were to be a Game 5 in Philly that Zack Wheeler was going to pitch it, Lindor outdid himself. Again. After his ball was over the right-field wall and Lindor was calmly making his way around the bases, he became that old sports line about acting as if you’ve been there before. Because he had been there before, when his home run in the ninth against the Braves in Atlanta had punched the Mets’ ticket to Milwaukee.

What he looked like in that moment, what he looked like with his grand slam swing against the Phillies, was exactly what he has become: best player on the best team in baseball.

So many things happened for the Mets in April and May, some even before they turned around their season. Mark Vientos and Jose (OMG) Iglesias showed up from Syracuse. Mendoza, right before the Mets did begin their 100-game run to the NLCS, had moved Lindor up to the leadoff spot. In June, their kid catcher, Francisco Alvarez, came off the injured list after spending a couple of months there because of a torn ligament in his thumb. And before long, the first 55 games had become nothing more than preamble to what has turned into the ride of a lifetime.

“The whole time, I was, like, this is who we are,” said Mendoza, who masterfully held his team together in tough times.

That’s the story he keeps talking about. An unlikely story because of the way the Mets started? Sure. Just not an underdog story. Not anymore. Not now.