The Mets Are Saving Themselves — and Being Saved From Themselves
New York's history of late-season collapses looms over 2025 — but so far, the Mets have been bailed out as much by their rivals' failures as by their own resilience.
The New York Mets are no strangers to catastrophic late-season collapses. While they benefited from the Boston Red Sox’s historic choke in the 1986 World Series, it seems like the franchise has been paying the baseball gods back what they owe on that debt — with interest — ever since.
Like in 1998, when they blew a 75 percent playoff chance with a week left in the regular season by losing five straight to close out the schedule. Or in 2006, when New York hosted Game 7 of the NLCS, spent most of the contest with a 50+ percent chance to win and had multiple moments at or above 70 percent in the mid-to-late innings before losing on a ninth-inning HR by a young Yadi Molina.
But the most canonical examples of Mets meltdowns happened in 2007 and then again in 2008.
In the first of those years, New York had a 99.5 percent chance to make the playoffs on September 13 — with a 6½-game lead in the NL East — and they were still at 97.3 percent as late as September 23, with 7 games left in the season. But losses in five of the next six games set up a must-win finale at home against the Marlins with staff ace Tom Glavine on the hill. Glavine promptly allowed 7 runs in the top of the first inning before the Mets even had a chance to bat, effectively ending their season before they could put up a fight to save it.
Flash forward a year, and the Mets once again had a 90+ percent chance to make the playoffs, with a 3½-game lead in the division on September 10. True to form, New York lost nine of their next 16 games to set up another do-or-die game against the Marlins on the last day of the season — in what might have been the last game ever played at Shea Stadium, to boot. And this time, a tight contest was broken open by consecutive HRs from Wes Helms and Dan Uggla in the eighth inning, providing the margin that sealed yet another collapse.
As much as anything — including the team’s many failed big-name acquisitions, the firing of Willie Randolph in the middle of the night or Fred Wilpon being swindled by Bernie Madoff — those twin collapses set the tone for the LOLMets phenomenon in the years since, which now hangs over every potential future disaster with the promise of history repeating itself once again.
The 2025 Mets have, at times, looked plenty ready to add themselves to this ignominious list as well.
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