A Mets season unlike any other should get a flag to match
Just my personal opinion: I’m not the biggest fan of pennants that don’t remind me of a pennant win. If I had my druthers, the Mets would only fly five flags in the Citi Field rafters—three white banners for the National League pennant wins that didn’t finish with a World Series trophy—and two blue banners for the ones that did.
That’s not to diminish the seasons represented by the other banners currently hanging above the top deck. The 1988 and 2006 division championships are certainly worth recognizing, as are the Wild Card successes from 1999 and 2016. These are undoubtedly monumental seasons in the history of the New York Mets—just maybe not deserving of a flag raised to the same level as those from ‘69, ‘73, ‘86, ‘00 and ‘15.
But if these flags are any indication, the Mets will raise another one next year to celebrate one of the unlikeliest runs any Mets team has ever had. I’ll recoil a tiny bit when it happens, as I can’t possibly remember the 2024 season as fondly as I remember, say, 2015…but who am I to say it shouldn’t be done?
I just have one request: Paint the banner purple. Because if this season has taught us anything, it’s that if you’re going to do something, you might as well have fun doing it.
It’s easy to forget how much fun baseball is supposed to be, mostly because losing sucks and even the best teams lose a lot. The 2024 Mets weren’t fun because of how seldom they lost, however. By record, their 89 wins are tied with the 2008 team for the 13th-most in franchise history. Would you classify the 2008 team as one that sparks joy?
I certainly don’t.
Part of the reason this Mets team brought so much joy is a function of expectations. One of my favorite Mets teams of my lifetime was the 2014 team that lost more games than it won. Its best player by bWAR that season was Juan Lagares. It featured only one All-Star—Daniel Murphy—a questionable one, at that.
But it also won five critical games down the stretch that vaulted the team into a second-place tie in the NL East, three in a road sweep against the Atlanta Braves and two in a home series against Houston that locked them into a position they hadn’t seen in six years. No one could have possibly guessed that it would serve as a foundation for a pennant win one year later—these were just young guys on a frankly mediocre team winning a few more baseball games than they should have. And it looked like a lot of fun:
Just look at Lucas Duda! How fun was that??
And if anybody asks me what the 2024 Mets season was like, I would point them to the above clip and say it was like that, except it happened like 50 times throughout the season.
Much of that has to do with an organization that seems much more tolerant of shenanigans than it was previously, slowly starting in 2022 but really blossoming this year. Edwin Díaz has a fun intro, but the team cranked it up to ridiculous levels two years ago by inviting Timmy Trumpet to play him in live. SNY already had a fantastic broadcast, but director John DeMarsico was given more leeway to flex his film school background even when it looked silly. Steve Gelbs ran the sausage race.
And as much fun as all of that was, it pales in comparison to the fun this organization had in 2024.
First, the Mets brought in a dance team, which had the potential to be embarrassing but ended up being just the 12th most ridiculous thing the team did this season. The start of the season brought Seymour Weiner, who by a stroke of PR brilliance became the face of the team’s dollar hot dog night.
Realizing they had not leaned hard enough into the purple motif for the city connect uniform reveals, the Mets invited the most purple thing in the country to throw out the first pitch—and it might have marked the inflection point on a magical season:
Then the team’s Latin pop star moonlighting as a middle infielder got hot, both on the field and on the charts. Previous regimes might have told Jose Iglesias to keep his music career for the offseason—this one gave him a microphone and a light show and asked him to sing his hit song after a game, whether the Mets won or not (they won 7-2, of course).
In multiple episodes of the Effectively Wild podcast, FanGraphs managing editor Meg Rowley accused the Mets of having “too many bits,” and I have to disagree. The bits made the season! Not all of them were winners—Pete Alonso’s playoff pumpkin might have paled in comparison to the rest—but they all added a certain flare, even if the original purpose was to giggle at a silly team making a nice little run that turned out to be serious contention.
Which is why my favorite moment of the season wasn’t Francisco Lindor’s go-ahead home run in Atlanta, or Alonso’s go-ahead home run in Milwaukee, or Lindor’s series-sealing grand slam in New York. It was right after Lindor’s postgame interview after Game 3 of the Wild Card Series, where Lindor cuts off his camera time early to rejoin his team for a picture.
But instead of getting in the frame, he pumps up his team by jumping around, yelling his throat out, surely at the expense of his injured back but uncaring of the consequences of. He looked like he was having as much fun as a person could possibly have, and in that moment, I was, too.
So if the Mets are going to raise a banner for 2024, it should be adorned with the same color that made this season so special to begin with. They should paint it purple.
And while they’re at it, they should paint the city connects purple, too.