It’s the Wednesday after the All-Star game, and there’s no baseball, only dreaming. For the majority of teams, the ones not condemned to last place, or somewhere close to it, there is renewed hope coming out of the break, sort of a second Opening Day. The Mets created this hope for themselves with an impressive 8-2 homestand. They sit five games under .500, seven back of Atlanta and Washington, and have a beatable opponent in San Diego waiting for them to start the second half (or game 96 by the way the schedule wraps around the All-Star break).
The question for a hopeful Mets fan is how hopeful can they be? At 45-50, how have Mets teams of the past finished the season? Has a Mets team ever turned it around to win the pennant (I bet many of you already know this answer)?
Through 95 games, the Mets have had several seasons when their record was around their current mark of 45-50. Unfortunately, not many of those seasons turned into winning ones except the famous 1973 pennant winning season. A season, mind you, when they still only won 82 games.
In fact, over the Mets 53-year history, they have been under .500 twenty-nine times at the 95-game mark, and only TWICE (1973 and 2001) have they finished the season above .500.
Of course, every season is new, and this doesn’t mean hope is lost for the 2014 Mets. It just means they have history working against them, something that is not new to the franchise nicknamed the Amazin’ Mets.
