Whether the MLB actually has a 2020 regular season in some form is still up in the air. The optimist in me likes to think there’s no way the league would let this happen to the sport, but I was also wishing for some kind of agreement by now.
It doesn’t matter what the agreement — or non-agreement — eventually comes to. If the New York Mets take the field this year, games won’t start counting until after the calendar flips to July due to COVID-19. Although it’s been necessary because of the health risks involved, it’s disappointing.
After all, it’s June — we should be two-plus months into the regular season by now. For the Mets, though, it’s a chance to bypass a month that’s been their white whale lately.
As I sat here trying to think of positives to glean from in our current situation without baseball being played, this was one of them. The past two seasons have each included a dreadful June performance by New York, and as much as I’d like to forget both of them, it’s impossible to do so.
Former manager Mickey Callaway probably wants to forget about his two years at the helm during this month, too. The 2018 season led to a 5-21 record that completely bottomed out the club and erased a hot April start. This past season wasn’t as bad, but it still wasn’t great since they finished with a 10-18 mark.
In thinking about the past two Junes in particular, I was curious as to how the Mets have generally performed during that month in recent memory. While there’s still three months of the regular season left to be played by the time June is in the books, it can be a telling month that changes the trajectory of a club’s ultimate fate by the time Game 162 rolls around.
We’ve already seen how one measly 10-game June road trip changed the course of the year for those 2006 Mets, ya know.
As it turns out, the third month of the regular season has been an issue — to varying degrees — for the Mets most of this past decade. The below table shows off their June win-loss record, along with the same stats for the month of July to show if they were able to bounce back or not.
It’s interesting to note how the first three years of this past decade produced a winning record in June, even if New York’s performance slipped in each year that followed. It’s also interesting to note that 2011 was the only instance where New York produced a similar record in both June and July (both winning records).
Either way, the Mets haven’t experienced a winning June since 2012, with a 14-14 record in 2017 being the closest they got before falling off a cliff in the two years that followed. I also can’t help but notice the specific performances in the organization’s most successful years of the decade: 2015, 2016, and 2019.
The respective sub-par months of June is just another trend all three of these clubs share with one another, along with having a hot second half of play. While there isn’t really a direct correlation between the two, treading water or slumping in the middle of the year made those late-season surges a necessity to finish where they ended up, anyways.
Whenever I think about the Mets and June baseball, one of the first things that comes to mind is the 2006 road trip — it changed everything for them. It’s partially why I feel June is pivotal during the regular season, even if this past year’s club showed it was possible to bounce back and play meaningful games in August and September anyways.
My thoughts of June baseball and how it impacts the Mets’ eventual fate has certainly soured because of how it doomed the ’18 club and how it gave last year’s crew too big of a hole to ultimately climb out of.
After taking a look at the past decade, though, slogging their way through June has been more common than I realized. The Mets won’t have to deal with this white whale in 2020, but it’s something that’ll be in the back of my mind in 2021, depending on how this current season ends up playing out.
