The New York Mets, and the Last Meaningless Game

In the parking lot across from Citi Field, two hours before first pitch on the last day of the season, Steve Treutle made cocktail sauce in a Tupperware container, shaking it beside his head like he was mixing a martini. “Little concoction,” he said. “Just ketchup and horseradish. It’s no big deal.”

Treutle and his fiancé were tailgating the game, the Nationals at the Mets. Like every other season finale ever hosted at Citi Field, this one meant nothing. On Friday, the Mets return to the postseason for the first time since 2006, and their fans will be reminded how brutal the playoffs can be. On Sunday, though, the stakes were low, the sun had come out, Treutle’s cocktail sauce was kicking, and he had a wedding to look forward to.

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“Next Sunday,” he said. “If it’s a day like this, it’ll be great. And it just so happens that the National League is not playing on that day. That just worked out.”

When I got on the subway, the sky was gray and Max Scherzer’s no-hitter in Game 161 the night before was still haunting the whole enterprise. I expected a classic Citi Field afternoon: black skies, empty seats, sad groundouts to second base with garbage swirling across the infield. When I got to Flushing, however, the weather had cleared, and everyone I met was smiling.

“They’re gonna go all the way this year,” said Treutle. “Lose the five, six games in a row, now we’re gonna start winning. Get a win today, get it out of our system, start winning.” I smiled along with him, like someone whose heart was not wrapped in copper wire.

Nearby, a few hundred fans in the matching blue shirts of the 7 Line Army played cornhole to the classic baseball anthem, “No Scrubs.” Most people I spoke to agreed: the Mets will crush the Dodgers, Citi Field is great, and Wilmer Flores is their favorite Met.

“Honestly, this weekend’s been a little rough,” said Rocky, who leaned on his tailgate, taking in the crowd through dark sunglasses. “Yesterday, the no-hitter killed us. Killed me, anyway. All I could think about was, Thank god we clenched last week.”

Asked if the playoff run had him missing Shea, Rocky, a Queens native, got quiet.

“Yeah, yeah, it’s a little bittersweet. It was home. As a kid, I used to go on the 7 train back and forth, always could see Shea Stadium, right from the 7 train. I don’t know.”

Going to the games with the 7 Line, which has been organizing these outings since R.A. Dickey’s 20th win in 2012, has lessened the sting for Rocky. Winning has helped, too.

“These are the guys from Shea Stadium,” he said. “These are all of us, from back then. Now with this new stadium, it’s starting to feel like home.”

Last week, Greg Prince wrote a lovely piece about his long goodbye to Shea Stadium, and the difficulty of loving Citi Field, “a ballpark that kind of dares you to embrace it as your own.” I knew Shea all too briefly myself, only starting in 2006; it didn’t take me long to embrace Citi Field. It was those long, barren Septembers that did it, when the wind pushed whirlwinds of hotdog wrappers past the replacement-level players on the field, and the Times sent photographers to document the emptiness.

I saw Jose Reyes’s last full game as a Met, in September of 2011. He marked the occasion with two screaming home runs. It was a damp night, and few stuck around through the thirteenth to watch the Mets lose to the Reds, 5-4. As we walked to the train, a man in a Spider-Man costume played a mournful “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” on his saxophone. Our cigarettes glowed in the fog, and Citi Field felt like home for the first time.

Since then, the end of the season has brought me Dickey’s 20th win, a sloppy victory on Mike Piazza Day, and a surprisingly touching farewell to Bobby Abreu. Those were days I savored, with all the desperation that word carries—trying to enjoy every drop despite knowing that each one brought me closer to the bottom. This year should have none of that melancholy, because the Mets are not yet finished, but there is still a part of me—and other Mets fans as well, I’d bet—that misses the meaningless games. It’s a lot harder to forget the losses that matter.

I’ve always used baseball as a way to process anxiety, and right now I need it. My wife is pregnant, due in February with our first child. Three days before the Mets traded for Yoenis Cespedes and began barreling towards the playoffs, we heard the baby’s heartbeat, thrumming across the speakers like the slow motion chop of a helicopter. Two days before the Mets clinched a spot in the playoffs, we saw the baby on the ultrasound, tiny hand pressed against a colossal noggin that quite rightly filled my wife with fear.

“It’s a boy,” grunted the woman performing the ultrasound, delivering perhaps the most important sentence I’ve ever heard without any ceremony at all. She was unimpressed by the pregnancy, the most ordinary miracle in the world.

“You’re handling this well,” my wife said sometime in the first trimester. “You’re not scared?”

“When we got married,” I said, “the idea of having a kid scared the hell out of me. I’ve had two years to get used to the idea.” I ran those words back in my head. “Or,” I continued, “I’m scared to death, and I’m repressing it so well that I have no idea. Maybe I’ll have a nervous breakdown sometime in January.”

She didn’t think that was funny.

The closer the Mets have been getting to the postseason, the more I have drifted toward panic. I don’t think this trembling fear has anything to do with impending fatherhood, the thought of which fills me with bright, helium-light joy. If I’m clinging to the Mets more than I ever have, I think it’s because I know that I won’t have this much free time ever again. These next few months will be unique in my life, and I want to hold on to them. It will be twenty years or more before my son wonders what his father was like in 2015, if he ever wonders that at all. It is an unsettling thought. I feel like a memory.

I don’t think I’m scared of fatherhood, although perhaps I should be. I think I’m terrified just about the Mets, but I really can’t be sure. I do know that, on Sunday afternoon, no one seemed to share my fear.

There was a kids’ zone set up beside the home run apple, where a DJ blasted family-friendly dance music and tried his hardest to get the crowd of spaced-out children to move. “This is it, Citi Field,” he said. “This is a party. It’s going down. Forget the playoffs. This is the big time.”

Beside the apple, Lisa Castillo did the twist, either out of respect to the DJ or to keep herself warm. She wore a Jets hoodie and an attitude of unabashed optimism.

“I grew up not too far from the stadium, so I’ve been a big fan,” she said. “Years and years of being a Mets fan, and rooting them on no matter what.”

Although she missed the “picnic-y cohesiveness” of Shea, Castillo loves Citi Field, loves these Mets, and was happy to have a final game “to cheer them on as they go to the playoffs.” Her husband was excited to get a fish sandwich.

I walked toward the right field gate, where a woman carried a sign that said “Curtis Grand[erson],” and insisted to her friends that she really considered him grand. From the muddy streets of the Iron Triangle, the chop shop district that still sits outside the stadium’s gates, there was the heavy smell of bacon. Most of the auto body shops, which have stubbornly resisted the Mets’ attempts to bulldoze them and build a mall, were closed.

A man with a voice like Crispin Glover sidled up to me and asked, “Hey buddy…Does Mister Met have a first name? Some old timer over there was asking. I said just Mister.”

I agreed with him, and he wandered away.

In McFadden’s, the barn-like sports bar built into the underbelly of Citi Field, a bathroom attendant dispensed Axe body spray, peppermints, and lollipops. A half-eaten plate of nachos sat abandoned on the floor. A man at the bar complained that his HD TV was too crisp, and a few hundred people stopped their conversations to cheer when the Giants scored.

“Last game of the regular season,” said the DJ, who had none of the enthusiasm of his compatriot at the kids’ zone. “I need all my Met fans to make some noise. Last game of the regular season. We’re gonna have some fun today.”

I liked the way he emphasized the word regular. In every previous year of Citi Field’s existence, no such qualifier was needed.

I’ve felt the fear ever since I got my ticket for the first home game of the NLDS. Fear of a sweep, of humiliation, of wasted hope—something worse than just waiting for next year. Fear of Citi Field, full but silent. Fear of that ride home on the 7 train, surrounded by 43,000 angry, despondent drunks. Fear of Kershaw, Greinke, and the assembled horde of the NL Central that follows in their wake.

That fear was tamped down once Game 162 began. For a meaningless game, it was sublime. The ballpark wasn’t full, but it was awake in a way it had not been at the sleepy sellout on opening day. A wide strike zone and the electric arm of Jacob deGrom, backed up by a string of relievers, kept the Nationals hitless into the seventh, when a ball off the foot of Ruben Tejada eliminated a chance to see the utter weirdness of a combined no-hitter.

The Mets weren’t hitting either, though, and the atmosphere grew tense as the game crept along. A loss was less threatening the possibility of extra innings; it was cold in the shadows, and the workweek was rushing up. In the bottom of the eighth, Curtis Grand[erson] sent a ball sailing deep to center field, giving the Mets a one run lead and exploding that tension. In the ninth, Bryce Harper got the last hit of the Nationals’ wasted season—a two-out double. Jayson Werth hit a ball that, for just a moment, looked like it was going to spoil the afternoon. But with a lazy outstretched hand, Juan Lagares caught it, and the (regular) season came to an end.

It was a pointless game, but a perfect one. For two hours and 34 minutes, those in attendance forgot to fear the Dodgers, and got an elegant 1-0 win as a parting gift, whatever the NLDS brings. The Mets came onto the field to thank the fans for the season, but most of us were already out the door. After all, we’ll see these guys again next week.

When I got home, it was night, and the first of our baby gifts had arrived in the mail: a hooded towel, with a cartoon giraffe on it. It was impossibly, wonderfully small.