Saturday Seasons, 2024: Grimace and Bear It, or OMG?
- A.J. Carter
- 2 minutes ago
- 6 min read
Optimists looking for a way to have hope as the 2026 Mets season unfolds look back no further than 2024, when the team overcame a horrendous start and propelled themselves into the National league Championship Series.
The season was David Stearns' first as the team’s head of baseball operations, and his first major task was finding a manager to replace Buck Showalter, whom owner Steve Cohen fired, ostensibly to give the about-to-be-named top baseball executive the opportunity to bring in his own team. The betting money was that Stearns would turn to Craig Counsell, with whom he worked in Milwaukee and whose contract, like Stearns’, had expired. But after interviewing in New York, Counsell surprised the baseball world by signing a 5-year, $40 million contract to manage the Chicago Cubs without giving the Mets a chance to match the offer.
As the Hermiston Herald reported at the time, Counsell’s decision was based on more than money. Rather, he looked at geography – Counsell grew up in Wisconsin and went to college in Indiana, about equidistant from Chicago – and an assessment that the Cubs were closer to being on the upswing than the Mets. As Counsell chose to play out 2023 rather than sign an extension with Milwaukee, Cubs officials were told by one of Counsell’s friends, “If he ever managed anywhere else, the Cubs have always been his dream job,” according to a story in the Hermiston Herald.
“It was just the right fit for me,” Counsell would say later.
Instead, Stearns turned to Yankees bench coach Carlos Mendoza, who, despite his lack of major league managing experience, “comes with a solid reputation, especially among the [Yankees’] younger, Spanish-speaking players. He has drawn high praise for his ability to connect with them, as well as his approach to teaching the game to players of various backgrounds,” the Daily News wrote.
Counterbalancing that optimism was Medoza’s inexperience and the Mets’ disappointing history of swooping up the hot managerial prospect of the year (Mickey Callaway) or the one with the supposed great baseball pedigree (Luis Rojas). The News’ Bill Madden was unimpressed, writing a few days later that Mendoza “will obligingly do whatever Stearns’ analytics geeks lay out for him, with no pushback.”
With a manager in place, Stearns – who would also serve as general manager, at least for his first year, with the Billy Eppler’s departure under a cloud – went about reshaping the roster. Over the next two months he signed: pitcher Austin Adams; starting pitcher Luis Severino, relief pitcher Michael Tonkin; infielder Joey Wendle; and relief pitcher Jorge Lopez. He traded for reliever Yohan Ramirez, starter Adrian Houser and outfielder Tyrone Taylor.
As the calendar turned to 2024, he signed outfielder Harrison Bader and starter Sean Manaea. And as spring training neared an end, he inked designated hitter Edgar Martinez.
“We should be in a much better spot,” shortstop Francisco Lindor said of the signing. Added first baseman Pete Alonso, “He’s got a ton of knowledge, he’s super talented and he’s going to make us better.”
The Daily News’ assessment of the roster: A formidable lineup, a starting rotation in need of front-line starters, a great bullpen led by Edwin Diaz’ return from his 2023 World Baseball Classic season-killing knee injury. They projected a third-place finish and a sabermetric-predicted 84-win season, with a 30 percent chance of making the postseason.
Cohen’s reaction to the naysayers: “I think we’re going to surprise to the upside.”
But an 0-5 start to the regular season, the team’s worst start in 19 years, left fans wondering whether Cohen and Stearns had put together the right management team and roster. Fans seemed to be willing to write off the team early: Only 15,000 fans were present at Citi Field when the Mets broke the streak with a ninth-inning, come-from-behind rally highlighted by an Alonso homer and a Taylor single to propel the Mets to a 2-1 win over the Tigers in the back end of a doubleheader.
It was especially a relief for Mendoza, already under fire for some strategy moves that failed to produce. “These things are all justifiable when they work, but, to a disgruntled fan base, they look like malpractice when they don’t,” Laura Albanese wrote in Newsday. “They also gave the sense that Mendoza, much like his hitters, was pressing, and there has to be at least some hope that now that the first win is out of the way, things will feel a little less desperate.”
And, yes, the team did reel off a six-game winning streak amid 12-3 run before hitting a 1-5 skid and ended the month above .500 – barely.
Things went really south in May, so much so that on May 29, when they dropped to 11 games under .500 after the Dodgers swept them in a three-game series, Lindor and outfielder Brandon Nimmo called a closed-door, players-only meeting. The meeting followed a game in which reliever Jose Lopez’ final pitch was throwing his glove into the stands after being ejected for arguing a checked swing call (It would be Lopez’ final toss as a Met; he was designated for assignment almost immediately afterward.)
“The Mets are a dead team walking right now,” Newsday’s David Lennon wrote.
Lindor’s message to his teammates at the meeting? “Focus on the process, being better and having the urgency of winning,” Lindor said. “Vibes are the most important thing on a daily basis. You have to be optimistic. You have to stay upbeat. You have to stay in the state of mind where you believe you could stay upbeat -- playing with a lot of energy and playing with a lot of passion.”
And for the next two games, it worked. But then the team lost the two after that, including blowing a lead after the eighth inning for the sixth time that year. As they headed into June and to London for a four-game set against the Phils (which they split), they continued to hold stiff upper lips while trying to avoid looking at the standings.
But they must have had a jolly good time playing across the Big Ditch, because shortly after they returned, they ripped off a seven-game winning streak, fueled by one of the two big heroes to rescue the season: the furry, purple McDonald’s mascot Grimace, whose only tangible achievement was throwing out the first ball at the June 12 game.
The Mets won that game, and the next six, and people began talking about the Grimace Effect.
The other move started quietly, right around the time of the team meeting, when the Mets added journeyman infielder Jose Iglesias to the major league roster. It didn’t seem like a significant move at the time, but Iglesias played as if he had made a deal with the Devil. Inserted into the starting lineup, he provided the spark the team needed. From May 31 to July 14, Iglesias batted .380, with a .999 OPS and the team went on a 26-13 run to hit the all-star break with a 49-46 record; if the season ended then, they would have been the third wild card.
Iglesias’ on-field performance should have been enough to energize the Mets, but his influence didn’t stop there. A song he wrote sitting at a table in his Miami area home and recorded under the stage name Candelita became a rallying cry for his teammates and the fan base.
Iglesias would be quoted saying he wrote “OMG” while thinking to himself: "This is the type of energy I need, and anything negative should just be pushed away." The lyrics of the song's chorus are: "Oh My God, todo lo malo échalo pa’ allá (Everything that's bad, push it to the side), Oh My God, dame salud y prosperidad (Give me health and prosperity)."
As the team got hot and chased a playoff berth, the fans returned to Citi Field, cheering in a team that as the regular season would to its conclusion would be fighting for a playoff spot. They finally did it on September 30, in the first half of a makeup doubleheader against the team they were battling for the spot, the hated Atlanta Braves.
It wasn’t easy. The Braves led, 3-0, after seven innings. The Mets scored six runs in the top of the eighth to take the lead, but the Braves took it back with four in the bottom of the frame. Leave it to Lindor to save the day, with a two-run homer in the ninth giving the Mets the lead and, eventually, the game.
The playoffs? Mostly remembered for one hit in the third and deciding game of the Wild Card series against the Milwaukee Brewers. Scoreless into the bottom of the seventh, when the Brewers plated two to take the lead, the game was eventually won by a Pete Alonso three-run homer – the first time in MLB history that a player had hit a go-ahead home run while his tam was trailing in the ninth inning or later in a winner-take-all playoff game.
It was Lindor who hit the key homer in the NLDS against the Phillies, giving the Mets a 3-1 series win. But then they ran into the buzzsaw that was the Los Angeles Dodgers. They did salvage two wins in the series, but the losses, by scores of 9-0, 8-0, 10-2 and 10-5 told a more realistic story.
Bad enough losses for them to end the season with a Grimace? Perhaps. But looking back on the season as a whole, especially how they rose from the early depths to 89 regular season wins (five more than the Daily News predicted), a more apt assessment is “OMG.”
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