Last week, I had recap duties for the Mets’ series opener against the Reds. After the Mets suffered another in a long line of hapless losses, I chose to mostly write about the New York Knicks, who at that time were one win away from the NBA Finals. A dereliction of duty? Perhaps, but in my defense: Can you really blame me for preferring in that moment to talk about the Knicks—who went on to finish their sweep of the Cavaliers that night and be declared Eastern Conference champions for the first time since
1999, i.e. the first time since I’d started watching them in the mid-2000s—over a Mets team that has spent their 2026 trying—and mostly failing, despite a decent winning streak here and there—to simply hold their head above water?
I don’t even live in New York right now, but even hundreds of miles away it’s pretty clear that a certain blue and orange squad has taken over the hearts and minds of the city, and it ain’t the one we usually talk about on this site.
From my Mets fan point of view, 95% of me has appreciated having the Knicks as a diversion from the awful baseball we’ve been subjected to over the past couple months. No matter how terrible things have been at Citi Field, it’s been a comfort to know that all I needed to do was wait until the next game at Madison Square Garden to experience some significantly better vibes. I fear for what things will be like in the dog days of July and August when I will be forced to give all my attention to the Mets once more (perhaps some people could simply spend those months building up anticipation for football season, but as a Jets fan… well, yeah).
That other 5%, however, is a different story. That other 5% is looking at what’s happening with the Knicks and wondering when we will get to experience something similar with the Mets. And to be clear, I’m not just talking about making a championship run, though of course, that is the ultimate goal in all sports. But what I’m looking at is not just the last two months of basketball, but rather the past four years of it. During that time, the Knicks have accomplished something that the Mets have pretty much never accomplished during their entire history: continuous relevance.
Let’s back it up. Even those who don’t watch basketball probably know that the 21st century had not been kind to the Knicks before the 2020s. The organization spent the first two decades of the 2000s being a perennial laughingstock, putting up just three winning seasons in nineteen years from 2001 to 2020 and winning just one playoff series in those three winning seasons from 2011-2013. But then Leon Rose took over as team president in 2020, and a series of moves—most notably, the free agency signing of Jalen Brunson—transformed the team’s identity. They easily made the postseason in all four seasons since Brunson joined the team, and they had some measure of success once there in each of those seasons, as they won at least one playoff series in all four years before finally making it to the Finals this year. Now they are a mere four wins away from giving Knicks fans their first title since 1973, an event which would undoubtedly cause New York City to burn to the ground. If you need any more evidence for how thoroughly the team has taken over the city, look no further than Mayor Zohran Mamdani signing an executive order to repeal kids’ bedtimes for the Finals, a decision I was sure to inform my sister about so she could adjust my three-year-old nephew’s sleeping schedule accordingly.
Again, winning a championship is the final goal, and if the Knicks don’t manage to get it done this year or in the near future it will certainly limit the level of fondness we can feel about this era in the years to come. But there is still something to be said about rooting for a team that is always a factor come playoff time, that goes into each season genuinely believing that it has a chance at being the last squad standing. Having spent most of my life rooting for a team that was always a laughingstock of the sport instead of at the forefront of it, it has been a special feeling to get to experience the latter for a change and I have tried not to take that for granted.
The Mets, on the other hand? Making the playoffs four years in a row is something the franchise has quite literally never done. Their record is two straight years, which they’ve only accomplished twice (1999-2000 and 2015-2016). In theory, it should be easier than ever to finally break that streak nowadays with the expansion of the wild card. They had the chance to make the playoffs in consecutive seasons for the third time in history last year, but their collapse prevented that from happening. And barring a miraculous turnaround, odds are they won’t be making the playoffs this year, either, so the stretch of perennial irrelevance will continue for an unforeseen period of time. Despite playing in a league whose collective bargaining agreement is far more generous towards big market, deep-pocketed franchises in comparison to a salary cap league like the NBA, the Mets have simply never been able to establish the kind of year-to-year consistency that the Knicks have had for the past few years.
This should all be familiar enough to those of us who have rooted for the team for a while, so why complain about it now? Well, beyond the fact that the Knicks are now reminding us what extended success looks and feels like, there’s also the fact that this time a year ago, it really and truly seemed like things were finally changing for the better.
The Mets had their rich owner and a president of baseball operations who was seen as one of the best in the business. They were coming off a magical 2024 season in which they came up just short, but not before getting one over on some of the foes (the Braves and the Phillies, namely) who have historically been the ones to get the last laugh over the Mets. They had won a bidding war for one of the best players on the planet, beating the goddamn Yankees, of all teams. And in the first half of 2025, they were succeeding at the major league level while also boasting a strong farm system and improved player development apparatus. A World Series victory was not guaranteed, of course, but it seemed like another playoff berth was in store and that a string of them would still follow in the years to come. If you get enough bites at the apple, eventually it stands to reason that you’ll have a pretty good chance at winning it all.
Mets fans have certainly fallen victim to false hope before, but this didn’t feel like that at all. This felt sustainable. This felt real.
But we all know how things played out from there. The second half of 2025 was a slow-moving train wreck, and they missed the playoffs by one game. After a tumultuous offseason which still ended with most people feeling optimistic about how things would go this year, 2026 has largely picked up right where the end of last season left off. And now, 2024 looks like what 2015 and 2006 were before them: not the start of an exciting new era of Mets baseball, but rather a flash in the pan, an oasis of glory (and fairly limited glory at that, given that all of these seasons ended without a ring) amid a desert of ineptitude. Indeed, one good season a decade seems to be all that the baseball gods see fit to give us.
So while watching the Knicks has given me all sorts of joy over the past couple months, it has also made me look at the Mets and wonder: When is it their turn? When will we finally get to see not just a good season here and there, but rather an extended period of meaningful, important, and just plain good baseball? Every single time we think they’re on the verge, things go wrong. Players get hurt, prospects bust, managers and GMs get fired. All of this has happened before, and seemingly, all of it will happen again. And again. And again. It’s the sort of thing that can make a skeptic believe in curses.
So again: When it is the Mets’ turn? Usually when we ask a question like that, we’ll be able to offer some kind of attempt at a sensible answer. But I’ve got nothing for this one. All I can do is watch the Knicks and be reminded of what it is that we’ve been missing.
If there’s a silver lining here, it’s this: The current success of the Knicks showed how dramatically a franchise’s fortunes can change before you know it. One day you can be the worst-run team in the league, and then you hire the right person and sign the right player and suddenly you’re at the top of the organizational rankings. One day, perhaps we will look up and the Mets will have accomplished the same level of annual relevance that the Knicks have achieved over these past few years. Maybe it will even still be the current people in charge to get them there; after all, for all the things that have gone wrong over the past calendar year, they still have some bright young players on their roster, and their player development apparatus remains far ahead of where it was just a few years ago.
So yes, maybe we will finally see the Mets get over the hump if we just wait a little bit longer. But we have already been waiting so long, and despite all the positive steps they had seemed to have taken over the past few years, it still oftentimes feels like we remain so far away.
