On a sunny day in late March, Michael Matteo, Jr., lounged on a grassy berm beyond the right-field fence at Clover Park, a minor-league stadium set amid the sprawling strip malls of Port St. Lucie, Florida, about an hour up the interstate from the tony confines of Palm Beach. On the field, a New York Mets split squad was comfortably beating the St. Louis Cardinals in a spring-training matchup. The temperature was in the low seventies, cool for South Florida; that morning, the stadium’s elevator attendant took comfort in knowing that at least the cold weather wouldn’t frizz her hair. Back in Brooklyn, where Matteo lives, it was “thirty-five degrees and raining,” he said, sounding pleased. In the bright Florida sky, a few contrails fluffed into clouds. Matteo, who wore shorts and a commemorative ’86 Mets jersey, had taken off his shoes.
Matteo is a plumber by trade who also works as a garbage collector for the New York City Department of Sanitation. He was ten years old in 1986, when the Mets won the World Series for the second—and, to date, the last—time. It remains one of the great moments of his life. He goes to at least twenty games a year at Citi Field, in Queens, where the Mets play, and buys a season package when he can. He began bringing his son to Port St. Lucie three years ago. His son, who is now eight, was pressed up against the fence, baseball glove in hand. A few feet away, a young kid asked his mother whether a lazy fly ball was a home run.
Optimism is running high this year among those who cheer for the Mets. Usually, this is a bad sign: the Mets have a long history of disappointing their fans, not to mention their friends, their mothers, local authorities, themselves. The team lost a hundred and twenty games in its first season, in 1962, a record that held until last year, when it was bested, or worsted, by the Chicago White Sox. And yet the Mets have also maintained an almost continuous capacity to surprise. “It is safe to assume that the Mets are going to lose, but dangerous to assume that they won’t startle you in the process,” Roger Angell wrote, in this magazine, during that first season. By now, the losing is more of a spiritual condition than a description of the team’s over-all performance in its sixty-three years of existence. There have been just enough moments of wild, inexplicable joy to keep hope alive. “I simultaneously expect everything is going to go perfectly and I expect some unimaginable calamity to befall us,” the writer Devin Gordon, a diehard Mets fan, told me. Gordon is the author of a book about the team, “So Many Ways to Lose.”
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“I just learned the rules of baseball, like, a year ago,” another fan, Kyle Gorjanc, standing near Matteo on the berm, told me. She wore a Mets hat studded with palm trees over her pink-streaked hair. Last season, the Mets lost thirty-three of their first fifty-five games, and looked terrible. Then they went on a run that lasted through the summer and into the fall, ending only in the National League Championship Series, where they faced the juggernaut Los Angeles Dodgers. The turnaround began on a day that Grimace, the McDonald’s character, threw out the ceremonial first pitch. The shaggy purple blob became a mainstay at games. “The Mets were very meme-heavy last year,” Gorjanc said. “It’s what got me interested.” She’d become envious when her partner, Nick O’Brien, who was with her at spring training, attended a playoff game, and afterward texted her a picture of two Grimaces and a Hamburglar break-dancing in the parking lot.
The high expectations for the team this year seem more grounded in something like reality. During the off-season, the Mets signed one of baseball’s best hitters, Juan Soto, a Dominican player who turned pro at sixteen and won a World Series, with the Washington Nationals, at twenty-one. He’s now twenty-six and a terror to pitchers everywhere. A disciplined, versatile hitter, Soto drew more walks before turning twenty-six than any player in major-league history—while also ranking among the league leaders in slugging. He is slotted second in the Mets’ batting order, behind Francisco Lindor, the team’s shortstop and clubhouse leader, and ahead of Pete Alonso, a popular slugger with a barrel chest and a small head—fans call him the Polar Bear. It’s a top-of-the-lineup that rivals any squad this side of the Dodgers.
A few hours before the next day’s game, I watched Soto up close, taking batting practice. Almost alone among big-league hitters, Soto steps into the batter’s box to face opposing pitchers with the air of a man who has the upper hand. He doesn’t look at a pitch so much as calculate it, and when he has solved the equation he lets you know, either by swinging perfectly and making solid contact, or by letting it go by, almost certainly out of the strike zone—in which case he will then sweep his leg back and forth or shimmy his big, muscular hips, bringing them ostentatiously close to the ground. These movements are referred to as the Soto Shuffle, but there is nothing hesitant or dancelike about them. “It’s like I always told him—when you get into the batter’s box to hit, you own that space,” Soto’s father, Juan Soto, Sr., a salesman from Santo Domingo who used to pitch bottle caps to his toddler son, told ESPN a few years ago. By all accounts, Soto, Jr., is almost unfailingly polite, but in the box he puts on a show of dominance. (When asked recently to name the best hitter of all time, he answered, “Myself. Until you prove me I’m wrong.”) He sometimes grabbed his crotch as part of his routine back when he was a kid, which was not very long ago.
At batting practice, neither his DayGlo-orange long-sleeved undershirt nor his construction-cone-colored hat could distract from the sight of his massive quads. In nearly all his physical particulars—chest, jaw, hindquarters—he resembles a cartoon bull. Much attention is paid to his keen eye and intelligence at the plate, but the violent energy he sends back into the ball, from his cocked foot through the torque of his body, is at least as impressive. In the cage, he took swings with a steady rhythm, his backswing moving smoothly into his ready stance, the cocking of his foot like the click of the metronome. When he straightens out his leg into his stride, the rotation of his body has already begun. I watched as ball after ball exploded off his bat, a lone firecracker trailing into the hazy blue sky.
Mets fans are thrilled by how Soto might juice the team’s offense, but they are also elated about where he is coming from: last year, Soto played for the New York Yankees. He made the World Series with the Yankees and was reportedly offered seven hundred and sixty million dollars to continue playing for the Yankees. And yet he chose the Mets, rejecting the team whose pin-striped professionalism and unparalleled success have served as taunts in the direction of Mets fans since 1962. Baseball insiders saw the Mets as a likely destination, but, to fans of the team, the whole scenario seemed so improbable that many didn’t believe it was possible. Matteo had said to his friends, “Who would leave the Bronx to come to Queens?”
“New York likes winners, right?” the sports-talk host John Jastremski told me. Jastremski is a Yankees fan. “I think whether you are coming from the glitzy high-rise Tribeca penthouse or you live in wherever, you like winners in New York.” (When Soto’s choice was reported, Jastremski said, on his podcast, “Seeing Juan Soto in that Met uniform is going to make me want to vomit!”) Truthfully, though, the Mets have always reflected a different sort of New York ethos: even during the good years, the team’s fans have held on to the underdog identity that was inscribed at the beginning. “It is the team for every guy who has to get out of bed in the morning and go to work for short money on a job he does not like,” Jimmy Breslin wrote, after that woeful inaugural season. “And it is the team for every woman who looks up ten years later and sees her husband eating dinner in a T-shirt and wonders how the hell she ever let this guy talk her into getting married. The Yankees? Who does well enough to root for them, Laurence Rockefeller?”
Soto probably does well enough to root for the Yankees. The Mets have agreed to pay him even more than the Yankees offered—seven hundred and sixty-five million, plus various signing bonuses, perks, incentives, and possible escalators. It is, by a significant margin, the largest contract in American sports history. The Mets could make that offer because the team is now owned by one of the richest men in the country, Steve Cohen, a hedge-fund billionaire with a reputation on Wall Street for being reclusive and rapacious. The feds investigated his hedge fund, S.A.C. Capital, for securities fraud; Cohen was never charged with wrongdoing, but the firm had to pay a penalty of $1.8 billion, and some of the top traders went to prison for insider trading. (In 2014, Cohen opened a new fund, Point72.) As the Mets’ owner, though, he has been forthright and sensible. Many players openly love him, and Mets fans do, too. They sometimes call him Uncle Steve.
“As much as it’s hard to root for a billionaire, Uncle Steve is so much cooler than the Wilpons,” Nick O’Brien said, in the sunshine of Port St. Lucie. He was referring to the real-estate developers—and Bernie Madoff investors—who owned the team for decades before selling it to Cohen, in 2020. “He’s invested heavily in psychedelics,” O’Brien explained, when I asked him what made Cohen cool. (A couple of years ago, Point72 bought nineteen million shares of a company that specializes in psychedelic therapies.) So, O’Brien wasn’t bothered that Cohen made his money from the kind of Wall Street speculation that has benefitted a few New Yorkers at the cost of so many others? “Not bothered feels too binary,” O’Brien said. “Slightly bothered.”
O’Brien wore a Mets Hawaiian shirt and, like Matteo, was barefoot. “I like being a fan of the underdog,” he said. “If Yankee fans win, they’re, like, ‘Oh yeah, we expected this.’ So they’re just going to be sort of fundamentally unhappy.” I asked him whether he worried about becoming fundamentally unhappy if he started expecting the Mets to win. “I’m not really a worrier,” he said.
Like nearly all the other Mets fans I talked to, O’Brien and Matteo seemed to feel that a scrappy identity is nice and all, but really they just want to see their guys on top. The players feel similarly. “Even growing up in Wyoming, I knew the Yankees,” Brandon Nimmo, a lanky outfielder and the Mets’ longest-tenured player, told me. “The Mets were just kind of known as that ‘other’ team.” He and his teammates had a bit of a chip on their shoulder when they faced the Yankees, he said. But, since Cohen had bought the Mets, there was less of a sense of inferiority. It’s no longer a “David-versus-Goliath story,” Nimmo said. “It’s now a Goliath-versus-Goliath. We’re on even ground, which is the way I think it should be in New York.”
There is no local ordinance that says New York has to be a Yankees town, and in fact it wasn’t always: for the first few decades of big-league baseball, the city’s allegiance lay mostly with the Giants, who were perennial contenders at the start of the twentieth century. The Yankees were the junior team until a brewer’s son, Jacob Ruppert, bought them, in 1915, and they became flush with cash. Then they pilfered a slugger in his mid-twenties from a rival club: Babe Ruth, who’d begun his career with the Boston Red Sox. Ruppert and his co-owner built Yankee Stadium a few years later. It was much larger than other ballparks and, some said, had the sterile feeling of a bank. The Yankees seemed “to be thoroughly imbued with the New York idea that money can buy anything,” a columnist wrote in The Sporting News. And maybe it could, because during the next hundred years the Yankees won twenty-seven championships.
They’d just won their nineteenth when the Mets arrived, on a wave of nostalgia. The Giants had left the city for San Francisco five years earlier. Only one person voted against the move: the stockbroker for Mrs. Joan Whitney Payson, who owned a small share in the team and loved Willie Mays. (She was also fond of horse racing and the Impressionists.) When a lawyer named William Shea put together a plan to form a new league to compete with Major League Baseball, he tapped her to own its New York team. She could afford it—she was a Whitney, after all, as in the museum. To head off Shea’s plan, the American League and the National League each agreed to add two new teams, including a National League team in New York City which would be principally owned by Payson. She understood the assignment. The Mets weren’t going to win a World Series right away. They needed to draw former fans of the Giants and of the other team that had left for California, the Brooklyn Dodgers. And they needed to entertain them.
Nothing about the Mets, except possibly their name, the Metropolitans, was particularly subtle. (Payson, for her part, had preferred Meadowlarks.) The team’s insignia was the same orange intertwined “NY” that had been used by the Giants, and the blue was borrowed from the Dodgers. The first roster featured once great players who were recognizable to the spurned fan bases, even if the quality of their play no longer was. To manage the team, Payson called on Casey Stengel, a gifted coach who was an even more gifted gabber. He’d recently been fired from the Yankees for the sin of aging. “I’ll never make the mistake of being seventy again,” he said.
Just reading the names on the early Mets rosters is a laugh: Choo-Choo Coleman, Vinegar Bend Mizell, Hobie Landrith, the coach Cookie Lavagetto. There was Bob Miller (Lefty) and Bob Miller (Righty), who shared a hotel room on the road. Jay Hook had a degree in engineering and was the rare pitcher who could explain how a curveball curves. (“If Hook could only do what he knows,” Stengel said.) Above all, there was Marvelous Marv Throneberry, the team’s poor patron saint. It was frequently pointed out that Throneberry’s initials spelled MET, though his fan club, which was legion, wore shirts emblazoned with the word VRAM: Marv backward.
The Mets have always been vaguely embarrassing; it’s part of their charm. In 1964, a man with a giant baseball for a head, who’d been appearing in cartoon form on team publications, started attending games at Shea Stadium: it was Mr. Met, the major leagues’ first in-person mascot. Soon, Lady Met appeared. (They married in the mid-seventies.) When the Mets somehow won the World Series in 1969, people called it a miracle. It was just a good team, really, led in part by a brilliant young pitcher named Tom Seaver. But the Mets were already too deeply associated with the bizarre for it to be understood any other way.
When free agency came to baseball, in the late seventies, the team didn’t pursue any of the newly available stars or pay its own stars the new market rates. This angered Seaver, who eventually asked to be traded. Payson had died in 1975; her heirs sold the team in 1980, to Doubleday, the publishing house, and Fred Wilpon, a shareholder, became the team president. (Wilpon and his brother-in-law Saul Katz later bought out Doubleday.) The Mets outshone the Yankees for a period in the eighties, and won their second World Series. That team was as garish and chaotic as any other Mets squad, albeit much more talented than most. But Metsiness, it turned out, had a dark side. There was drug abuse and accusations of domestic violence; some of the team’s best players were pushed past their breaking points by the pressure of the season. Others didn’t seem to need any pushing. It was the go-go eighties in New York. Drugs fuelled the night clubs, and the stories out of Wall Street included even more malfeasance than usual. Players groped stewardesses and snorted coke in airplane bathrooms, and that was just the stuff they admitted to. The go-to book about the ’86 Mets is called “The Bad Guys Won.”
That team ultimately imploded in scandal and recrimination, and the Mets returned to more low-key modes of self-defeat. There was the time that Robin Ventura hit a walk-off grand slam in Game Five of the 1999 National League Championship Series, against the Atlanta Braves—officially downgraded to a single because Ventura was mobbed by his teammates before he could finish rounding the bases—only for a Mets reliever to walk in the Braves’ winning run a game later, ending the Mets’ season. In 2006, the team’s best player, Carlos Beltrán, struck out on three straight pitches to end Game Seven of the N.L.C.S., with the last pitch a curve that passed right over the middle of the plate as he stood there, frozen, the tying run on second base. The next season, the team blew a seven-and-a-half-game lead in the standings, with just seventeen games to go. In one low moment, Mr. Met was caught on camera flipping off fans; in another, a player sprayed bleach at reporters. Beltrán was hired as the team’s manager, then was discovered to have helped engineer a cheating scheme while with his previous team, the Houston Astros. Several promising young aces blew out their elbows. One All-Star pitcher ended up missing games because he held in his pee too long. Very Mets.
On an afternoon in April, I met the team’s general manager, David Stearns, in a windowless conference room down a hallway or two from the locker room at Citi Field. Stearns is among the brightest of the whiz kids to arrive during the “Moneyball” era—young men who speak sabermetrics with native fluency and project the confidence of people who could succeed at any number of white-collar jobs. Raised on the Upper East Side, Stearns went to Columbia Grammar, then Harvard, where he majored in political science. A lifelong Mets fan, he spent a summer interning for the Brooklyn Cyclones, the Mets’ minor-league affiliate in Coney Island, where his many responsibilities included running races in a giant hot-dog costume and power-washing the bathrooms. After college, he worked his way up the baseball food chain through a series of more conventional internships and positions, spending more time inside spreadsheets than novelty costumes. He made his name by turning around losing, small-market teams, mostly through savvy trades and bargain contracts. At forty, he’s no longer a phenom, exactly, but he can still give that impression. Although he was not the first person Cohen hired for the job, he is the clearest embodiment of the team’s direction in this new era. When we met, he wore a gray three-quarter-zip pullover with a Mets insignia subtly embroidered on the chest, the crisp collar of a blue-checked button-down peeking out of the open neck.
When Cohen bought the team, he said, somewhat notoriously, “If I don’t win a World Series in the next three to five years—I’d like to make it sooner—then obviously I would consider that slightly disappointing.” He then signalled his seriousness by approving a trade for Lindor and giving him what was, at the time, the largest contract in team history. He also splurged on starting pitchers. The Mets won more than a hundred games in 2022 but lost in the Wild Card Series, and basically fell apart the following year. The team traded the pitchers for prospects, and Cohen called Stearns, who had recently stepped down from a job running the Milwaukee Brewers, exhausted by the long hours away from home, and taken an advisory role instead. But he couldn’t resist the chance to turn things around for his childhood team. His goal, and Cohen’s, isn’t just to win the World Series but to make the Mets competitive in a predictable, sustainable way. In the conference room, Stearns, slipping into business bromides, told me that this was a matter of controlling what they could control and attending to the “synergies between the front office and field staff.” He mentioned “core principles that we talk about behind closed doors.” There are three of them, he said, but he refused, with a smile, to tell me what they are.
“David is a remarkably smart, patient, opportunistic head of state,” Gary Cohen, the Mets’ longtime play-by-play announcer, told me. The job does entail a degree of ruthlessness. This past off-season, the front office didn’t re-sign the infielder Jose Iglesias, who had been so popular in the clubhouse and among fans that his musician alter ego, Candelita, was practically another mascot. And Stearns was hardnosed in negotiations with Alonso, bringing him back on a smaller contract than some fans thought he deserved. But it wouldn’t be fair to say that everything is numbers now for the Mets. After Cohen took over, he and his wife, Alex, a diehard Mets fan, invited the players and their wives to dinner at a mansion they own in Greenwich, Connecticut, which sits on eighteen acres. Nimmo and his wife bonded with the Cohens on the property’s pickleball courts. Citi Field had never had an especially nice place where players’ partners and kids could take refuge during games; within a year, the Mets had the best “family room” in the league, with full-time child care on game days. It was “eye-opening,” Nimmo told me: before Cohen, he said, “if we were going to do some improvement, it was usually four or five years out.” Lindor described to me a team culture in which people were held accountable, but with the expectation that everyone was in it for the long haul. “People don’t walk around on glass,” he said.
Soto remains close with his parents, who still live in Santo Domingo, and he cited Cohen’s emphasis on family as part of why he signed with the Mets. He was reportedly moved that Cohen’s father-in-law, a Mets fan who grew up in Puerto Rico, also attended their meetings, which were held at two of Cohen’s other mansions, in Boca Raton and Beverly Hills. (Cohen, the third of eight children, grew up in Great Neck, Long Island, where his father worked in the garment industry and his mother taught piano lessons.) In truth, though, Soto’s decision still seems somewhat mysterious. He has said that the Yankees were originally his first choice—his father, last year, described the club as “the home of baseball”—and he has denied rumors that Yankee Stadium security accidentally mistreated a member of his family. Cohen, for his part, thought that his first meeting with Soto was a disaster, because Soto kept pointing to weaknesses in the Mets’ lineup. Cohen is an art collector, most noted for having purchased not one but two hundred-million-dollar Giacomettis. (He has since sold one of them.) Soto’s agent, Scott Boras, has suggested that Cohen was “adept at dealmaking because he dealt with the art world, where your market is nobody else’s market, because you want the art.”
Cohen has described the Mets as an “unpolished gem.” He told Sports Illustrated, “I love the fact that I can change how the Mets are perceived, how the Mets fans perceive themselves.” Stearns said something similar to me, though he put it differently: “You historically have gotten knocked down a lot as a Mets fan, and you have to be able to still relish and create excitement for yourself about what comes next, even though what has just happened may not have been the most enjoyable experience.” This was a pattern that he and his colleagues were trying to change, he said. “The goal is that future generations of Mets fans, or specifically this generation of Mets fan, doesn’t need to live that way.”
Was he worried that some of the fun and the delight of being a Mets fan might drain away if the pattern changed? He’d thought about this, he said, but last season showed him that the team could have “tremendous success on the field” and still be the Mets. “We’re not the New York Yankees,” he said. It was true—the team’s ride to the N.L.C.S. had seemed like a giant party. The Yankees, meanwhile, had made it a step further than the Mets, all the way to the World Series. But they ultimately lost, just barely avoiding a sweep, and their fans seemed humiliated.
Perhaps it’s a bit romantic to think that the ups and downs of the Mets mean more than whether or not the team plays in October. And yet most sports fans recognize that how they understand the world is shaped by what happens to their favorite teams, and by the identities that fans form when they come together. Cities see themselves in the players that represent them. There was a chance, Devin Gordon, the writer, conceded, that the Mets would turn into “a garden-variety pro-sports franchise” and that something would be lost, something funny or even just fallible, a certain kind of humanity. It’s hard not to connect this with broader changes under way in New York City—the arrival of freshly minted billionaires and the departure of more modest institutions, the replacement of public goods with private amenities, the never-ending rise in rent. Is there a place for people who don’t always come out on top? Or do you need a hedge-fund manager’s fortune to get by? Are there no more Davids, only Goliaths?
The Mets opened their season on the road, against the Astros. The game came down to the last out of the ninth, with the Mets down two, the tying run on, and Soto at the plate. One of baseball’s best closers, Josh Hader, was on the mound. Hader threw three straight balls. Soto sees a fair share of hittable pitches, partly because pitchers sometimes give up on trying to find an edge. He had already got the better of Hader in a few key moments during their careers. But Hader followed the three balls with two strikes. Soto sat fastball, then whiffed at a slider way off the plate to end the game.
The season is long; one at-bat, one series, even one month says very little. Soto had the next fifteen years to redeem himself. Still, it was a disappointing start, and although the Mets began the season against two lesser teams, they split their first six games. The offense was sputtering; only Alonso was hitting well. The Yankees, meanwhile, were bashing home run after home run. Aaron Judge, the team’s Paul Bunyan, did not seem to miss the presence of Soto in the lineup at all. But the Mets’ pitching had been better than expected, and no one was panicking when the team arrived at Citi Field for the home opener, on April 4th, against the Toronto Blue Jays. Matteo surprised his son at school that day, showing up in his Mets gear and taking him to the game. “Everything was just electric,” Matteo told me. The Mets won, 5–0. Then they won again, and again, and again.
On a cold Tuesday in April, with the team on a five-game winning streak, I went to Citi Field. Frigid air blew in at gale-force speeds; the game was moved from an evening start to 4:10 p.m., to make the most of the still-wintry light. Beforehand, there was a press conference to celebrate the anniversary of a hoax: in an issue dated April 1, 1985, Sports Illustrated published a piece by George Plimpton purporting to be a profile of Sidd Finch, a fictional French-horn-playing Harvard-dropout yogi who could throw a pitch a hundred and sixty-eight miles per hour. Naturally, Plimpton had made him a Met.
Citi Field has an appealing openness: from the concourse and the stands, there are views of Flushing Bay and the Whitestone Expressway, the distant Manhattan skyline and nearby auto-body shops. The food is decent, too, and reflects much of the ethnic makeup of the surrounding area. On game days, kids play catch in the parking lot, where Cohen would like to put a big casino. (He’ll need approval from the New York State Legislature.)
On account of the updated start time—and, no doubt, the threat of frostbite—fans didn’t begin arriving until about thirty minutes before the game. Attendance was announced at nearly twenty-nine thousand, but no more than a couple thousand people actually showed up. Many seized the chance to huddle close to the field, regardless of what their ticket stubs said, presumably—the ushers did not appear to be checking seat assignments. Others gathered out of the wind, in the seats under the overhang. When the Miami Marlins’ lead-off batter popped up, the ball was buffeted so much by the wind that it fell for a hit. It was hard to imagine how a batter could stand the sting of his hands in that cold, or how a pitcher could grip a ball, let alone throw strikes. But then Lindor led off with a home run, his first of the year. The Mets’ starter, Clay Holmes, struck out ten batters in five and a third innings—including, at one point, five in a row. Nimmo broke a tie in the fifth with a two-run double; in the sixth, Soto was intentionally walked to load the bases, and Alonso cleared them with a double. Energy coursed through the stadium.
The score was 9–5, Mets. Temperatures had dropped into the thirties, and the wind continued to blow. But the crowd seemed to be getting bigger and louder. There were gasps to spare for a dramatic play by the Marlins’ center fielder, who sprinted toward a long fly ball into the left-center gap and dove, snagging the ball midair and holding onto it as he skidded across the dirt, saving three runs and some modicum of the Marlins’ respectability. Neon-orange hats still studded the stands; few people headed for the aisles. Perhaps this was easy to explain—only diehards would show up in this weather. And the Mets did have a winning streak going. There was something almost carnivalesque about playing baseball in such miserable conditions.
Before the game, I had spoken to Lindor. He has a gentleness about him, particularly when he talks; in person, he was both smaller and more muscular than he seemed on TV. He struggled when he first got to the Mets—for a while, fans thought that his acquisition was a bust. At one point, after long hearing it from the fans, he celebrated a big hit with a thumbs-down in their direction, unleashing a torrent of criticism. Now he’s the anchor of the Mets’ defense; last season, he was one of the league’s best hitters. (If a single thing turned around the Mets’ fortunes last year, it was probably—with apologies to Grimace—a team meeting that Lindor called, at the end of May, in which he insisted that they hold one another accountable.) I asked him about a glove I saw him wearing during spring training, which featured the emblems of various city workers: the N.Y.P.D., the Department of Sanitation, the Fire Department. “My first year, it took me a little bit to understand the culture and understand how things work,” Lindor said, of New York. “It’s all about working and trying to make it, you know? It’s all about hustling.” He said that the way New Yorkers are protective of their people reminded him of Puerto Rico, where he was raised.
The Mets’ early-April winning streak ended at six, but they continued to play well enough to reach the top of their division. (The Yankees reached the top of theirs, too.) Soto, like Lindor, got off to a bumpy beginning as a Met—during one stretch, he went a dismal two for twenty-four. Then, in the bottom of the fifth in a game against St. Louis, he came to bat with the Mets down one and a runner on third. The noise of the crowd grew louder, and the fans at Citi Field rose out of their seats: a standing ovation, urging on the new star. He hit a game-tying single, as if in response. Later, he said that he was “a hundred per cent” surprised by the crowd. “I really appreciate what they did,” he said. “I feel like they don’t know how meaningful that is.” His numbers were not yet up to his previous standards; even so, as April drew to a close, the Mets were off to their best home start ever. They looked comfortable in first. ♦
