Bart Giamatti wrote of baseball:

It breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart. The game begins in the spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall alone. You count on it, rely on it to buffer the passage of time, to keep the memory of sunshine and high skies alive, and then just when the days are all twilight, when you need it most, it stops.

Well. This season of the Mets has broken my brain. Through the first 70 games, the Mets were flying high with a record of 45-25. Their starting pitching was elite, sporting a league-best 2.79 ERA. Playoff odds 96 percent.

Then they lost 14 of 16.

July and August were months of attrition and madness. Just as Juan Soto had turned back into Juan Soto, the starting pitching turned into a pumpkin.

Then they were winning eight out of ten, and showing late season energy. Only to sink back into chaos, playing brilliant baseball against good teams like the Padres, but losing consistently to mediocre teams like the Marlins. If this team somehow made a World Series run from the last wild-card spot, I would resent them still for making me pretend I didn’t spend a whole summer dreading them.