Baseball

Blame bullpen, Minaya for Mets' collapse

GM should have had backup plan for eventual relief woes

Jim McIsaac / Getty Images

It was a painful end to the season, and Shea Stadium, for Mets fans on Sunday.

When it was over, the team’s analyst and former star, Keith Hernandez, sat in the broadcast booth staring blankly at the field, looking as if he wanted to cry.

“This one’s a real sock in the gut,” he finally blurted out as the team stood in the dugout, staring numbly at the field on which they will never play another game.

Some of us saw this coming. I wrote last week that the Mets would not go down quietly, but they would go down in a way meant to inflict the most agony on their faithful fans. That’s exactly what happened. Just as they did last year, they took it to the final game at home against the Marlins, needing a win to prolong the season. Just like last year, they lost.

There’s no such thing as fate, no such thing as cursed teams. In sports more than in life, you make your own luck. In sports, losing is as much a mindset as winning.

And for whatever reason, these Mets are more comfortable losing than they are winning. They played heroically in the second half to take over first place, but once there, they didn’t know what to do, how to behave, how to play the game. Perfectly good set-up men couldn’t get an out in the ninth. Accomplished hitters who had won many games couldn’t win one more.

The Mets ended 45 years at Shea the same way they began — out of the playoffs.

And now they’re moving to a ballpark named for an investment bank.

Heaven help them.

Mike Celizic is a contributor to NBCSports.com and a freelance writer based in New York.

< Prev | 1 | 2