| The Mets are in it! Barely, heart-stoppingly, by-the-skin-of-their-teeth-ingly headed into the postseason. Life on the edge, for Mets fans, is nothing new, of course: They are accustomed to close calls, precipitous collapses, and championships that remain just out of reach. (The word “Miracle” was applied to their team for a reason: Miracles are rare.) Chris Smith, a Mets fan who’s written about sports in our pages for decades, this week delivered an illuminating profile of David Stearns, the team’s president of baseball operations and a big reason for its recent run of overperformance. Once you’ve read that, turn to another Smith feature, this one from 2000, published a couple of weeks before the Mets faced the Yankees in their one (and so far only) Subway World Series. The headline on the story — “Are the Mets Cursed?” — simultaneously is eye-roll inducing and feels almost reasonable. And one line in the story marks it both as a period piece and, perhaps, a reason for Mets fans to hope: “The Mets aren’t burdened with the gloppy fatalism that clings to the Red Sox and Cubs.” At the time, each of those teams was approaching a century-long championship drought; since then both have broken their dismal streaks. Ya gotta believe. |
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