Expansion team.

"At least they made the playoffs," says my friend the optimist.

"After 170+ days in first place, finishing in second is a disaster," I responded. 

You may safely guess if you do not recall that I predicted a September collapse by the Beloved Mets, but it mostly happened in the homestretch of the regular season in October. We snuck in as a wild card, and now we get to play at home, but against the Padres, who beat us four times out of six in the regular season. And of course the Braves, who sucked until they were moved into the NL East (at which time they became division-winning machines) (but not championship-winning machines, heh heh), came out of nowhere to knock the Mets off their perch, sweeping them in the penultimate season series. 

This is all very typical. 

Get your stupid giant head in the stupid game, Mets.

To listen to the Mets' social media people, you'd think creeping into the playoffs like whipped dogs was the best thing that could happen to them. I think most of their longsuffering fans expect to see them swept at home by the Pods, a team with an even more painful but not quite as knife-twistingly awful history. San Diego has only been to two World Series and lost both. But the quality of the Mets' ability to crash and burn is excruciating. The 1986 team should have won three championships in a row, but was damned lucky to win one. Since then they've been to the World Series twice and won one game in each. And that's not taking into account the many late-season disasters, the agonizing seven-game loss to the A's in 1973, the trading of Seaver, and all those other things that have made Mets fans want to change their names and move to Qatar, where no one plays baseball. 

People remember that the franchise began in 1962 as the "loveable losers," but that was no fun for the players, and it was by design. In the pre-free agent era, the new team had to be put together from rejects and over-the-hillers from other teams. If Major League Baseball had set out to create the worst team in history, it could hardly have done a better job.

By the mid-sixties, even diehard Mets fans were sick of losing, and being a national punchline. When Charlie Brown said in disgust that if he ever made it to the big leagues it would be on an expansion team, he was thinking of the Mets. 

The next Mets fan who tells me that I Gotta Believe is going to get slapped. I always remind them that the famous Tug McGraw saying was not about the 1969 Miracle Mets but the 1973 Mets that ran into Mr. October in Oakland. 

I hate to be so pessimistic, but what can I say? I've been trained this way.