With Two Much-Needed Wins, The Mets Ease Up On Paying Tribute To 2007-08

As an organization, the Mets did a terrific job Saturday paying tribute to David Wright, whose no. 5 was retired as he was inducted into the team’s Hall of Fame.

Fortunately for the current incarnation of the Mets, they’ve spent the last two days inching a little further away from the possibility they’ll continue paying homage to the season-ending collapses in 2007 and 2008 that still haunt Wright nearly two decades later.

Of course, losing six games in the standings to the Phillies and slipping into second place during a 39-day span in early-to-midsummer isn’t on the scale of blowing a seven-game lead over the final 18 days of the season, a la 2007, or frittering away a 3 1/2-game lead over the final 18 days in 2008, when the Phillies again nipped the Mets at the wire.

But any extended skids that threaten to endanger a once-ironclad invitation to the playoffs — which have been expanded twice since 2008 — is going to conjure up memories of two of the most infamous late-season stumbles in baseball history.

“Not getting it done, especially in ’07, that’s still a very, very — those are difficult memories for me, because I thought in ’06 that we were on our way to really kind of doing it every year,” Wright said Saturday afternoon. “And ’07 was, for lack of a better word, kind of a bit of of a train wreck towards the end of the season.”

The 2025 Mets aren’t a train wreck yet. But even with back-to-back wins over the Reds and Angels — just the fourth time the Mets have won at least two straight games over the last five-plus weeks — the ride is still more rickety and the tracks less stable than than they could have imagined last month.

The Mets led the majors with a 45-24 record through June 12, when they were ahead of the Phillies by 5 1/2 games in the NL East. But they are just 12-20 since then — tied for the third-worst mark in the bigs, ahead of only the Rockies, who are on pace for a record-breaking 123 losses, and the Nationals, who fired manager Davey Martinez and general manager Mike Rizzo in the midst of their 10-22 tailspin.

As was the case in 2007-08, the stumble has been a team-wide effort. The struggles of Pete Alonso (a triple slash of .216/.303/.362 with four homers and 14 RBIs) and, especially, Francisco Lindor (who is hitless in his last 26 at-bats to drop his triple slash to .183/.245/.344 with five homers and 17 RBIs) have bogged down the Mets, who are hitting just .229 with a .300 on-base percentage and .377 slugging percentage while averaging 3.8 runs per game since June 13. Those figures are down from the .248/.332/.427 triple slash and the 4.6 runs per game they averaged during the fast start.

“The fair critique is we haven’t scored runs,” president of baseball operations David Stearns said Monday afternoon.

The only Mets starting pitcher to last beyond the sixth inning since June 1 is All-Star David Peterson, who has done it five times. Griffin Canning suffered a season-ending torn Achilles June 26 while back-end rotation members Tylor Megill and Paul Blackburn are out indefinitely.

An overworked bullpen has lost Max Kranick and Dedniel Nunez to season-ending elbow injuries and cycled through a baker’s dozen of fringe Immaculate Grid additions who have come back and forth from Triple-A or the waiver wire (and back again, in the case of Luis Garcia and Justin Garza, and then forth again to Triple-A or the waiver wire in the case of Richard Lovelady).

There’s little doubt Stearns is going to have to pay a premium to bolster the bullpen before the July 31 trade deadline. But the narrow wins over the Reds and Angels offered hope the Mets may get some internal help for Juan Soto and Brandon Nimmo, who have been doing their best modern imitations of Wright during the current skid.

The Mets’ collapse likely cost Wright the NL MVP in September, when he hit .352/.432/.602 in September 2007 for a team that slashed .284/.351/.463. He then recorded a .340/.416/.577 triple slash in September 2008, when the Mets slashed .261/.345/.438.

Soto has a triple slash of .264/.391/.573 with 11 homers and 24 RBIs since June 13, a span in which Nimmo is slashing .300/.370/.475 with five homers and 18 RBIs.

Soto and Nimmo are just 2-for-13 in the last two games, but the Mets’ sixth- through ninth-place hitters batted .333 (8-of-24) with a home run, four RBI, nine runs scored and two doubles in the victories.

Brett Baty, who is establishing himself as a regular between second and third base, and Francisco Alvarez, who was promoted from Triple-A on Monday, had two of the biggest hits Monday. Baty’s fourth-inning homer sparked the comeback from a 4-0 deficit while Alvarez doubled Baty to third in the eighth, when Baty scored the tie-breaking run after Angels catcher Logan O’Hoppe dropped the throw from third baseman Yoan Moncada following Ronny Mauricio’s grounder.

“We have guys at the bottom of our lineup who are extending at-bats, seeing pitches,” Stearns said earlier Monday.

Whether Baty and/or Alvarez become lineup mainstays down the stretch remains to be seen. For now, the two wins at least provided some much-needed relief and cushion for the Mets, who are five games clear of the Reds, Giants and Cardinals, all of whom are tied for seventh place in the NL.

This core needs no reminding of how one win made all the difference for the Mets’ playoff positioning and fate in 2022 and 2024 — and surely no interest in enduring the reverse lessons Wright endured in 2007 and 2008.

“For me, if you ask biggest regrets — not that you can go back and do anything different, but I wish we could have finished that off, because that one hurt,” Wright said.