After A Game 1 NL Wild Card Series Loss, These Mets Look Like Those Mets At The Worst Possible Time

It’s just one letter, but “These Mets” offers such a different connotation than “Those Mets,” which is why the Mets rolling with “These Mets” as their postseason rebrand made plenty of sense.

But it’s just one letter, meaning it’s not all that difficult to turn “These Mets” into an exasperated expression tinged with profane invective — especially when These Mets begin looking like Those Mets at the worst possible time.

These Mets are a game away from an eventful off-season after Max Scherzer endured the worst postseason start of his career Friday night in a 7-1 loss to the Padres in the opener of a best-of-three NL wild card series.

“I’m hoping that we can play well and give him a chance to get back out there,” manager Buck Showalter said. “But it’s going to be up to us starting (Saturday).”

The lopsided defeat continued an ill-timed skid by the Mets that harkens back to their no-good very bad before times, when the initiation process for big-ticket acquisitions included struggles accompanied by a stadium booing in unison and late-season collapses were as much a part of the experience as the Home Run Apple and planes flying overhead.

Scherzer spent this season establishing himself as the best free agent signing in New York history — the hired gun who not only performed as expected and immediately won over a typically skeptical fan base but also invested himself in his new team by single-handedly changing its culture.

But none of that mattered to most of the 41,621 in attendance Friday, when “Tom Glavine” briefly became a trending topic after Scherzer tied a career-high by allowing four homers and was charged with all seven runs before trudging off the mound to a cascade of catcalls.

It wasn’t a Glavinian disaster and Scherzer’s initial performance in New York should earn him a mostly clean slate next season. But his recent struggles — Scherzer gave up four runs in 5 2/3 innings against the Braves last Saturday — offered another reminder of his vulnerabilities as a 38-year-old dealing with lingering oblique injuries after throwing more than 3,000 professional innings.

“Baseball can take you to the highest of highs and the lowest of lows,” Scherzer said. “And this is one of the lowest of lows.”

The Mets finishing second with 101 wins in Showalter’s first season as manager should not be considered a low point. But the Braves storming back from a 10 1/2-game deficit by playing .696 ball after June 1 and overtaking the Mets for good last week by sweeping a series in which New York started Scherzer, Jacob deGrom and Chris Bassitt can’t help but conjure up memories of the late-season stumbles that have defined the Mets’ increasingly Quixotic pursuit of a third championship.

The what-could-have been tales of the 1988 and 2006 teams — stymied as a clear NLCS by stunning homers from catchers Mike Scioscia and Yadier Molina — yielded the consecutive disastrous September swoons that cost the Mets playoff berths in 2007 and 2008.

That, of course, led to a fallow stretch in which the Mets pieced together mediocrity on a budget for the final dozen years of the Wilpon era. History won’t repeat itself there, not with These Mets being owned by a billionaire who can afford and handle the task of hiring the executives and manager necessary to build a deep, well-constructed team with the distinctive identity the Mets have lacked for so long.

And baseball’s gloriously unpredictable nature means there’s still a chance These Mets will offer more positive memories of Those Mets by climbing out of their self-dug hole in dramatic fashion. No one should be surprised if the Mets are still playing a week from now, giving the top-seeded Dodgers all they can handle in the NLDS a la the 1999 Mets going from the edge of elimination a handful of times to nearly knocking off the top-seeded Braves in the NLCS.

But if Jacob deGrom, the bridge between eras and someone whose looming free agency serves as a reminder of all the embittered exits made by iconic Mets, can’t deliver a throwback performance, this season will likely end for These Mets as it did for so many of Those Mets.