NEW YORK - The sign was, at first glance, made for this moment.
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Andrew Arrabaca was holding it outside Citi Field on Wednesday night, as he and thousands of other New Yorkers tried to will their team out of a 12-game losing streak that had become the punchline of text chains, memes and one savage New York Times correction.
But in a twist that is, when you think of it, very Mets, the sign was actually a retread. Arrabaca had made it last summer, as the team sputtered through September and fell one game short of the postseason.
“They kind of have to win at some point,” Arrabaca said Wednesday, before the Mets took the field against the Minnesota Twins. “They’re gonna have to play another not-so-great team.”
A 12-game losing streak would rattle the fans of any franchise, but this is baseball’s second-most-expensive roster, and this is New York, and this is the Mets. It doesn’t help that the team said goodbye this offseason to franchise cornerstones Brandon Nimmo, Jeff McNeil, Edwin Diaz and Pete Alonso. Or that, until Wednesday, the man responsible for the largest share of their $375 million payroll, Juan Soto, hadn’t played since April 3. Or that Steve Cohen, whose $20 billion-plus net worth makes him one of sports’ richest owners, was reduced to offering free tickets and complaining about low attendance figures on April 7. The losing streak began the next day.
As the losses piled up, things got even weirder in Queens. Two nights ago, Mets field reporter Steve Gelbs, citing the mystical B story of the classic 1989 baseball film “Major League,” held a ritual cleansing outside Citi Field, swapping in garlic for Jobu’s rum.
“It’s gonna start with this garlic necklace that I’m wearing to get all the demons away from us here at Citi Field,” he said, holding up a piece of burning sage to expel all the negative energy surrounding the then-11-game losing streak. “... One hundred and forty games to go, the season starts now.”
In the booth that night, Gary Cohen and Ron Darling hung up horseshoes and lit candles, an extension of the ceremony in front of Citi Field’s Jackie Robinson Rotunda, and the team wore their alternate black jerseys.
Poof! Rookie Nolan McLean carried a perfect game into the sixth inning, and Francisco Lindor hit a three-run homer down the right-field line, and Gary Cohen announced on air, “Mojo works.”
But there’s always another baseball game, and tickets - don’t tell Mr. Cohen - were very gettable. Annette Segarra drove from Connecticut alongside friends in custom Mets shirts. “We are believers,” she said. “Obviously - we’re here after 12 losses.”
Adam Tonis, a Queens native who now lives on Long Island, said the baseball season is a marathon, not a sprint. “If we lost 12 games in a row and we were playing football, we’d have a problem,” said Tonis, revealing himself as a good quote for stories about both the Mets and the Jets.
Seated in the upper deck, Virginia Croft and Patrick Brunetti said they never thought of canceling their tickets for the game, despite the bleak vibes of a mostly empty stadium.
“It’s very quiet. Whole sections are damn near empty. So it feels bleak because there is nobody here, but the fans that are here are in a good mood. It’s almost funny,” Brunetti said.
Sad funny, not fun funny. But then, in the eighth, first baseman Mark Vientos looped a two-out single into right field, giving the Mets a one-run lead, and Luke Weaver struck out the side in the ninth. And the crowd - breathed.
“It was like, ‘At least we don’t suck,’” Staten Islander Albert Pica said afterward.
On the television broadcast, Gary Cohen’s famous “and the ballgame is over” was recited with more the feeling of a mid-September stretch run win than a midweek pitchers duel in April, but they all count the same in the win column.
Somewhere in the upper deck, Croft must have felt something like pride. She’d called it, after all.
“We’re already at rock bottom,” she’d said two hours earlier. “It can only go up from here.”
A diehard Mets fan, Lucas Trevor reported from Queens and definitely wrote this story while bracing for a 9th-inning collapse.