ATLANTA – This series had no shortage of storylines.
There was the meeting of the Acuñas, Luisangel (active) and Ronald Jr. (inactive due to injury). The two swapped jerseys in the media room at Truist Park. And in, um, an interesting 10 minutes or so, Ronald hung out near the Mets dugout, chatting with his brother, friends, family and the Mets — and finally, the siblings took a photo… with Mets owner Alex Cohen.
Francisco Lindor still didn’t name his injury, but revealed he underwent a bone scan on Monday that showed no structural problems. He increased his training load before Tuesday’s series opener and seemed to be running better, but still put his shoes on more cautiously than usual. He continued to say he was moving in the right direction and hoped to maybe be ready for this series. But he missed his eighth straight game.
And looming over it all – literally – was Tropical Storm Helene. Governor Brian Kemp declared a state of emergency in Georgia and prepared for a storm that threatened to make landfall as a Category 3 hurricane. This dominated the pre-series discussion, with talking points including why a game (or two) wasn’t played on Monday, the shared day off, why two games weren’t played on Tuesday, why the series wasn’t moved to a more climate-friendly neutral site, concerns about whether a game could even be played on Wednesday, and whether an ark might be needed to get out of town on Thursday.
There is also concern that if no game is played in the next few days, the teams will have to meet again on Monday – one day after the regular season ends and one day before the wild-card round begins – to finalize the schedule and determine which teams are actually in the postseason.
Which, of course, brings us back to the reason the Acuñas were together, Lindor was trying to work his way back onto the court, and the team and league were trying to find game situations.
These games had a lot of implications for the 2024 season. And even more for the Mets.
This city and the franchise that plays here have spent much of the last quarter century dominating the NL East and tormenting the Mets and their fans. So the Mets had a chance to not only fight their way into the playoffs, but also threaten the Braves’ chances of doing the same. So, in the strongest sense of the Steve Cohen/David Stearns/Carlos Mendoza first year together, there was a chance to show that this was a new era for the Mets.
Cohen said he didn’t feel the need for an exorcism because the roster has changed so much since the second-to-last regular-season series of 2022 – when the Braves last dashed the Mets’ dreams – to the second-to-last series this year. And certainly so much has changed since the late 1990s, when those horrors began, that Cohen said it’s just not in the muscle memory of his current group.
But it’s in the stomachs and minds of an entire fan base. So it lives on. And if an entire relationship can’t be changed in three days (weather permitting), there may be some switching of sides.
“For us, there’s only one way (to get rid of the legacy of this series) and that’s to go out there and do it,” Carlos Mendoza said. “You have to do it on the field. Before that, it becomes a story. It’s right there (to change).”
The Braves won three games at Turner Field, ending the 1998 regular season and keeping the Mets out of the playoffs. The following season, again at Turner, the Braves eliminated the Mets in the NLCS. Different stadium (Truist), same story in 2022, when the Mets showed up with a one-game lead in the NL East with six games left to play and had Jacob deGrom, Max Scherzer and Chris Bassitt on the field, but still got swept out of first place and ended up in a wild-card series and an early exit.
There’s more, from John Rocker’s New York bashing to Chipper Jones’ on-field bashing — and then more trolling of the Mets by calling a son Shea. And there’s the fact that the Braves joined the NL East in 1994 and have won the division 18 times since then, with two World Series titles compared to two for the Mets and no championships.
The Mets began that series with a 25-36 overall score at Truist. The win in late September 2022 meant the Mets had a champagne toast to celebrate their move into the playoffs, but not a full locker room. Steve Cohen has his 50th high school reunion on Saturday and is hosting at Citi Field. But if the Mets can clinch a playoff spot that day, he’ll head to Milwaukee, he said. Because there might be more high school reunions, but only one since they bought the franchise for $2.4 billion to throw themselves in the middle of a champagne spray-fest.
The Mets can also give their owner his bath and reunion if they win two games at Truist, which would put them in the 2024 postseason and change the history of the relationship with the Braves.
That’s quite a story in Atlanta.
