MLB: How the crazy season of ‘the worst team in baseball’ New York Mets just won’t end

But their impact pales in comparison to the sheer chaos being wreaked on the Mets by a hurricane called Helene.

Midway through this week, the Mets were sitting on the verge of the postseason, which was a miracle in itself. Back in June, the Mets were bumbling around 11 games under .500 before improbably turning it around and embarking on the hottest run in baseball. Their final test on the way to October was a three-game series against their biggest rival for a wild-card spot, the Atlanta Braves.

That’s when nature intervened.

After the Mets dropped the first game of the series on Tuesday, cutting their lead in the wild-card race to a single game, a storm over the Gulf of Mexico began barreling toward Truist Park outside Atlanta. Anyone who had ever held a baseball bat—or an umbrella—could tell that there was little chance of squeezing in a pair of crucial National League East contests. Two hours before first pitch, the Braves finally announced that the two games had been postponed.

Still, they need to be played and the solution is somehow as much of a whirlwind as the storm that caused it. The Mets now have to travel to Milwaukee for a previously scheduled three-game set with the Brewers ending on Sunday. Then on Monday, they will make up the postponed games with the Braves in a double-header—right before a possible flight to San Diego or back to Milwaukee for the start of the postseason on Tuesday.

“We’ve got to go out there and not only win a series, but we’ve got to go out there and take care of business,” Mets manager Carlos Mendoza said. “That’s the only thing we can do is control the things we can control.”

Only this may be remembered as the season the Mets spun totally out of control. As recently as June, the team’s chances of reaching the postseason plunged to 7.9%, according to FanGraphs. Ten days later, Grimace waddled to the mound to throw out the first pitch, jump-starting a seven-game winning streak. Barely two weeks after that, infielder Jose Iglesias became a Queens folk hero with an on-field concert, where he performed his hit song “OMG.”

By mid-July, the Mets were back over .500 for good and their own TV announcer’s early-season lament that they had hit “rock bottom” was a distant memory.

Now, the Mets are tied with the Arizona Diamondbacks for the final two wild-card slots, one game ahead of the Braves, who face the playoff-hunting Kansas City Royals beginning Friday. But with the Mets and Braves scheduled to meet one day before the playoffs begin, a litany of absurd scenarios could materialize.

The most dramatic would be heading into Monday within a game of each other and playing twice in the space of about six hours for a playoff berth. This might not be the best for the stress levels of Mets fans, who are still haunted by losing the division title to Atlanta in a September sweep two years ago.

Then there are other utterly bizarre possibilities. The Mets could clinch a berth before Monday, which would render the double-header unnecessary for them—but still potentially decisive for the Braves. In that case, the Mets might care so little that their best option could be to save their pitchers and put a position player on the mound to lob meatballs to Atlanta’s sluggers.

In another possible twist, both teams could be guaranteed postseason spots by the end of Game 1, rendering Game 2 completely obsolete. At that point, Major League Baseball could simply scratch it from the schedule.

The height of absurdity, meanwhile, is a world in which the Mets and Braves both clinch playoff berths by splitting the two games. While the teams’ two skippers wouldn’t make a handshake deal for that, whichever club took the first game would have little incentive to try in the second.

“We’re going to have to be really fluid with the whole thing,” Braves manager Brian Snitker said.

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The strangest part is that all of this traces back to an entirely different rainstorm that hit Georgia months ago. Thursday’s game only landed on the calendar after the two teams were rained out earlier in the year.

That makes the final leg of Monday’s twin bill the makeup game of a makeup game. All of which means, at the end of a bonkers season, that in order to punch their ticket for October, the Mets may need to win a game in September that was scheduled for April.

-The Wall Street Journal