The Mets were officially eliminated from Wild Card contention on Friday, when the red-hot Cardinals won their 13th game in a row in the first game of a doubleheader against the Cubs.
Hours later, New York dropped its third in a row and eighth of its last 10 with a 5-1 loss to the Brewers, while both the Braves and Phillies won their games, dropping New York's tragic number to just two in the NL East.
Simply put, math is starting to line up with the longstanding feeling that the Mets were going to fall short of the playoffs. Their official elimination from postseason contention could come as early as Saturday night with a Braves win and a Mets loss to Milwaukee, which has ace Corbin Burnes on the mound.
Once the numbers prove it impossible for the Mets to break their playoff drought, there will be time to look back at the missed opportunity of the 2021 season. The Braves, at just 81 wins with nine games left to play, will hardly be a dominant divisional winner, rather capitalizing on a weak division that was expected to be among the league's best. Instead, the division was there for the taking, even as the Mets lost their three-month hold on first place shortly after the All-Star break.
But that realization doesn't make missing out on the playoffs any harder to swallow. It's already tough to take.
"It's tough either way," manager Luis Rojas said. "It's tough when you don't make the playoffs. Knowing that we spent the majority of the season in first place and our chances were really high for a long period of time during the season is tough. It's tough either way."
New York held a 5.5 game lead in first place on June 26. By Aug. 13, they had been knocked out of the top spot and never recovered, plummeting to a 25-40 record in the second half of the season. The harsh reality for the Mets is that even a mediocre showing in the second half could have been enough to claim a division that was initially seen as a gauntlet heading into the season, and instead holds the lowest win total for a first-place team in any division, with the 81-win Braves easily in that lead ahead of the 87-win White Sox in the AL Central.
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"Not getting a winning outcome is tough…at the end of the day, not making it is just really, really tough," Rojas said. "I can't say there's a measure whether it's tougher because of the amount of wins or anything. It's just tough when you expect to win. That was our approach and our mindset the whole time. You get to that point and don't get it, it's just tough."
Rojas sees the Mets' failure to reach the playoffs equally disappointing regardless of what it would have taken to get there, but there's no escaping that New York squandered an opportunity that would not have taken a sustained surge to accomplish.
"I don't want to measure where it's tougher when a team clinches with less wins than they would normally do, and we could have had it," Rojas said. "I'm not gonna say that."
Follow Ryan Chichester on Twitter: @ryanchichester1
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