Try to enjoy today's NY Mets Alumni Classic Game and ignore the parallels

It’s always fun to see old, beloved faces; unless of course they’re active and playing against the New York Mets. The idea of an ex-player crushing you isn’t sensible beyond some scripted scenario and yet it seems to happen all too often. Harrison Bader delivered Halloween scares all week against the Mets. Then Jacob deGrom stifled the bats without many strikeouts but 6 of 7 clean innings.

Before Saturday’s game, the Mets Alumni Classic Game will take place. It’s Team Shea Stadium vs. Team Citi Field. The rosters are pretty decent. The problem is a running theme can be found without much digging.

Because it has been so long between Mets World Series victories, it’ll be an eye-opening reminder of coming so close a couple of times and never being able to seal the deal. The current Mets are experiencing something similar. Essentially a class of players from 2000-2015 with a couple of collapses and near misses in there, the parallels are too familiar to what we’re seeing on the field in 2025.

The 2025 Mets collapse is making the Alumni Classic more of a reminder of the franchise’s past underachievements

Franchise icons, a Hall of Famer, and even a Cy Young winner will be present. It doesn’t matter who wins the game, what the final score is, or how blah some members of the Citi Field team are in comparison to the Shea Stadium squad, the same thought will be running through the minds of pessimistic Mets fans. Remember when the team failed to win with these guys?

The grown-up thing to do is to separate the team’s achievements from what the player may have meant to you 10 or 20 years ago. Amid a 7-game losing streak, it’s tough to not want to curl up like a baby and cry. At minimum, many of us would like to go back 10 or 20 years ago when these players were playing. We had far fewer responsibilities and probably felt we could get away with whining about everything.

Events like this should be fun. Everything tends to be when you’re winning games. Nothing is when the team felt comfortably placed among the best in the league. Just a half game lead over the San Francisco Giants heading into Saturday, seeing players who were on the 2007 roster back in action will feel too close for comfort to no fault of their own.

Back in 2019, while celebrating the 1969 Mets, the returning heroes of the franchise’s first championship came back and it seemed to spark some life into the current club. This was in June when there was time to wake everyone up.

The celebration of the team’s past couldn’t have been timed more poorly; nobody deserves any blame. This is a team searching for their next Grimace or just a quality start from the pitching with any run support at all. We can view it as a Mets collapse. Right now, it’s starting to feel like the Giants already have the Wild Card spot and the Mets are holding onto it temporarily.

Wash. Rinse. Repeat. On what should’ve been a weekend of celebrating the return of deGrom before even more festivities has become a cry for help. Try to enjoy it because as painful as many of those past seasons ended, many of those players from the past gave us joy, too. We could all use more of that.