How long has it been since the Mets last faced the Dodgers?
So long that “OMG” and Grimace were simply an acronym and fast food fictional character the last time the teams played each other.
It would have been hard to imagine then, in late May, that the National League Championship Series was still ahead for both.
The Dodgers, yes, but the Mets?
That’s baseball.
The NL pennant will be decided beginning Sunday with Game 1 of the NLCS between the Mets and Dodgers in Los Angeles.
The Dodgers joined the Mets in the NLCS bracket Friday with a 2-0 victory over the Padres in Game 5 of the NLDS.
It’s those Dodgers that swept three games at Citi Field in May, sending the Mets 11 games below .500 and prompting changes.
The Mets held a players’ only meeting.
Jose Iglesias arrived to help resurrect the lineup — bringing his newly-released song “OMG” to help become the soul of the team.
And after Grimace threw out the ceremonial first pitch June 12 and the team kept winning, an unofficial team mascot was born.
It will be the fourth postseason series between the coastal rivals.
The Mets won the last one, the 2015 NLDS, on Daniel Murphy’s back.
The only NLCS meeting between the teams occurred in 1988, when the Dodgers surprised a Mets team that had visions of winning a second World Series in three years.
Now the names are Shohei Ohtani, Mookie Betts, Freddie Freeman and Yoshinobu Yamamoto and enough star power to keep Southern California aglow in a blackout.
After weeks of scrambling, the Mets were in the unfamiliar position Friday of taking it relatively easy while their next-round postseason opponent faced the stress.
The Mets held an afternoon team workout at Citi Field, ahead of the Padres and Dodgers playing Game 5 of the NLDS in Los Angeles.
“It’s nice to be able to have these off days and you can reset [the pitching] and just kind of map it out as much as you want,” manager Carlos Mendoza said on a Zoom call with reporters. “But I think it’s more the rest for our guys, the position player group and just the whole team in general. With all the back and forth and the traveling and all the intense games that we’ve been playing, so to be able to have these couple of days to reset and get guys treatment and things like that is huge.”
As for the pitching, Mendoza wasn’t prepared to announce a rotation for the NLCS.
That, he said, was more a function of trying to gauge where his pitchers are between starts than the uncertainty of which team the Mets would be facing.
Kodai Senga, Luis Severino and Sean Manaea are all Game 1 options.
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Manaea, who pitched Tuesday, is the least rested from that crew, but would still be on his normal fifth day.
Senga, who pitched two innings in his return from the injured list last Saturday, would still be limited, requiring a piggyback most likely from David Peterson, but Tylor Megill is another possibility.
The Mets plan to hold another workout at Citi Field on Saturday before chartering to Southern California.
As much as Brandon Nimmo enjoyed the down time Thursday and Friday, he is also cognizant that the Mets can’t afford to relax.
“Kind of keeping the rust off is the biggest thing because we have been able to play high-intensity games to this point and not get too many days off in between for that,” Nimmo said. “[The off days] are definitely great for the injury side of things, but we also need to make sure we are staying mentally focused and we’re trying to treat these [workouts] like game reps.”
