Reed Garrett will not discount the June 12 game in which Grimace threw out the ceremonial first pitch as the Mets’ possible turning point.
Before Grimace: 28-37.
After Grimace: 61-36 and a run to at least the NLCS.
“It’s hard to deny Grimace’s effect on this team,” Garrett said, doing well to keep a straight face.
The better bet at a Mets’ moment of truth arrived May 29 at Citi Field against the same Dodgers team against whom they are about to face off with a trip to the World Series on the line.
It was the Dodgers who embarrassed the Mets during a three-game sweep while outscoring them 18-5.
The Mets dropped to a season-low 11 games under .500, were 16 games back in the NL East to the same Phillies club they just disposed of and were falling apart off the field, too.
Reliever Jorge Lopez was ejected from that disaster and tossed his glove into the stands.
It was time for the Mets to talk, Francisco Lindor calling a players-only meeting that was not about Lopez but was about the way the Mets were playing and preparing.
The Mets were going to start holding one another more accountable: If a player declared one intention of an at-bat in a pregame meeting and proceeded to stray from that plan during the at-bat, the player would soon hear about it.
“You said something, and I don’t see it,” Lindor said that day. “We got to step up. We got to do it the right way.”
The Mets pledged to be more open with one another while asking everyone to look within and ask if they are doing everything they can.
“If you see everybody else put in work, you should do the work yourself,” Garrett said of the meeting’s message. “I think it was: Hold yourself accountable and provide what you can provide to the team and do what you can to help the team succeed.”
During the closed-door meeting, Lindor spoke.
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As did J.D. Martinez, Adam Ottavino and Jake Diekman, a veteran who was DFA’d in late July.
“Guys who have been around and were able to kind of provide their insight on things that they’ve gone through in their career,” Garrett said Saturday from a workout at Citi Field, after which the team was flying to Los Angeles. “It wasn’t the first time that a team hadn’t been playing to expectations.
“I think they were just reminding us to keep your mind focused on what you can control every day. And if you can keep that in mind and control what you can control every day, I think everything would turn around.”
Things turned around, the Mets finishing on a 67-40 kick in which every single win was needed to crack into the postseason.
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Which has brought them back to a series opponent that reminds of how deeply they fell.
“We’ve been through a lot,” manager Carlos Mendoza said. “But the fact that after that game, that’s when the guys got together — we started turning the corner.”
