What’s so different about Mets pennant race in 2025

Even in the best of times, the Mets rarely make things easy.

The franchise’s first championship in 1969 was a miracle — seven years removed from its birth as a lovable laughingstock — after coming back from a 10-game deficit to the Cubs in mid-August. Their second pennant was clinched in 1973 after Tug McGraw asked you to believe in a team that would be six games under .500 and in fifth place in the second week of September.

The most dominant team in Mets history needed an improbable ninth-inning rally (16 innings total) to avoid Houston’s Cy Young winner, Mike Scott, in Game 7 of the 1986 NLCS, then forced Game 7 of the World Series by executing the most memorable two-out rally the sport has ever seen. In 1999, the Mets needed to sweep a series from the Pirates — and have the Reds lose two — on the final weekend of the regular season to force their way into a one-game playoff.

At this point in 2015, the Mets were hovering around .500, having spent most of the season’s first four months looking up at the Nationals. The next season, the Mets were under .500 in mid-August, eventually earning a wild-card spot by one game. Last year, the Mets’ incredible run to the NLCS was made possible by a dramatic regular-season-closing series in Atlanta and a tiebreaker over the Diamondbacks.