Mets rained out again, and what's truly bothering the fans…

New York has their game rained out for the second straight night. Plus, the barrier that Mets fans cannot get past quite yet.

What’s Up with the Mets? ☔️

• The Mets and Tigers were rained out again on Wednesday — they will make the game up on Thursday as part of a doubleheader

• New York will call up RHP José Buttó as their 27th man to start the second game of today’s doubleheader

• The Mets reportedly signed RHP Julio Teheran to a one-year contract (story)

• Teheran had a 4.40 ERA and a 4.93 FIP in 14 appearances (11 starts) with the Brewers last season

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Today’s Game 🗓

Match-up: Mets (0-4) vs. Tigers (4-0)

Where: Citi Field — Flushing, NY

GAME 1

Starters: RHP Adrian Houser vs. RHP Casey Mize

When: 12:10 PM EDT

Where to Watch: SNY

GAME 2

Starters: RHP José Buttó vs. RHP Mat Manning

When: TBD

Where to Watch: SNY

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Mets fans do not trust the process… ✍️

The season may be young, but tensions are quite high in Metsland right now. A week into their 2024 campaign, New York has had three rainouts, four losses, and zero wins.

Not much has gone right for the club in the four games they’ve actually played with inconsistent-to-bad starting pitching, poorly played defense, ice cold spells for some of their best hitters and a weekend of getting punked and embarrassed by the Rhys Hoskins situation – one of many such situations that the organization has seemed to bungle over the years.

This fanbase has some of the most passionate, emotional and reactionary fans in all of baseball. In one way it makes them unique and stand out, and in other ways it can be pretty frustrating if not seemingly ridiculous at other times. To have such emphatic and boisterous reactions to a four-game sample size in a 162-game season seems so absurd on it’s surface, and yet it makes a lot more sense when you zoom out and look at the big picture.

Mets fans are acting this way because they do not trust the process.

Before you ask, this goes beyond David Stearns and Steve Cohen. This is a deep-seeded trust issue that goes back decades and spans generations. This severed trust is not tied to any one group of players, a manager, front office or even ownership group.

Fans of this club have a hard time trusting anything because so few times has anyone in charge ever gotten anything right – and even when they have, that success is often incredibly short-lived.

It’s why you have some Mets fans freaking out on social media after four games, or irrationally compare Steve Cohen to the Wilpons or have radio hosts hyper-criticize Francisco Lindor for a couple bad games in March (after we’ve been told for so many years by the WFANs of the world that the postseason is the only thing that actually matters).

They. Don’t. Trust. It.

I’m not here to tell you that any of those reactions are rational, by the way. In fact I find most of those examples I just listed pretty stupid. But the point of the matter is that you’re seeing so many people feel this way because they’ve been burned before. In 2006, this organization brought so much hope and excitement back into this fan base’s lives only to come up short that October, devastate in 2007 and 2008 with back-to-back collapses, and go nearly a decade without a return trip to the playoffs.

In 2015, a magical second-half ride ended in utter devastation with not one but three late-inning meltdowns vs the Royals and the bitter unraveling of Matt Harvey’s career tied to his final start of that World Series. The club did make the postseason again that next year, but it again ended with a 9th inning meltdown and several mediocre-to-awful seasons that followed.

In 2022, Cohen’s second season of owning this club, the hope that sprung when he purchased the Mets seemed to come to fruition. The first five months of the ‘22 campaign felt like an absolute dream with magical moments coming so consistently and a level of dominance we haven’t seen from a Mets team in a long time. But even that came crashing down in September as the team choked away the division to the hated Atlanta Braves, and they’ve never seemed to recover since. As everyone now knows, that team wound up losing in the Wild Card Series at home to a Padres team that finished 12 games behind them in the standings, and had their most disappointing season in franchise history last year before hitting the ‘eject’ button in July and blowing up the veteran portions of their team.

And that brings us to this 0-4 start. For a lot of Mets fans, this isn’t just four games into a new season that they’re reacting to – it’s a continuation.

For some, this is just Game 163, 164, 165 and 166 of the 2023 season. For others, it may be an even greater continuation of years if not decades of disappointment. It may not always be rational, but it is how many fans often see these things. To feel is to be emotional, and sometimes those emotions — especially for a sports fan — are not always rooted in logic.

The only way for trauma to heal is for people to see active change, and that is no different from a sports fans’ perspective. The only way that Mets fans will believe in the process, believe in this front office, believe in this owner is to see the results play out in a positive way over time. Trust is earned, and when it comes to the fanbase of a woebegone franchise such as this, it takes quite awhile to get there.

For the Mets, there’s a lot more work to do until that point.

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Around the League 🚩

• Dodgers DH Shohei Ohtani hit his first home run with the team as LA defeated the Giants, 5-4

• Rangers RHP Nathan Eovaldi generated 23 swings-and-misses over seven lights-out innings in Texas’ 4-1 victory over the Rays

• Yankees OF Aaron Judge connected on his first home run of the season as the club defeated the Dbacks 6-5 in 11 innings

• Red Sox RHP Nick Pivetta dominated over five scoreless innings as Boston completed a sweep over the A’s with a 1-0 win

• Padres C Kyle Higashioka threw out two runners and hit a home run of his own in the same inning as the team avoided a sweep vs the Cardinals