NEW YORK — At the Citi Field team store, there is no evidence of the recent, raucous past.
Among an endless sea of blue and orange New York Mets brick-a-brack, there isn’t a shred of Grimace purple. Not an OMG T-shirt in sight. Nothing about Pete Alonso’s playoff pumpkin. No overt references to the 2024 Mets, that boisterous thrill ride of a ballclub that shattered expectations and reenergized a franchise.
Last year’s outfit was a whirlwind, a wagon, a meme factory, a statistical improbability. On May 30, the Mets were 10 games under .500 and an afterthought, a punchline. Then, a dreamland summer changed everything. On Oct. 9, the Mets clinched a spot in the NLCS by eliminating the Phillies in front of 44,000. Along the way, a cornucopia of bits took root, becoming an inextricable part of the tale, as big as the action itself.
But the 2025 Mets, in order to author a new story, have opted to leave the past behind. So far, so good: The club is currently tied for the best record in baseball.
“The only thing I was concerned about and that we talked about a lot internally,” Mets president of baseball operations David Stearns told reporters Monday, “was that we didn’t want to fall into the trap of trying to recreate 2024. It was going to be different.”
Slugger Jesse Winker, a high-passion fan favorite, expressed the same feeling more colorfully when asked about it back in spring training.
“If you hung on to the same s***, there would be no progress,” he said. “Like, imagine if we were still living how we lived in World War II. The f*** would we be doing?”
That mindset holds firm across the New York clubhouse, despite the amount of continuity on the Mets’ depth chart.
Of the 26 players included on New York’s 2024 NLCS roster, only six — Jose Iglesias, Harrison Bader, J.D. Martinez, Luis Severino, Jose Quintana and Phil Maton — are no longer with the organization. Stearns and the front office opted to bring back four crucial pieces from last year’s team — Winker, first baseman Pete Alonso, reliever Ryne Stanek and starting pitcher Sean Manaea — in free agency. Iglesias, whose outlandish rise to Latin pop stardom became a rallying cry, is the most culturally notable departure.
But despite the sense of familiarity, the 2025 group is consciously trying to create an energy all its own.
“You absolutely cannot try to copy and paste that feeling because it’s not authentic,” Stanek told Yahoo Sports in spring training. “It would be fake. So much of it was just pure chaos, random stuff that happened. The Grimace thing, Iggy being a pop star with a concert in the infield — so much of that was really cool in the moment, but if you tried to do it again, it would feel cheap.”
Star shortstop Francisco Lindor, the team’s de-facto captain, echoed that sentiment.
“[Establishing a new identity] is definitely important,” he said in February. “Every team has their own, so we’ll see what kind of identity we end up forming.”
The signing of superstar outfielder Juan Soto to a record-breaking, paradigm-altering $765 million contract was the first sign that 2025 would begin a wholly different era of Mets baseball. But that sense of reinvention isn’t limited to the locker room. It’s clear that the Mets’ marketing department has chosen to downplay specific motifs from 2024, including the OMG imagery related to Iglesias’ hit song.
Last season’s handmade OMG signs, which Mets players featured prominently during games, have been preserved but are no longer in-game totems. One lives in the Mets Hall of Fame at Citi; the other was sent to Cooperstown to be enshrined in the National Baseball Hall of Fame. The Mets are commemorating the old while embracing the new.
Nearly a month into the new season, the decision to turn the page looks wise. The Mets’ 16-7 record is tied with Los Angeles and San Diego for the best in baseball. New York’s pitching staff boasts a 2.43 team ERA, the league’s lowest mark. Alonso has the highest OPS in MLB for a player not named Aaron Judge. Lindor, traditionally a slow starter, has already clubbed five long balls. The Mets are 10-1 at home. They’ve won five in a row. To put it simply, there is a good vibe swirling about the ballpark.
Accordingly, Citi Field attendance is up — by a ton. Compared to this point in 2024, the Mets are drawing 14,530 more fans per game. That’s an astounding bump, one also related to an underwhelming 2023 season that didn’t have fans buying tickets in April 2024. But this time around, people are energized and packing the place: 35,430 strong for a brisk Monday night against the Phillies, for instance.
It’s a testament to the excitement conjured by last year’s team, as well as the headline arrival of Soto and the continued superstardom of Lindor. Citi Field’s game-day experience continues to impress, with eye-catching light shows and the sport’s largest video board. Also, the team is winning. If that continues, nobody will be griping about the absence of Grimace.
Life moves on, and so have the Mets.
“All we’re a part of right now is like a giant, giant, giant, giant Mets yearbook,” Winker explained poetically. “First year was in ’62. We’re now in ‘25, and it’s just a big-ass yearbook. Go look at your old high school yearbook. Every year was something different, right? Maybe your basketball team won state one year. Oh, but then the next year, they won four games. So it’s like every year is a new chapter.
“That’s all it is — a big-ass yearbook.”
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