Howie Rose deserves better

“That would make this dream that I’ve lived complete,” he said in March.

Instead, Rose has had a front-row seat to a nightmare as the Mets are now 5-10 at Citi Field on the young season.

None of it is happening in a vacuum. Juan Soto has missed several weeks. Francisco Lindor will miss several more. Bo Bichette came to New York on a three-year, $126 million contract after the Mets missed out on Kyle Tucker — the consolation prize that was supposed to be no consolation at all — a former All-Star who hit .315 in his final season in Toronto and was going to slide into the middle of this lineup and remind everyone why David Stearns chose him over bringing back the man who hit more home runs in Mets history than anyone who ever wore the uniform. Instead, he went 1-for-14 to open the season while Citi Field let him hear it before he’d had a chance to do anything worth booing.

“I thought it took too long,” Bichette said, which is either the most self-aware thing a player has said in recent memory or the saddest, and with this team in this April, it’s genuinely hard to tell the difference.

Mark Vientos was supposed to bounce back. Francisco Alvarez was supposed to take a step. Brett Baty was supposed to build on 2025. The Mets expected bounce-back seasons from three players simultaneously and are instead watching all three search for something they cannot find in a lineup that has gone cold at the worst possible time in the worst possible year.

Stearns built this roster to win a World Series. When you squint hard enough — when Soto is healthy, and Lindor is healthy, and Bichette is the player the Mets paid $126 million to acquire — there is still, somewhere in the distance, the silhouette of a contender. The starting pitching, minus Kodai Senga and David Peterson, has been better than advertised. The defense has genuinely improved. The pieces are not all bad pieces.

But that is the lie, isn’t it? The same lie Mets fans have told themselves in September after September, in October after October, in the specific late-season darkness of 2025 when the doors were closing, and the team that was supposed to be good enough wasn’t. You talk yourself into it because they are too talented, there is still too much season left, and then you look up, and somehow it’s later than you thought, and the window you were squinting through has quietly closed.

Rose has watched all of it. He has watched more Mets baseball than almost any human being alive, and he has described the experience of letting it go as impossible rather than difficult — “letting go of the Mets isn’t hard,” he said in March, “it’s impossible” — which is maybe the most Mets sentence ever constructed, the sentence of someone who has spent too many years understanding exactly what this franchise asks of you and choosing to give it anyway.

What that means, practically, is that he will be in the booth for every ugly one of these. Every night, the Mets find a new and creative way to confirm what the standings already said. He will call all of it the same way he has called everything with the specific, hard-won equanimity of someone who has been through enough Septembers with this franchise to understand that the only honest way to love the Mets is to love them without conditions.

Which is also, maybe, the only way to understand why Mendoza sent that text. Not as a promise, exactly. More like an offering from one baseball person to another, from a man who understands what this team means to the one who has given it 39 years of his voice. The Mets have made Howie Rose a lot of things over four decades. A Hall of Famer. An institution. A punchline, occasionally, in the way that loving this team has always made everyone a punchline eventually. What they have not yet made him is whole. That is what this season was supposed to be for. And somewhere in the distance, beneath all of it, there is still — there is always — the possibility that the Mets will make him a liar about the end.

That’s the thing about this team. There is no bottom, but there is no ceiling either, not really, not with the Mets, who have a way of making the impossible feel routine in both directions. Howie Rose has known that longer than almost anyone. He has 134 games left to find out which direction this one breaks.

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