Culture
As Mets show fatigue in NLCS, time could be ticking on their magical season
NEW YORK — When Francisco Lindor led off the bottom of the seventh inning, reality reduced Citi Field’s a cappella rendition of “My Girl” to a faint mumble.
It sounded appropriate, given all the fun that was had over the last handful of months juxtapositioned against what’s at stake now and how things have looked.
Time’s almost up on the New York Mets’ season.
The Mets face elimination after another lackluster performance in the National League Championship Series. They lost 10-2 to the Los Angeles Dodgers Thursday night in a game in which they appeared thoroughly overmatched. Again. They trail the Dodgers in the series, 3-1.
Worse than those numbers, because teams have mounted comebacks facing such deficits, the Mets look like they have run out of gas.
“Sean (Manaea) said it the other day,” Mets manager Carlos Mendoza said when asked if his rotation had hit a proverbial wall.
Here’s what Manaea said Monday after his start when asked about his final inning: “I just hit a wall. I mean, I don’t know, I just hit a wall. I’m obviously not trying to do that. I really have no other excuse than that.”
So Mendoza went on …
“We ask a lot of these guys,” he said. “And we’re facing a good team. You’ve got to give those guys credit. That’s a deep lineup. That’s a good lineup. And whether those guys are feeling it or not we haven’t executed and we haven’t got length from them.”
The issue can be spotted elsewhere because there’s no one reason why the Mets have been outscored 30-9 in the NLCS, but the rotation is as good a place as any to start.
New York relied heavily on strong starting pitching during the final months of the regular season, but it came with a catch. The more the Mets’ veteran rotation, coming off injuries and shorter workloads a year ago, supplied quality outings, the more the fear grew that there’d be a tax to pay. Unfortunately, for the Mets, that due date popped up in mid-October.
Jose Quintana is a year older and a 100 innings deeper than he was in 2023. (Photo: Luke Hales / Getty Images)
The Mets’ path to winning in the postseason included camouflaging their shallow bullpen by trusting their starters to pitch deeper into games than most pitchers from other teams would in October. It hasn’t worked against the Dodgers, a lineup loaded with stars and an overall carrying tool of plate discipline.
Game 4 starter Jose Quintana, 35 years old and more than 100 innings over his total from when he was a year younger, never had much of a chance. The Dodgers negated his style of working the edges, leading to four walks, five hits and five runs in just 3 1/3 innings. By the time the scoring book closed on Quintana, the Mets faced a 5-2 deficit.
Earlier in the week, Mendoza relayed that rest days were an important part of the calculus when ordering his rotation for the NLCS — even though his starters were getting extra rest.
“I think it comes down to where they are physically,” Mendoza said. “Those three guys (Quintana, Manaea and Luis Severino), they are in territory right now that they haven’t been.”
Through four games, no Mets starter has recorded an out in the sixth inning. Meanwhile, on the Dodgers’ side, only Game 1 starter Jack Flaherty accomplished the feat, pitching seven innings. But that’s part of the difference between the Mets and the Dodgers. Los Angeles can win in other ways, including leaning on several leverage arms looming in its bullpen.
When Quintana’s outing ended, the Mets turned to reliever José Buttó. Once a mainstay in the late innings, shaky performance has relegated Buttó to lower-stress situations in the playoffs. Buttó allowed two inherited runners to score. It’s his first season as a consistent contributor on the major-league roster. Also, he began the season as a starter. Out of gas?
For Game 5, the Mets will start lefty David Peterson. As The Athletic previously reported, he always loomed as an option over Kodai Senga, as long as the Mets didn’t end up using him out of the bullpen first.
Peterson stands out as the Mets’ best option, but he hasn’t started a game since Sept. 29 and has pitched as a multi-inning reliever since, topping out at three innings on Oct. 5.
“We’ve gone through a lot this year,” Peterson said, “and it’s made us who we are at this point.”
The Mets are hoping to keep alive an improbable season that’s included Grimace and OMG. (Photo: Dustin Satloff / Getty Images)
Lindor added, “If you have no belief, you shouldn’t be here. You gotta believe. You gotta fight for what you want. You gotta fight for it.”
From New York’s perspective, the season is not yet over. The Mets talked about adding a new chapter to a wild plot containing pages on OMG and Grimace. On Friday, The Temptations will perform “My Girl” after singing the national anthem. Yes, that’s another real sentence about the 2024 Mets. They hope to author a few more improbable ones.
Inside the clubhouse, there was a common theme as players pulled from the past. The Mets were down to their last out in Milwaukee, multiple players pointed out. That was in the Wild Card Series, though. It didn’t entail winning three in a row. It was only a couple of weeks ago, but it feels like much longer. Plenty has happened since.
And it hasn’t been just the Mets’ rotation that has seemingly run out of gas in this series. Position players like Jose Iglesias and Francisco Alvarez haven’t done much, either. Brandon Nimmo is dealing with plantar fasciitis, and, to his credit, continues to hustle on every groundball.
The Mets have overcome plenty of challenges. Players walked the line of inspiring hope while acknowledging the weight of this particular task. The Mets shouldn’t be counted out completely, but their long-held concerns over how they navigated previous tests may finally be catching up to them.
(Top photo of Mets in the dugout: Frank Franklin II / Associated Press)
The result has been a terrible irony for a country that was founded as a refuge from intolerance: “How is it that the appeal to humanitarianism, tolerance, the rule of law and protection of minorities that characterized the beginning of Jewish self-emancipation gradually acquired all the traits of the relentless, remorseless and increasingly racist ethnonationalisms from which Zionism sought to liberate European Jewry?”
To answer this painful question, Bartov uses all the tools at his disposal, weaving together history, personal anecdotes, even some literary criticism, including a close reading of a poem — by Hayim Nahman Bialik and known to “every Israeli schoolchild” — about the perils of vengeance that has been misinterpreted and warped for political ends. Bartov writes unsparingly about Hamas’s murderous attacks, in which about 1,200 Israelis were killed and about 250 others taken hostage, which he calls an unequivocal “war crime and a crime against humanity.” It was a “slaughter of innocents” that “evoked collective memories of massacres and the Holocaust.”
Indeed, in a May 2024 poll of Israelis that he cites, more than half of the respondents said Oct. 7 could be compared to the Holocaust, and the Israeli media repeatedly depicted the massacre as a pogrom. Bartov understands why — for traumatized people, new traumas will revive old ones — but he maintains that the label is a category mistake. Israel is a state; it has an army, laws and government. A pogrom “is a mob attack, condoned or supported by the state authorities, against a minority lacking any attributes of a state.” (“To be sure,” he adds, “pogroms have occurred within the territories controlled by Israel, but when they take place, they were and are being carried out, with increasing frequency and ferocity, by settlers in the West Bank.”)
Israel doesn’t have a constitution. After its founding, its government was supposed to codify the protection of religious freedom and minority rights, but efforts to adopt a constitution were waylaid and arguably thwarted by political figures like David Ben-Gurion, the country’s first prime minister. Bartov believes that a constitution could have made Zionism “superfluous” after it succeeded in establishing a state that could be a refuge for Jews. Citizens could have turned toward the task of building a “just society” that aimed at “peace, truth and reconciliation with the Palestinians.”
This sounds nice, if fanciful; constitutions don’t magically prevent authoritarianism. Not to mention that attacks by surrounding Arab states did nothing to alleviate Israelis’ sense that they were constantly embattled.
Now that we’ve memorized the first half of our poem, let’s learn a little more about the man who wrote it. (Haven’t memorized anything yet? Click here to start at the beginning.)
For most of his life, Wystan Hugh Auden (1907-73) was a star. He was widely read, quoted, argued over and gossiped about, achieving a level of fame that few writers now — and not many then — could contemplate. His New York Times obituary did not hesitate to call him “the foremost poet of his generation.”
Celebrity of that kind is ephemeral, but Auden’s words have continued to circulate in the half century since his death. Maybe you’ve heard some of them before. In the 1994 film “Four Weddings and a Funeral,” his poem “Funeral Blues” is recited by Matthew (John Hannah) over the casket of his lover, Gareth (Simon Callow).
In the Gen-X touchstone “Before Sunrise” (1995), Jesse (Ethan Hawke) regales Celine (Julie Delpy) with an impression of Dylan Thomas reading Auden’s “As I Walked Out One Evening.”
In both these scenes, the characters use Auden’s poetry to give voice to a longing for which they otherwise might not have words. Auden’s poetry is often useful in that way. It speaks to recognizable human occasions, and it isn’t always all about him.
“The More Loving One” might not be something you’d quote at a funeral or on a date, but it is almost effortlessly quotable — the perfect expression of a thought you never knew you had:
Admirer as I think I am
Of stars that do not give a damn,
I cannot, now I see them, say
I missed one terribly all day.
Ken Burns, filmmaker
The word “I” occurs five times in this stanza, but we don’t know much about the person speaking. His personality is camouflaged and revealed by craft.
Auden, born in the northern English cathedral city of York, began practicing that craft as a schoolboy, and honed it at Oxford. Not long after graduating in 1928, he was anointed by critics and readers as the great hope of modern English poetry. A charismatic, divisive figure, he gathered acolytes, imitators and haters.
He swam in the intellectual and ideological crosscurrents of the 1930s, drawing Marxism, psychoanalysis and mystical nationalism into his writing. Assimilating a daunting array of literary influences — Old English and Ancient Greek, French chansons and Icelandic sagas — he forged a poetic personality that was bold, confiding and seductive.
His love poems of that era were candid, discreet dispatches from a calendar of feverish entanglements, wrenching breakups and one-night stands, usually with other men. He also wrote about the feverish politics of the time — class conflict; the rise of fascism; the Spanish Civil War — in ringing rhetoric he later disavowed.
In 1939 Auden moved to America, acquiring U.S. citizenship after World War II. In New York he fell in love with Chester Kallman, a young American writer who became his life partner.
It was a complicated relationship, starting as a passionate affair and enduring through decades of domestic companionship and creative collaboration. Kallman’s refusal to be sexually exclusive wounded Auden, a dynamic that poignantly shades this poem’s most memorable couplet:
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.
Yiyun Li, writer
In America, Auden distanced himself from the radical politics of his earlier career and embraced Anglican Christianity. His intellectual preoccupations shifted toward religion and existentialism — to the kinds of big questions we think about late at night, or when we look to the sky.
Making the leap from wunderkind to grand old man without seeming to stop in middle age, he became a mentor for several generations of younger poets. He was a prolific and punctual contributor of reviews and essays to various publications, including this one, for which he wrote a rave of J.R.R. Tolkien’s “The Fellowship of the Ring” in 1954.
Through it all, Auden devoted fanatical attention to the finer points of poetic technique. His notebooks are full of numbers, word lists and markings that show just how deep this commitment went. He counted every syllable, measured every stress.
He gathered rhymes and other words with a lexicographer’s zeal and a crossword puzzler’s precision.
The third stanza of “The More Loving One” is a miniature showcase of Auden’s skill. Of the four epigrams arrayed before us, it may be the most technically perfect.
Admirer as I think I am
Of stars that do not give a damn,
I cannot, now I see them, say
I missed one terribly all day.
W.H. Auden, poet
The rhythm is flawless, without an extra syllable or an accent out of place. The grammar is also fastidious. Here is a single sentence, springloaded with equivocation, beginning with one idea and sliding toward its opposite.
This quatrain is the poem’s ideal formal representation of itself, a kind of proof of concept: four lines of impeccable iambic tetrameter in an AABB rhyme scheme. The by-the-book regularity of this stanza should give you a leg up in memorizing it, and you can test yourself below!
But the rest of the poem is an argument against perfection, just as it is a celebration of uncertainty and humility — as we’ll see tomorrow.
Play a game to learn it by heart. Need more practice? Listen to Ada Limón, Matthew McConaughey, W.H. Auden and others recite our poem.
Question 1/6
Admirer as I think I am
Of stars that do not give a damn,
Tap a word above to fill in the highlighted blank.Your first task: Learn the first two lines!
Let’s start with the first couplet in this stanza. Fill in the rhyming words.
Ready for another round? Try your hand at the 2025 Poetry Challenge.
Edited by Gregory Cowles, Alicia DeSantis and Nick Donofrio. Additional editing by Emily Eakin,
Joumana Khatib, Emma Lumeij and Miguel Salazar. Design and development by Umi Syam. Additional
game design by Eden Weingart. Video editing by Meg Felling. Photo editing by Erica Ackerberg.
Illustration art direction by Tala Safie.
Illustrations by Daniel Barreto.
Text and audio recording of “The More Loving One,” by W.H. Auden, copyright © by the Estate of
W.H. Auden. Reprinted by permission of Curtis Brown, Ltd. Photograph accompanying Auden recording
from Imagno/Getty Images.
PERMANENCE, by Sophie Mackintosh
Sophie Mackintosh’s novels are always speculative in some way, with either the author or her characters forging a world governed by its own logic and rules. In their boldness and their ability to convey the violence of patriarchy, they recall the work of Jacqueline Harpman — not only the cherished “I Who Have Never Known Men,” but also “Orlanda,” her wild riff on Virginia Woolf’s “Orlando.”
Like Harpman, Mackintosh has a spare and confident hand. Her work is sometimes described as dreamlike; certainly, its contours are sketched with rapidity and confidence and relatively little detail. Her prose operates according to the same principle, at once lyrical and precise, like this from her second novel, “Blue Ticket”: “On the ground was a dead rabbit, disemboweled. Still fresh, the dark loops of its insides glistening like jam.”
When Mackintosh writes about masculine power, she does so in a way that articulates both its seductions and its terrors. Her newest novel, “Permanence,” is less explicitly concerned with the structure of patriarchy, but it has the same erotic charge as her earlier work, the same preoccupation with social prohibitions and the thrill that comes from breaking them.
Like “Blue Ticket,” “Permanence” turns on a highly pronounced binary. In “Blue Ticket,” adolescent girls are issued either a blue or white ticket on the day of their first period. A white ticket denotes a future of marriage and children, a blue ticket one of work — even, it seems, a career. The divide is stark and self-evidently faulty, its coarseness an expression of the brutalizing regime the characters are trapped in.
“Permanence” features a similar opposition, neatly delineated. Clara and Francis are conducting an illicit affair. One morning, they wake up in an alternate reality where they are openly living together. The novel shuttles between these two worlds, one ordinary and familiar, the other a curdled paradise for adulterers.
The thinness of this “city of impermanence” — “fluid, cohesive and yet disparate” — emerges at once. The sky is “uncannily blue,” the newspaper bears no date, the edge of the city is marked by “a slick ring of water, as far as the eye could see.”
Still, a boundary cannot keep the other world from seeping in. Initially, elegantly, this is a problem in the structure of desire. Having been provided the life they dreamed of, in which their longing for each other is fully met, Clara and Francis begin to experience, to their uneasy surprise, boredom and discontent.
Without absence, the intensity of their desire for each other wanes. They even begin, or at least Francis does, to long for the relief of their ordinary life: “Another day ahead of them of petting, giggling, lying around. It seemed insubstantial suddenly, though only the day before he had felt he could do it forever.”
Soon enough, it becomes clear that the problem between Francis and Clara doesn’t lie in the outside impediments of the world they live in, but in their relationship itself. Francis remains troublingly himself — a married father of a small child, reluctant to leave his family, however much he is in love with Clara: “He did love her, and he did want to be with her. … But he already had reality elsewhere, reality which he sometimes felt trapped by, he would admit, but which he could not truly imagine cutting loose.”
“Permanence” might seem like an outlier in the current array of articles and books about open marriages and polyamory, and at first glance the line of distinction between the two worlds, much like the division between blue and white tickets, seems almost old-fashioned. But as Mackintosh persuasively illustrates, the familiar emotions of jealousy, infatuation and eventually indifference — these persist and can flourish in any relationship, however free of prohibition.
“You want this,” Clara tells herself, and then, “You no longer want this,” as it occurs to her that “maybe it was in absence that they loved each other best, and most honestly.”
In her work, Mackintosh devises scenarios that are bold and almost aggressively simplified. But her terrain is complexity and contradiction, and in her hands these oppositions twist and turn in on themselves.
It’s hardly a surprise when the central character in “Blue Ticket” decides to eschew her designation and have a child, declaring, “True and false were no longer opposing binaries. My body was speaking to me in a language I had not heard before.” Nor is it especially startling when discontent chases Clara and Francis from one world to the other, unraveling their relationship.
What is more disquieting is the surreptitious ease with which Mackintosh’s speculative worlds start to align with our own, allowing the reader to see how so many of the old prohibitions and conventions — around choice, around marriage — remain, somehow, firmly in place.
That moment of recognition, in a landscape that is startlingly alien, is the source of Mackintosh’s power as a writer.
PERMANENCE | By Sophie Mackintosh | Avid Reader Press | 240 pp. | $28
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