The Mets Schedule as World Order: 162 Games of Geopolitics, Jet Lag, and Existential Comedy
If you squint hard enough at the Mets schedule, you can almost see the contours of the modern world: a 162-game atlas where jet-lagged millionaires chase a white leather sphere across time zones like confused diplomats, while the rest of us wonder how we’re going to pay the rent. The 2024 slate drops the Amazin’s in Seoul first—yes, Seoul—because nothing says “America’s pastime” quite like a 7 a.m. first pitch beamed live to insomniac New Yorkers who’ve already binged everything on Netflix twice. MLB markets this as “global outreach.” The cynic calls it free advertising for whichever Korean conglomerate just bought the stadium naming rights. Same difference.
From there the Mets fly 6,800 miles back to Queens, bodies protesting louder than the subway turnstiles, just in time for tax day and a three-game set against the Cardinals. The Cardinals, for the uninitiated, are baseball’s version of the Swiss—polite, punctual, and somehow always rich. Meanwhile, the Mets are the nation-state that keeps electing charismatic populists who promise the moon, deliver a parking lot, and still get re-elected. Every year, Opening Day feels like a constitutional convention where we collectively forget last season’s coup attempt.
Look closer at the calendar and you’ll notice a tidy West Coast swing in late May, perfectly timed for maximum circadian cruelty. The Mets land in Los Angeles when their body clocks read midnight, play a night game, then hop to San Diego where the in-flight movie is either “Top Gun: Maverick” or live C-SPAN—hard to tell the difference anymore. Somewhere over the Rockies, Pete Alonso contemplates the carbon footprint of professional hope while scrolling Zillow listings he still can’t afford. The planet warms, the fastball stays 98, and the universe maintains its impeccable sense of priorities.
By July the schedule becomes a geopolitical Rorschach test: a home-and-home with the Yankees, those pin-striped hedge funds with bats, followed immediately by Canada’s lone franchise, the Blue Jays, who insist on bilingual lineup cards and universal healthcare in the dugout. The Mets, ever the good neighbors, politely nod, then return to a country where insulin costs more per ounce than printer ink. The Rogers Centre roof closes against the summer smog; Citi Field opens its gates to whatever apocalyptic humidity the Atlantic is brewing this week. Somewhere a climate scientist updates her model; somewhere else a fan updates his fantasy roster. Only one of these spreadsheets will matter in October.
August brings the trade deadline, baseball’s quarterly earnings report. By then the Mets will either be buyers (Steve Cohen cashes in a few petrodollars) or sellers (the Wilpons’ ghost laughs from the luxury-tax grave). The schedule shows a four-game series in Atlanta, a city that treats traffic cones like state flowers. International viewers—yes, MLB.tv is inexplicably legal in 183 countries—watch Ronald Acuña Jr. sprint like a bond trader chasing yield and wonder why their own national sport involves so much less running and so much more paperwork.
Come September, when the Mets are mathematically eliminated or improbably alive, they’ll face the Marlins in Miami. The Marlins, owned by a former Yankee now cosplaying as a Floridian, play in a ballpark where the home-run sculpture was literally torn out for being “too distracting.” That’s late-stage capitalism in a nutshell: remove the art, keep the debt. The Mets will win two of three, because irony abhors a sweep, and fly north for the final homestand as hurricane season peaks. Final record: 87-75. Miss playoffs by one game. Blame the Seoul jet lag.
And so the Mets schedule, like every grand narrative, ends where it began: with the promise of renewal next spring, when pitchers and catchers report and the whole carnival resets. The world will still be on fire, ticket prices will rise faster than sea levels, and somewhere a child in Jakarta will fall in love with Francisco Lindor’s smile beamed across the equator. Hope, like a hanging curveball, is indefensible and irresistible. Swing away.
