Trying To Secure Playoff Spots, Mets And Yankees Struggle With Pesky Miami Marlins

It happens every year and becomes more prevalent since the playoffs turned into a four-round format in 2022 because there are more meaningful games in the final weeks.

It also means one or two potential teams with losing records may succeed at messing up some type of playoff aspiration for a contender.

From the New York baseball perspective, the team messing things up might be the Marlins, a least based on the combined 56 games the Mets and Yankees played.

While the Yankees won 16 of those and the Mets won 11 times, three losses apiece were against the Marlins who are vastly improved from last year when it went 62-100 — a year after winning 84 times in the regular season to reach a wild-card series with the Phillies.

Recent evidence points to the Marlins being the kind of bugaboo for the New York teams, who face differing degrees of difficulty in their quests to become division winners.

The Yankees head into September three games out with 12 straight against the Astros, Blue Jays, Tigers and Red Sox before a season-ending 13-game stretch against teams with losing records.

The Mets enter September seven games out with a group who set team records for offense in a month but struggle to pitch on a frequent basis. Of their 26 games, 20 are against teams with winning records while three are against the pesky Marlins and three are against the careening Nationals.

Although they slipped back under .500 after briefly getting there, the Marlins went a combined 6-1 against the Yankees and Mets in August. The Yankees entered Miami on Aug. 1 riding the positive buzz from adding relievers David Bednar, Camilo Doval and Jake Bird along with utilityman Jose Caballero at the July 31 trade deadline and got outscored 22-15 in a three-game sweep by the Marlins.

The nightmarish series of events in Miami sent the Yankees from 3 1/2 to 4 1/2 games behind the Toronto Blue Jays in the AL East. The Yankees eventually dropped 6 1/2 games out on seven occasions and did not really start making a dent in their deficit until this week when they won seven straight to get within two games out before taking a 3-2 loss to the White Sox on Sunday.

The Mets won four of six games from the Marlins in the opening weeks when they went 21-10 through the end of April on the way to a 45-24 record and a 5 1/2 game lead over the Phillies in the NL East. Now the Mets are 29-40 in their past 69 games, and the Marlins outplayed them three times.

The Marlins capitalized on three errors in a 7-4 win on Thursday. After taking a 19-8 loss Friday while the Mets unveiled Jonah Tong for five inning, the Marlins scored five in the first inning, withstood two homers by Juan Soto in an 11-8 win Saturday and easily earned a 5-1 victory Sunday.

The scrappiness and spoiler mentality were evident Sunday, starting with Sandy Alcantara making the Mets appear lifeless for most of his seven innings. Alcantara was among the more prominent starters rumored to go at the deadline and it seemed reasonable to think the Mets were a team who could check in on him and even make the effort to obtain him.

The Marlins will not finish with 100 losses and likely will avoid 95 if not 90. They get another crack at messing up for the Mets with a season-ending series at home. There could be similar apprehension to 2007 and 2008 if the Mets do not do enough between Sunday and the last weekend to secure a playoff berth.

“There are a lot of young players that are hungry all the time. They want to be out there, have an opportunity to play the game and win the game,” Alcantara said.

The Marlins may also potentially mess things for the Phillies quest at avoiding the NL’s third-best record or Detroit’s bid at staying as the team with the top record in the AL.

For now, they are potential spoilers to the Yankees and Mets division title hopes. The Mets entered this weekend coming off a three-game sweep of the Phillies, an experienced team hardly fazed by their division lead by reduced to four games.

And then they killed the buzz in matter resembling how the Yankees did the same when each trade acquisition contributed to a walk-off 13-12 loss, the offense mustered two hits off Eury Perez in the second game and Luis Gil struggled in his debut in the series finale.

This time, other than the record-setting events coupled with Tong’s hyped debut, the Mets were a sloppy downer and failed to handle a pesky opponent properly.

“It means a lot,” Marlins leadoff hitter Xavier Edwards said. “You always want to get on the road and start a road trip while hot, which we did. I feel like we usually play the Mets pretty tough. Just kind of one of those teams that we kind of matchup well against and play them tough whether it’s here or Miami.”

There is certainly precedent for this thing occurring in recent New York baseball history.

In 2022 the Mets finished with 101 wins, their second-most in team history. Three they did not obtain were at home against the 74-88 Chicago Cubs from Sept. 12-14 when they were outscored 15-6 and saw a division lead trimmed to a half-game.

It was not the sole reason for the Mets blowing a seven-game lead by going 28-22 the rest of the 2022 season but it certainly did not help, especially when they lost the division lead on the final weekend of the season in Atlanta where they also lost the tiebreaker.

On all accounts, the 2018 regular season was successful for the Yankees in manager Aaron Boone’s first season after a decade of Joe Girardi. They won 100 games but only 12 of 19 against the 47-115 Baltimore Orioles while the Red Sox won 16 of 19 meetings with the Orioles to help claim the division by eight games and eventually a fourth championship since 2004

By any measure the Yankees and Mets are fairly secure in their wild-card situations. If the situation becomes a little skittish in the final weeks with those spots in jeopardy, the underwhelming results against the Marlins might be cited amongst other issues.