Lindor is the leader of the Met-amorphisis

The shortstop's fingertips are all over New York's run to the NLCS

You never hear about the team meetings that don’t work. Surely there are the down moments, in an endless season, when the manager or the owner or the star holds a Come-To-Jesus gathering and nothing happens (and He doesn’t show). Those remain secrets. Too embarrassing to let everyone know that all that honesty and verbiage went for naught.

Francisco Lindor, the Mets’ $341 million shortstop, decided to take that risk on May 29 and call his team to order. They were 22-33 at the time. They had just lost three consecutive games to the Dodgers. It was time for a talking-to.

“We had to be accountable for each other,” Lindor would say later. “A lot of people talked. Some guys get caught up in the process. If things are going well, that’s fine. If you’re not going well, then maybe you need to change the process.

“We had to start winning. On the other hand, we had plenty of time. We talked about that, too.”

Things weren’t good. Jorge Lopez had just heaved his glove into the stands after rookie manager Carlos Mendoza removed him, and the Mets promptly released him, and Lopez contritely called himself “the worst teammate in baseball” although some misinterpreted Lopez as saying the Mets were the worst team in baseball. No one was arguing that point. Owner Steve Cohen was unhappy with the play, which seemed logical since the Mets had the largest payroll in the game, were paying Justin Verlander and Max Scherzer $55 million to play elsewhere, and were projected to pay a $104 Competitive Balance Tax, which tops the payrolls of seven other big-league teams.

The next night, Lindor’s single in the eighth inning tied a game at Arizona, 2-2. J.D. Martinez won it with a home run in the ninth. The Mets won one of the next three games, but then they won 11 of their next 13. They got three runs in the ninth to beat the Phillies, 6-5, in London, at a time when the Phillies seemed more like a bunch of Marvel powerhouses than a baseball team. They never really quit winning, in fact, and on Wednesday they finished off the Phillies in a four-game National League Division Series, as a delighted CitiField audience held up “OMG” signs, which has become 21th-century language for “Ya Gotta Believe.”

From the moment they sprang out of the expansion womb and went 40-120 in the Polo Grounds, the Mets have been stepchildren who, every once in a while, delight their fans in October. Seven years later they took out the Orioles in the World Series, a baseball upset that followed, by nine months, the Jets’ seismic Super Bowl III win over the Colts. In 1973 they barely topped .500 but won the N.L. East, and then got to Game 7 of the World Series. How can you still be the underdog with all that investment? You give everybody else a two-month head start. Lindor was right. There was plenty of time left, provided by a playoff format that allows three wild-card teams per league.

The old, familiar one wild-card format would have left the Mets in the dust. They finished with 89 wins and didn’t even qualify until the day after the regular season was supposed to end. On the day Lindor got everyone together, they were six games out of the wild card. Without so many lifelines, the Mets probably would have dealt some veterans and tried to economize. But with over 100 games left, there were options, and the Mets chose the right one nearly every time.

It helped that catcher Francisco Alvarez came back from injury on June 11. They are 58-27 when he starts. It helped that the Mets finally grew tired of waiting for third baseman Brent Baty to hit and went with Mark Vientos, another homegrown kid who was ready for the closeup after the Mets had sent him down in spring training. Vientos was nine-for-16 in the Division Series with two home runs.

It helped that closer Edwin Diaz got healthy in mid-June. And that Jose Iglesias, a 12-year veteran on his eighth change of uniform, came from the minors and went into full boil, hitting .337 and stabilizing second base. Last year Iglesias was in El Paso, San Diego’s Triple-A affiliate, and got out of his contract in June, attracting interest from absolutely nobody. He signed with the Mets last December, but by then he had bigger ambitions in the studio. He sings under the name Candelita, and his recording of “OMG” reached No. 1 on the Spanish-language charts and then became the Mets’ soundtrack.

It helped that manager Carlos Mendoza, in his first season, moved Lindor to the leadoff spot and moved Brandon Nimmo into the No. 3 hole. And it helped that lefty David Peterson, from the U. of Oregon, swooped in to throw five consecutive quality starts. On Sept. 29, in a game that was very much a case of win-or-walk, Peterson threw seven one-hit innings at Milwaukee.

The drum major for all of this was Lindor, which is why the franchise shivered when he left a Sept. 13 game, against the Phillies, with an unspecified back problem. It turned into an 8-day absence and an injection into his joint. A backup named Luisangel Acuna came up to stop the gap. His older brother Ronald is the reigning N.L. Most Valuable Player, with the Braves. Only teams that win get surprise visits from Guardian Luisangels, but nothing was going to work without Lindor, who came back for the final four regular-season games and had six hits, including the wild-card clinching homer in Atlanta. On Wednesday he grand-slammed Carlos Estevez in the series-clinching 4-1 win. In a time when a routine single is cause for pimping and pantomimes, he grimly rounded the bases without self-commemoration. It was only the sixth inning, after all. And, for that matter, it’s only the Division Series.

Meanwhile, the team seance became so effective that Lindor and Nimmo scheduled mandatory team dinners on the night before every road series. When weather interfered with their travel between Washington and Houston, the two Mets rented out a ballroom in their D.C. ballroom and ordered in for everybody. Lindor reasoned that the hitters’ meetings and the pitchers’ meetings and the time on the buses and planes were providing contact but not togetherness. Sit across from each other, with no phones to glare into and no schedule to keep, and talk trash as well as truth. Whether it leads to winning is not really the issue. The issue is that the Mets believe it does. 

Lindor has been special from the moment Cleveland picked him eighth overall in the 2011 draft. He has played 10 major league seasons, and this will be the seventh year in which he’ll be a Top 10 MVP finisher. This year Lindor had 33 home runs and 91 RBI with a .500 slugging percentage, and was still the fulcrum of the Mets’ defense. In the true sense of what an MVP is, he would be a much closer runnerup to Shohei Ohtani than he will be in the balloting.

“Learning his mentality and watching him go about his business is eye-opening,” said Vientos,  who worked out with Lindor during the winter. “Honestly, seeing the way he lives is a dream.”

History indicates that teams who play dreamy baseball like this in October don’t tend to wake up for a while. The Mets’ success is another blow to the playoff format that gives the top two seeds a bye while the wild-card series proceed. Teams with byes have gone .500 in series until this year, and if the Tigers and Padres both win they can push that mark to 3-1 in favor of the “underdogs.”

In truth, it’s a decided disadvantage to play no games for five or so days when no team ever has to do that unilaterally during the season. This is one more reason to expand the Division Series to seven games, because it gives the idle team a better chance of relocating its groove, and it also brings the entire roster into play.

But this is no fluke nor an injustice. The Mets were the best team in the N.L. East by a margin of 10 games after May 29. There’s a difference between magic and illusion. Lindor knew the potential sum of all the Mets’ parts. He also knew they wouldn’t see it if he didn’t get them all together.