Seventeen to Two: The Rivalry Where One Side Stopped Showing Up Years Ago.
If you grew up a Mets fan in the late 1990s, you remember the Robin Ventura grand-slam single. You remember Kenny Rogers walking in the winning run in Game Six of the 1999 NLCS. You remember Andruw Jones in center field running down balls that other center fielders did not run down, and Chipper Jones at the plate hitting the ball through the right side every time it would have hurt the most. You remember John Rocker, and you remember Bobby Cox standing at the top of the dugout steps with his arms crossed, watching another inning go your team’s way. These memories are vivid because they hurt. They are catalogued, in many Mets households, by the cumulative weight of having lived through them.
Here is the harder thing. The Braves do not, particularly, remember any of this.
Mention the 1999 NLCS in an Atlanta sports bar and the response will be polite, vague, possibly accurate — oh, that was the Rocker year, or I think we played the Yankees in the Series, didn’t we? — but it will not be the response of a fanbase that considers the Mets a co-author of their team’s recent history. To the Braves, the Mets are not a rival. The Mets are the team that finishes second in the National League East when the Braves finish first. The Braves’ rival, by any measure of how much oxygen each franchise occupies in the other’s seasonal narrative, is the Phillies. It has been the Phillies for years. It will be the Phillies for the foreseeable future. The Mets, in the Atlanta imagination, are background scenery.
The Asymmetry, in Numbers
This week’s issue picks up an idea introduced two issues ago: rivalries are asymmetric, and the asymmetry is measurable. Mets-Braves is the cleanest example in the modern game. Consider the years since 1995 — the year Atlanta began an eleven-year run of consecutive division titles, and the year the rivalry as Mets fans currently understand it begins.
| Window | Braves NL East | Mets NL East | Notable |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1995–2005 | 11 (consecutive) | 0 | Mets came closest in 1999 and 2000; lost both NLCS / Wild Card series |
| 2006–2017 | 1 (2013) | 2 (2006, 2015) | Mets’ only window of parity. Braves rebuilding. |
| 2018–2023 | 6 (consecutive) | 0 | Including 2022, when both teams went 101–61 and the Braves won the H2H tiebreaker |
| 2024–2025 | 0 (Phillies) | 0 (Phillies) | Both teams now finishing behind a third club |
| Total since 1995 | 17 | 2 | Ratio: 8.5 to 1 |
Two of the seventeen Atlanta titles — 2022 and 2024 — were decided by the head-to-head record between these two teams in tiebreaker situations. In 2022, both clubs finished 101–61. The Braves had won the season series ten games to nine. They were declared division winners. The Mets were assigned the top wild-card seed, lost the wild-card series at home, and were eliminated. In 2024, the Mets and Braves both went 89–73. The Braves had won the season series. They got the higher seed. These two losses, separated by two seasons, were as close as the Mets came in this stretch to anything resembling a divisional victory. Both were lost by the same one-game margin in head-to-head play.
“A rivalry, properly speaking, requires two teams that consider each other rivals. We have been having a one-team rivalry since 1999.”
— The Eulogist, on the long Tuesday nights of unrequited resentmentWhy the Other Side Does Not Reciprocate
Two issues ago in this newsletter, we proposed the idea that hate, in baseball, requires perceived stakes. A team starts to feel like a rival when, in the recent past, it has stood between you and something you wanted. By that measure, the Mets-Braves relationship is unbalanced because, for nearly thirty years, the Braves have not, in any meaningful season, found themselves blocked by the Mets from anything they cared about. The Mets did not stop the Braves from winning a division. The Mets did not knock the Braves out of a postseason. The 1999 NLCS, the only time these teams have met in October, was a Braves win. Atlanta’s losses, in their long memory, have been authored by the Yankees in 1996 and 1999, by the Cardinals in 2004, by the Phillies in 2008. Not by the Mets.
From the Mets’ side, the situation is the inverse. The Mets’ recent decades have been shaped, in large part, by losing to the Braves. The 1999 NLCS. The 2022 tiebreaker. The 2024 tiebreaker. The fifty-something games each year, every year, in which the two teams played each other and the Braves won most of them. There is no Mets fan over the age of forty who can talk about the team’s last quarter-century without, somewhere in the second paragraph, mentioning Atlanta. There are very few Braves fans over the age of forty whose narrative of the team’s last quarter-century requires the Mets to be in it at all.
The Mathematics of Unrequited
If we imagine each team’s annual playoff frustration as an ordered list, ranked by the team that delivered the disappointment, the Mets’ list reads: Braves, Cardinals, Royals, Braves, Braves. The Braves’ list reads: Yankees, Yankees, Cardinals, Phillies, Dodgers. The Mets appear in both lists. They appear in their own list more.
The Braves do not appear in the Braves’ list of frustration sources at all. They are too often the cause of someone else’s.
What This Costs, and What It Doesn’t
There is, finally, a question worth asking: is this bad? Is it diminishing, somehow, to have spent twenty-five years in a rivalry the other side did not show up for? Mets fans this morning will be tempted to answer yes — that the rivalry as they understand it has been a long act of self-deception, a relationship of forms with a partner who left the room a long time ago.
The honest answer is: probably not. The Mets-Braves relationship, asymmetric as it is, has produced more memorable Mets baseball than its absence would have. The 1999 NLCS, lost in heartbreaking fashion, was still some of the best baseball Mets fans ever saw. The 2022 tiebreaker, lost by one game, was the closest a Mets team has come to a 100-win season since 1988. Mets fans hate the Braves in part because the Braves have given Mets fans something to feel intensely about. That the Braves do not, in turn, hate the Mets back is not a rejection. It is a sign that the Braves have been, for most of this period, busy with other things — specifically, winning. Atlanta’s indifference is not cruelty. It is what a successful organization looks like when it does not have time for the team that finishes second.
The 2026 Mets are 14–23. The Braves are 26–12. They have not yet played each other this year. They will, beginning the second week of June, six times before the All-Star break. The games will, on the Mets’ side of the rivalry, mean a great deal. On the Braves’ side, they will be Tuesday-night baseball against a team currently ten games out of first place. This is not new. This is the rivalry, accurately described.
The Braves win 510. The Mets win 419. Some Tuesdays in June, in three weeks, somebody will hit a slider into the Citi Field bullpens, and a Mets fan will remember, for a moment, why this used to feel like the most important kind of baseball. The Braves will board their plane to Philadelphia. The rivalry, the only one anyone has been having, will continue.
