NEW YORK _ In baseball, a sure sign that a season is ending is the sudden appearance of large cardboard boxes, in which players stuff their professional lives _ the apparel they accrued the past eight months, the equipment they will need over the winter or in spring training, maybe the ballpark giveaways they mostly don't care about.
These boxes first appeared in the Mets' clubhouse Wednesday afternoon, hours before the team was mathematically eliminated from playoff contention, and proliferated over the weekend as they played out the string. Before a 7-6 win in 11 innings against the Braves in the finale Sunday, players were in full-blown last-day-of-school mode cleaning out their lockers.
The season ended in truly Metsian fashion. Dominic Smith, in his first at-bat in more than two months after sitting out with a stress fracture in his left foot, hit a walk-off three-run home run when the Mets were down to their final out.
The teams needed extra innings in the meaningless game after Adeiny Hechavarria _ cut by the Mets last month a day before he would have earned a $1 million bonus _ hit a tying homer in the ninth. In the 10th, the Mets had runners on the corners with one out and failed to score, causing fans to head for the exits in droves. Hechavarria hit the go-ahead homer in the 11th. It was the first multi-homer game of his career.
The Mets finished 86-76, third in the NL East. That represented progress after consecutive losing seasons, but they missed the playoffs for the third year in a row and the 11th time in 13 years.
And so begins the wait for chief operating officer Jeff Wilpon and the front office to make a decision on manager Mickey Callaway, who is 163-161 in two seasons. General manager Brodie Van Wagenen in recent days ardently declined to comment on Callaway or any other Mets topic, including Pete Alonso's historic rookie year, and a Mets spokesman said the team does not plan to announce anything before Wednesday.
Callaway said he will spend the next couple of days driving 19 hours home to Florida.
"I don't have any anxiety," Callaway said. "I'm proud of what we did this year. I'm proud of how hard I worked and I left everything on the field."
Noah Syndergaard allowed three runs in seven innings, striking out nine and walking two. In 2019, he made a career-high 32 starts _ reaching the 30-start milestone for the first time since 2016 _ but had a career-high 4.28 ERA.
