Purple Perfection: How Grimace's first pitch has Mets fans smiling during five-game winning streak

Baseball is a weird sport.

It’s important to put that out there at the beginning of this article.

Part of the reason why it’s a strange game is that over the course of a marathon 162-game season, you never know what will be the moment, the thing that a team latches on to as a either a turnaround point or a precursor to some good fortune.

Maybe it’s a team meeting. Maybe it’s an animal running onto the field (see the 2011 St. Louis Cardinals’ rally squirrel or the 1969 Mets' black cat). Maybe it’s a player wearing the same undergarment during a hot streak. Looking at you, Jason Giambi.

Or maybe, for the 2024 Mets, it’s a purple… thing… throwing out the first pitch.

With a 4-2 loss to the Miami Marlins on June 11, the Mets fell to 28-37, with most of the headlines surrounding the team being about whether or not they’d be sellers at the trade deadline.

Then, on a seemingly mundane Wednesday night at Citi Field, something changed. Prior to the start of the game between the Mets and Marlins, Grimace, the McDonald’s character who has been described as both "the embodiment of a milkshake" and a taste bud by the fast food chain, threw out the first pitch to celebrate his birthday.

He wore a comically large glove on the wrong hand. He wore a City Connect hat on a night the Mets wore their classic pinstripe uniforms. The Mets even gave him his own City Connect jersey, which he didn’t wear, probably because he has no shoulders.

He used his entire body to shake off a sign from his catcher. And with a blank look he lobbed a shot put of a pitch home that bounced to the plate and was about a foot outside.

But it was still perfect.

Since that pitch, the Mets are 5-0. They’ve outscored opponents, 31-14, with key pieces like Francisco Lindor, J.D. Martinez, Starling Marte, and Pete Alonso all looking like the star players they are at the plate -- and the team’s .799 OPS over the last week is the fourth highest in the National League.

On the pitching front, the Mets have posted a 2.40 ERA as a team over the last five games, with Luis Severino, Sean Manaea, and Jose Quintana all allowing just one earned run in their starts during this run. In the bullpen, Edwin Diaz has come off of the IL and has looked like the 2022 version of himself who was the best reliever in baseball.

On Saturday, the Mets also won for the first time while wearing their City Connect uniforms.

Coincidence? It would seem unlikely.    

And just like that, the Mets find themselves just 1.5 games out of a Wild Card spot in what’s been a very inconsistent National League.

As you might expect, the internet has been having a ton of fun with the Mets’ new purple pal. The memes are strong.

But even the Mets are having some fun with it, with the G-man popping up on the video board after Lindor’s leadoff homer on Sunday and during other big moments.

The Mets are simply playing good baseball right now. They’re matching strong starting pitching with big hits in key moments, the lineup is heating up from top to bottom, and the bullpen is once again led by a lights-out closer on the back end.

Can we attribute all of this to the purple perfection of Grimace’s first pitch?

Probably not, but we’re choosing to anyway.

Where do the Mets go from here? Well, first things first is a trip to Texas for a three-game series with the defending World Champion Rangers.

If the Mets can keep their hot streak going, perhaps we’ll all look back fondly on when a creature(?) named Grimace gave Mets fans a reason to smile.