You Can’t Spell Mets Without ‘Meme’

It was a chilly night in Queens, and the New York Mets’ bats were especially cold. But, as Businessweek’s Max Chafkin writes, the team’s meme strategy is the hottest in baseball right now. Plus: A breakout seltzer hit, a company working toward a brain science breakthrough, and AI’s power plant pitch. If this email was forwarded to you, click here to sign up.

By any objective measure, the New York Mets are the weakest of the four teams still competing in Major League Baseball’s postseason. Among the Cleveland Guardians, the New York Yankees and the Los Angeles Dodgers, the Mets had the poorest regular-season record and are the only team that didn’t win its division. The conventional wisdom at the end of May was that the Mets were likely to trade away their best players and tank before the season ended, a view held not only among fans and sportswriters but also by at least one of the team’s players, who publicly proclaimed them “the worst team in the whole f---ing MLB.”