The Mets play their 69th game of the season today when they open a two-game set at Citi Field against the same Kansas City Royals that came into town last October and bounced them from the World Series in five games. At the moment, the Mets are 36-32, which is exactly what their record was last season through 68 games. The win/loss mark matches their Pythagorean record, meaning that the Mets, as currently constituted, are exactly who we think they are: strong on pitching, hit-or-miss on offense, and toeing the line just enough on defense to keep the whole enterprise afloat for now.
It’s comforting to think that the Mets are keeping up with last year’s surprising pennant winners, but that was a team that ultimately made great strides at (and then after) the trading deadline. And from this point on in the season, they not only went 54-40 (.574) but actually underperformed according to their Pythagorean record, which pegged the Mets as essentially a .600 team heading into the playoffs. This season’s Mets are unlikely to go out and acquire a Yoenis Cespedes-type player in late July, and for now all anyone can do is hope that the injury bug starts to move on from Queens, that Zack Wheeler’s impending mid-July return contributes even more muscle to an at-times dominant staff, and that the lineup starts to exhibit some semblance of rhythm and consistency.
This year’s team, despite now sitting in third place in the National League East behind Miami, shouldn’t yet be cast head-on into some doomsday prophecy. At the same time, we have now reached the first critical juncture of the schedule, made all the more pressing by this past weekend’s sweep at the hands of the positively dismal Braves. After the pair with Kansas City, it’s on to Atlanta for four more against a team that has lost two of every three games this year yet holds a winning record (5-4) against the Mets. Then it’s back up north for three games in DC against the first-place Nats. Then four games at Citi against the Cubs, who are playing .700 ball and have the best record in MLB. Then three at home against Miami, which is 3-3 versus the Mets. Then four at home against the Nats to head into the All-Star break.
That last contest against Washington will be the Mets’ 88th game of the season, which had them at 46-42 last year, so it’s a matter of going 10-10 over this 20-game stretch to keep up with the 2015 squad. The more pressing issue this time around is that the Mets were already in first place at this point last season, 1.5 games ahead of Washington instead of six games back. All these wins matter now just as much as they do in September, but last year’s team had some margin for error, some buffer on which to fall back. The 2016 Mets are already sitting in a hole from which they must ascend, and that makes the here and now feel a lot more important than usual.
Momentum is largely overrated in sports, but what winning does do, besides increase the sense of confidence in both an individual and the group dynamic, is allow a team more leeway to guard against the unexpected later on. The Mets were an offensive juggernaut over the last two months of the 2015 regular season. There is absolutely no reason to assume that is going to replicate itself again. At the plate, Michael Conforto would need to once again resemble more than just an overmatched call-up. Travis d’Arnaud would need to stay healthy. Same for Lucas Duda. And someone—anyone!—would need to pick up the slack for the dearly departed David Wright. That’s perhaps the one spot where Sandy Alderson can make a deadline move to shore up the lineup, but otherwise the Mets need to win with what they have to hedge against the most likely outcome, which is that their offense stays near the bottom of the National League. For now, the Reds, Padres, Marlins, and Brewers have all scored more runs to this point. Each team they can leapfrog from now until Oct. 2 in Philly will represent some meaningful bump in their playoff odds, which are encouraging if still quite tenuous.
But every win now—whether against the Nats, Cubs, Marlins, or the Atlanta freakin’ Braves—makes the end-of-season playoff push even more feasible. I think we’re all pretty hip to the notion of banking wins and the inherent importance thereof. But this is the first critical test of that practice for the 2016 season. The Mets might have already doomed themselves to a late-season lament about a lifeless, mid-June sweep at the hands of the Braves, but a few wins now against Chicago and Washington would lessen the chances of that reality. There are still 94 games to go. The season, as far as I’m concerned, starts now.
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