The Mets are thoroughly mediocre – scoring 509 runs, giving up 507, and with a .508 winning percentage heading into Monday night – yet there were so many expectations coming into this season, the parallels between 2015 and 1984/85 feeling perfectly valid at the time. They’re going to put it all together this time. Last year was a precursor to something more. You first have to learn where you’re going in order to reach the mountaintop. The pitching can only get better; the lineup now knows how to deliver hits consistently. And when you’re striking out that many opposing batters, who cares about your porous defense? Oh, the things we tell ourselves.

The book is certainly not completely written on this particular iteration of the team, but I don’t suspect the 2016 Mets are going to be dismissed as a lost opportunity. The National League is deep and talented this year, certainly far more than the American League. It seems viable that any one of five NL teams could win the World Series, and the Cubs – the Cubs! – feel like the overwhelming favorite at this point. So sure, you can see that they haven’t posted a winning season since April and cringe at all the winnable games tossed aside, but even if everything had gone swimmingly for the Mets in 2016, the deep end of the pool feels mighty crowded at the moment. Nothing still would be certain.

Besides, the way this season has been far from ideal. The offense, aside from their surprising ability to mash taters with increased regularity, has been dismal. No speed, no consistency, no faith. The defensive chances have been limited, which was the plan with this pitching staff, but anyone who say they have a firm idea of, say, a majority of who the Mets will be fielding on Opening Day 2017 is selling something you shouldn’t buy. There are future stars on this roster, yes, but their development has either been stymied or, at worst, seen regression. The trade for Jay Bruce was misguided, the signing of Jose Reyes was embarrassing, and the demotion of Michael Conforto has been nothing short of prospect malpractice. And though David Wright, Lucas Duda, Matt Harvey, and Zack Wheeler were all expected to be on the field and contributing at this point in the season, their collective futures are instead mysteries for another day.

And yet, there is so much to be hopeful for in 2017. Noah Syndergaard, Jacob deGrom, and Steven Matz could easily be the best 1-2-3 of any staff in the NL East. There’s a decent chance Harvey and/or Wheeler start to resemble their capable former selves. There’s every reason to expect Conforto can thrive in a post-Terry Collins world, and there’s Brandon Nimmo, Amed Rosario, Dominic Smith, and Gavin Cecchini following close behind him in the pipeline. If Yoenis Cespedes sticks around – and perhaps depending on a new contract for Neil Walker – the Mets will have the early makings of a lineup core that could outproduce this season’s meager middlemen. Point is, the Mets have room to grow, their ceiling still not even within arm’s reach. What do the Mets end up with this season, 85 wins? It’s not hard to see the jump to 90 or 92 next season so long as the rotation maintains some positive balance of relative health.

That’s what the fans want to see. Not necessarily a World Series championship but a team that plays to its highest caliber and gets the chance to show off all that it can do. Last season was a surprise, a trickster demon in the dark who held off his final scare for the bitter end. Going forward, the Mets and their fans know what they have, know what Syndergaard’s fastball can do to opposing bats, know what a healthy Cespedes can provide when unleashed. Sure, deserve got nothing to do with it, but the Mets should recognize that their window is likely shorter than most, thanks to a dependence on pitching, and that these opportunities come along oh so rarely. Just ask the Cubs. Hell, ask the Indians and Rangers, who may very well be vying for the role of Ultimate Sports Spoiler when the American League pennant is decided.

For the Mets, that season won’t be 2016, but no reason why it can’t be 2017. That’s why we watch. That’s why we hope. That’s why we always come back.

Photo Credit: Brad Penner-USA TODAY Sports

And I remember the moment that it started to feel inevitable, like maybe 2015 was the season when everything finally wouldn’t all go to hell. It was August 2, a Sunday night game on ESPN, and Syndergaard was sensational in eight innings of work. His fastball looked unhittable all night, especially with Bryce Harper flailing at his final offering to end the eighth. That win wrapped up a sweep of Washington, tied up the division, and the Mets took a one-game lead over the Nats the next day that they never relinquished.

The circumstances were quite different this past Sunday night, when Syndergaard put in another sterling effort, but his performance gave off that whiff of what every Mets fan felt at Citi Field a year ago. With eight seemingly effortless innings of dominance over a struggling San Francisco squad, Syndergaard showed that, even when compromised with that nagging bone spur in his elbow, he can still perform like one of the best pitchers in the National League.

I wrote last week about how Steven Matz should simply be shut down for the remainder of the year because the Mets are no longer realistically playing for anything beyond the original 162, and I feel the same about Syndergaard. Even more so than Matz, Syndergaard is the cornerstone for the future and the team would be foolish to play games with his long-term health. Going into Monday night, the Mets are a .500 club that is actually outplaying its Pythag by a game and remains the third team on the outside looking in on the NL Wild Card hunt. This isn’t the year for this team and they simply don’t need to see any more from Syndergaard to know what they have, and what they have is a dominant No. 1 ace-type pitcher, so long as they don’t screw him up.

But at this point, it’s a fine time to see just how much better Syndergaard has pitched this year as opposed to his rookie campaign. He pitched 150 innings and faced 603 batters last season; he’s up to 148 and 602 respectively in 2016. He made 24 regular season starts both last season and now this. So the time is perfect to see what’s happening with Syndergaard’s results both then and now.

2015: 2.98 DRA, 79 cFIP, 10.0 K/9, .279 BABIP, 166 K, 5.35 K/BB

2016: 2.71 DRA, 68 cFIP, 10.8 K/9, .343 BABIP, 177 K, 5.53 K/BB

The inflated BABIP is a direct result of Syndergaard cutting his dingers allowed down from 19 to 9. (Those balls have now become doubles, which increased from 17 to 30.) But his historically good K/BB ratio from his rookie season has only improved, as his strikeouts have gone up even as his command has stayed roughly the same. (You could even presume that his walks might even be a touch lower without the bone spur.) His groundball rate is up; the flyball rate is down. Almost everywhere you look, there’s improvement in Syndergaard’s peripherals—he should be a top-five vote-getter for NL Cy Young, and I couldn’t care less how many steals he allows—and he has firmly established himself as the undisputed ace of Dan Warthen’s stable of starters.

Which is exactly why the Mets need to be extraordinarily careful with Syndergaard. He’s still below last year’s mark for innings pitched, but the bone spur means he’s compromised. With a little luck, the Mets can likely enter next Opening Day with a rotation featuring Syndergaard, Jacob deGrom, Matz, Matt Harvey, and Wheeler. That’s a rotation that doesn’t keep you up at night, and with those five rested and recovered the Mets could be the favorites in the division once again. But that means making smart decisions now. When Terry Collins pulled Syndergaard on Sunday night with 98 pitches thrown, it felt like the most logical move he’s made in weeks. But the Mets need to take that logic and expand it to a higher degree, and if that means effectively punting on the season with still six weeks remaining, so be it.

It’s too easy to think that it’s fine to let Syndergaard ride this season out to its inevitable endpoint, that his recovery of lost velocity from earlier in the season means he’s good to go until the season’s last day. That’s what pitchers tell managers to let them stay in ballgames, but managers need to manage better than that. But this ultimately needs to come from Sandy Alderson, and it needs to come quick. Winning in 2017, in many ways, means treating that season like it’s already here.

Photo Credit: Lance Iversen-USA TODAY Sports

The big problem for the Long Island phenom is that it’s been a season of two clear halves. There’s been the healthy half followed by the injured half. Outside of an anomalous first start of the season, marred by seven earned runs in less than two innings, Matz was sensational from his second start through his 12th. But after that, from the time just before Matz was diagnosed with a bone spur in this left elbow, his season was suddenly in doubt. It wasn’t thought that rest alone would fix the issue, but Matz was determined to keep pitching as long as the Mets would allow him to do so.

Bottom line: The Matz we then saw earlier in the year is no longer the one pitching now.

Starts 2-12: 70.2 IP, 1.91 ERA, .232 AVG, .303 BABIP, 72/13 K/BB, 99 pitches/start

Starts 13-22: 60 IP, 4.20 ERA, .271 AVG, .323 BABIP, 56/16 K/BB, 100 pitches/start

Matz also allowed five taters in the first grouping, then nine after the bone spur. Unsurprisingly, his line-drive rate also went up from 20 percent to 28 percent. And those numbers in the second group are with the added benefit of this past weekend’s sterling start against the Padres, whom he no-hit into the eighth inning. It helped, sure, that the Padres have the third-fewest hits in all of baseball, but it’s more than the Mets have, so that’s something.

You can have a legitimate debate about the utility of continuing to let Matz pitch when the entire world knows that his health is compromised and the risk for further injury might go up with every pitch he throws. But that argument really only was genuine so long as the Mets were a viable playoff contender, and a team that has to start Jose Reyes at shortstop and Wilmer Flores at first base—to say nothing of starting Ty Kelly, Alejandro De Aza, and Rene Rivera at all—is not a viable playoff contender. That Terry Collins and Dan Warthen have actually allowed Matz to throw more pitches per start in the weeks following the bone spur disclosure feels like borderline malpractice. This is a pitcher that you’re counting on to be a cornerstone of next season’s (hopefully contending) club, and now you’re pushing him even harder than before even though the world knows he’s pitching in pain. This is archaic, old-school thinking at its most damaging.

The injury is even changing the fundamental way Matz is pitching, which surely can do no good for his future development. (Remember, this kid is 25. He’s still going to get better.) But since the spur was revealed, Matz’s four-seamers have dipped to only about 55 percent of all pitches. Changeups are also down considerably, which makes sense. (Your changeup is truly only as good as your fastball.) And so sliders and curves have filled the void. Matz is, in essence, learning how to pitch through the pain, which is drastically different from learning how to be a better pitcher.

And yet, despite Matz’s recurring struggles of late, the state of the Mets’ pitching has remained encouraging this season. They have the lowest FIP in baseball. They have issued the fewest walks and allowed the fewest dingers. They have the fifth-best cFIP And and seventh-best DRA. But the season is essentially lost and, with six weeks to go until the offseason, the time to start thinking about next season is now. That means shutting down Matz as soon as possible.

Matz won’t win Rookie of the Year, but the Mets know they have something special in him. They also know he’s pitching through a painful injury. The path to giving him a chance at a healthy and dominant 2017 isn’t all that complicated, so they better start down that road soon.

Photo Credit: Andy Marlin-USA TODAY Sports

* The phrase doesn’t actually appear in the oath, though it does contain this wording—”I will not be ashamed to say ‘I know not’”—which applies here as well.

Maybe a MLB manager can’t win your team a whole lot of games by himself, but by all means, do not render your presence on the bench to that of a net-negative. Do no harm to your team.

Lately, there’s been a whole lot of negativity surrounding Terry Collins. It’s not his fault the Mets have suffered a litany of season-affecting injuries. He didn’t give Matt Harvey thoracic outlet syndrome. He didn’t plague David Wright with chronic spinal stenosis. He hasn’t slowed Zack Wheeler’s interminable rehab from Tommy John surgery. The list goes on. Collins caused none of these things, so we should try and separate these instances from the greater picture.

But Collins is not doing a great job with what’s left of these Mets, both on the field and off. He got snippy with P.R. chief Jay Horwitz about having to disclose Noah Syndergaard’s health earlier this season, but then made him pitch the sixth inning on July 31 when he was already sitting on 105 pitches. Syndergaard finished with 118 pitches. The Mets are in the midst of an increasingly lost season and their star pitcher, who is pitching with a bone spur in his right elbow, has now thrown at least 105 pitches in four straight starts. He hasn’t gone past six innings in any of them, meaning he has and is laboring through everything nowadays. At a time when the Mets need to be thinking about 2017 and beyond, this feels like an irresponsible approach to an already fragile arm. (Same thing applies to letting Steven Matz, who is also dealing with a bone spur, throw 120 pitches in six innings on Sunday. Seriously, why?)

That’s just one really glaring issue out of many recent ones. Saturday’s 6-5 loss to the Tigers was a Collins-fueled debacle in so many ways. Facing a 25-year-old left-hander named Matt Boyd, making his 22nd career start and with a career ERA over 6.00, Collins chose not to start Michael Conforto but instead put Ty Kelly in left field and Rene Rivera at designated hitter. His steadfast refusal to play Conforto against southpaws has been a source of frustration since the earliest moments of the season, and yet Collins will not give the Mets’ best young hitter any extended playing time against lefties. If anything, this is exactly the sort of game in which you let Conforto get in his cuts. He was a first-round pick and has the chance to become a special kind of hitter. He can and will learn how to hit lefties at least adequately well—just not while Collins is on the bench. Only once Boyd was pulled from the game did Conforto enter as a pinch-hitter for Rivera and finish out the game as DH.

Collins then opted not to pinch-run Brandon Nimmo in the ninth in place of Jay Bruce, who started on second base but was thrown out at home by J.D. Martinez, who gunned a perfect one-hop strike in from shallow right field. Asked about it after the game, Collins pled ignorance about whether Nimmo or Bruce was faster, even going so far to posit that maybe Bruce is the fastest player on the team but how he would know? There’s a layer of folksy sarcasm under there, but Collins is shielding himself with the fact that Bruce is a recent addition to the team and he simply couldn’t know him that well yet. It was as absurd an attempt at a defense as we’ve heard from him all season. And baseball watchers who are invested in these games would know that Nimmo, while not Tecmo Bowl Bo Jackson, had plus-speed as a prospect and is almost certainly more likely to run 180 feet faster than Bruce. Collins, above all, needs to know who gives the team the best chance to win. And if he doesn’t have a great handle on Bruce’s attributes, then Bruce should take a seat until Collins does, because then you’re just playing games with the lineup and playing someone solely because of how much money they’re making. And once you do that, you’re harkening back to the worst traits of those forgettable Mets teams of the early ‘90s. That’s what these past few weeks have reminded me of.

On top of all that, Collins’ refusal to challenge the final play was nonsensical. Even if Bruce didn’t touch the plate, the play looked close enough. He had nothing to lose by challenging. After the game, he shrugged it off, tried to cast some blame on the Mets’ video review guy (who only did his job in this case), and chalked it up to a lesson learned. It was a fitting end to a sub-subpar day.

Indeed, the whole week had the tone of a building fiasco. Preceding the mess in Detroit was the controversy over Yoenis Cespedes, his lingering quad injury, and how it might or might not relate to his golf game. Collins made it personal, going after the media (and, more directly, Newsday’s Marc Carig, who was only doing his job) and talking about what he can control versus those elements beyond his grasp. “I don’t care about perception!” Collins snapped. “I deal with reality.”

But the reality with the Mets as of late is that they stand nine games back of Washington in the East, two games out of the Wild Card game, and everyone continues to do their job to the best of their ability except for Collins. His decisions of late are hindering the development of the Mets’ best young players and he increasingly says one thing while his actions illustrate the opposite. Like lamenting Syndergaard’s tenuous health status and then running him out there when doing so could prove injurious. Like saying he’s going to rest Jeurys Familia after he pitched twice in a row, including an ugly blown save, and then pitches him again the next night, resulting in another blown save. It’s not as bad as Matt Harvey pressuring Collins into letting him pitch one more fateful World Series inning, but the Mets don’t figure to be in a big spot like that for some time yet to come. “I let my heart get in the way of my gut,” Collins said after the Game 5 loss to Kansas City. Maybe that’s not exactly what we’re seeing this season, but it’s a variation on a familiar theme. And right now, the song can’t remain the same.

Maybe Collins is frosty because he didn’t ask for Jay Bruce to become a Met and, considering the lengthening list of injuries, he thinks he’s doing the best he can with a suboptimal situation. Maybe he doesn’t like young players like Conforto or Nimmo. Maybe he feels resentful about having to answer questions from the media every time something with this team goes to hell. If any of that is true, the good news for Collins is that it probably won’t be his responsibility to worry about any of it next season.

Photo Credit: Rick Osentoski-USA TODAY Sports

Another take is that this is a hedge against Yoenis Cespedes leaving during free agency this offseason, which is a thing that will almost assuredly happen. But it also — both for now and for next season, when the Mets control a certain-to-be-exercised $13 million team option—clogs up an already crowded outfield, thereby stunting the development of Michael Conforto, Brandon Nimmo, or both. And in acquiring Bruce, they traded away one of their few infield prospects (Dilson Herrera) that could be major league-ready soon. And boy, do the Mets need infielders bad these days.

But what you can’t say is that the move will help the Mets win anything of consequence this season. These moves—the Bruce trade plus the reacquisition of pitcher Jon Niese, which we shan’t speak of again—are not the kinds of roster changes that do anything to counter the claim that the Mets are, by most any objective measure, in a pretty bad state right now. On Sunday afternoon, they were a late Neil Walker three-run dinger away from securing a third-straight losing month. Because of the 6-4 win over Colorado, they finished July with a 13-13 mark, so it doesn’t seem quite so bad. But the sole reason they’re over .500 at the moment is because of that 15-7 record in April, when they outscored opponents by 41 runs. There was so much hope then, so much optimism. It feels like forever ago.

Now, the Mets are holding on by a thread, and it’s all because of that dreadfully mediocre July. MLB’s playoff projection had the Mets at 69 percent back on July 7. Entering play on Sunday, they had flopped to 25 percent. This was the same day Terry Collins let Noah Syndergaard throw 118 pitches, even as his month-by-month velocity chart has resembled that of a tech stock in late 2000. It’s indicative of not only what’s poking around inside Syndergaard’s right elbow but of the Mets season in general—a slow, steady dive toward disappointment.

It happens almost every year. At some point, you can feel the season inexorably slipping away. In the good years, it doesn’t happen until after the All-Star break, but it’s always unmistakeable. You win games you really shouldn’t, while losing games in ways that leave you agape. The breadth of all the injuries starts tallying up past a manageable point. And more than anything, you start to lose ground in the standings when you can least afford it. First the division leader gets further from view, then someone from below leapfrogs you, and then there’s nothing left to do but ride out the season and start resting up for next spring training.

The Mets appear to have reached this point, the slide downward to inevitability. It was a frustrating series against the Rockies, a team that shouldn’t really give the Mets such fits. Jeurys Familia finally looked human, which should be the worst kind of omen for this team. It now looks like Asdrubal Cabrera is out for some time, putting him squarely alongside David Wright and Matt Harvey. Sandy Alderson failed to cobble together a reasonable trade package for Milwaukee’s Jonathan Lucroy, and at this point, why would they even bother? To what end would such a move help this increasingly lost year?

Sure, the Mets ended July with the exact same record they had last year through 104 games (54-50). The thing is, this year’s team is not going to go 36-22 the rest of the way like they did in 2015. They didn’t acquire a bat at this trading deadline as good as Cespedes a year ago. They don’t have the health and depth of pitching like they depended on a year ago. And unlike last season, Conforto’s confidence has been pulverized this year by Collins’ needless lineup tinkering. Maybe most critical of all, Washington isn’t laboring through a season-long implosion the way it did last year.

The slide is here. The slide is happening. You almost never return from the slide.

This is fine. To have a great season, a whole mess of things have to go right. This certainly has not been that kind of season for the Mets, but they are still set up in a way that 2017 could be the year 2016 was meant to be. Make sure Zack Wheeler gets healthy. Same for Harvey and Syndergaard and Steven Matz, who should also be under serious consideration for a shutdown.  Piece together a functioning infield and hope injuries don’t then decimate it. And commit to Conforto’s place in the outfield already.

This season, it seems, was made for the Cubs and Nats and Giants (their recent slide notwithstanding?) and one of those three is almost certainly going to represent the National League in the World Series. If you told me the collective odds on that outcome was on the order of 98 percent, I’d believe it without hesitation. Counting on yourself to sneak in on that extra 2 percent? That’s a sucker’s bet, friend.

The margins on this are always so slim and often maddening in origin. Case in point: Sunday’s win over Colorado was the Mets’ first win over the Rockies this season in seven tries. They’re now 1-6 against the Rockies. Flip that record around—a far-from-inconceivable reality—and the Mets are only two games behind the Nats and in real position to be hosting the NL wild card game come early October. Often a season comes down to whether you beat the Rockies when you were supposed to. We can tell ourselves all sorts of stories, but not beating the teams you should beat will always come back to get you.

There are two months left in the Mets’ 2016 season, and there’s much that can and should be learned about this roster over that time. If anything, the Mets should play looser and more carefree over that time with the players they do have because, in some warped way, once the slide happens, the pressure comes off. Yes, play for your roster spot next season, play for your offseason contract, play to remind yourself that baseball can and should, at all times, be fun.

But just know that you’re no longer playing for anything greater in this season. The sooner you recognize that, those late, game-winning three-run taters might even feel a little more fun.

Photo Credit: Jake Roth-USA TODAY Sports

We’re going to see a ton of trades over the next six days, some of them bigger and more profound than others. The Cubs have kicked off this wave in a truly surprising fashion by acquiring Aroldis Chapman for four players, including a couple of fine younger ones. There are a hundred different feelings one might have about this transaction, and it gets complicated from the perspective of both teams. (With the Mets’ recent signing of Jose Reyes, many of the same frustrations and conflicted feelings that bubbled up then are being rekindled anew by a different fan base. Bryan has written about this, and so has Andrew. They are worthy re-reads in light of recent events.) And whether you agree—whatever that even means in this case—with the Chapman trade, there’s one objective estimation that can be gleaned from the move and that lies in Epstein’s belief in the now, eschewing the undetermined future to make a bigger push for 2016 above all other years. (Again, you can quibble with how much Chapman actually helps the Cubs this season over another reliever, but Epstein believes it and so now we play the waiting game.)

The Cubs have decided they’re going to be aggressive, leave nothing to chance, shove the future aside and live in the now. Awesome! Good for them. They’ve got a great record. They churn out high-grade prospects like the Enterprise did tribbles. They haven’t won in 108 years, so aside from Chicago-area Lost enthusiasts who might believe such an omen sufficient to ride with what they’ve got, the Cubs are going to keep nipping and tucking to construct the roster they believe functions best. And in this way, they force all other teams to make their own decisions. More specifically, it’s the kind of move that directly affects other organizations from a psychological point of view, which brings us (as it always does) to the Mets.

By acquiring Chapman, the Cubs will help some clubs decide this season isn’t worth the risk, to pack it in and regroup for 2017. (Looking at you, St. Louis and Pittsburgh.) They’ll also motivate teams in their similar tier—say, San Francisco and Washington—that a comparable move is now more necessary, that they need to “keep up” with their opponents’ upgrades. (And truth be told, Andrew Miller in a Giants uni makes a whoooooole lot of sense right about now.) Then there are the teams in an as-yet-undefined space—the Dodgers, the Marlins, and the Mets—who are now faced with deciding which tier they’d like to enter. Is it worth it to try and secure that Wild Card spot and pin your whole hopes on one game? The Pirates will tell you that’s no way to live, but anything can happen once you make it past the first weekend in October.

So the Mets will either make a flurry of small moves in the next few days or largely stand pat and take their chances with the roster they have. Last season, it was a combination of one large acquisition (Yoenis Cespedes) that looked monumental in hindsight and a sampling of smaller moves (Juan Uribe, Kelly Johnson, Addison Reed) that, again, took on larger importance as the season wore on. If the Mets do largely stay idle and let the trading deadline pass without doing much to bring in reinforcements, it’s a sign that, among other things, they believe Wheeler can make a difference in the stretch run, that he will be the key second-half newcomer that gives everyone a late-season lift, even it’s only four or five starts’ worth.

Which, OK, maybe he can, but can you really bank on that? His last competitive game in a Mets uniform was September 25, 2014. His recovery has been delayed by several comebacks and he’s likely still several weeks away from attempting a return at Citi Field. He and Bartolo Colon were supposed to be the second-half sixth-man super-subs. But with Wheeler’s slowed recovery and Matt Harvey being shelved for the year with thoracic outlet syndrome, rotation depth is not the regular season strength it was back in April.

Here’s the rub: The Mets are still the rare team that can approach the wild card game with a smidge more hope than defeatism. If you throw Noah Syndergaard out there and survive you can come back with Jacob deGrom in Game 1, Steven Matz in Game 2, and then throw Syndergaard again in Game 3. The problem for the Mets is not necessarily what might happen in the playoffs; it’s that they have to make the playoffs. The Nationals’ slow and steady collapse made last season far less stressful for Mets fans than it could’ve have been, but Washington is healthy and hungry this year. The Mets, meanwhile, are limping along on one strong leg, but it’s all they’ve got. For 2016, the margin for error is long gone.

Yes, the Mets should make some kind of move before Monday’s deadline. They are still very much in contention for that wild card game, and the idea of running Syndergaard out there, be it at home or on the road, in a do-or-die situation has to give every Mets fan some measure of joy. But they need to survive now to advance then.

And at this point, it doesn’t look much like Zack Wheeler will be the significant pick-me-up they were counting on so many months ago. So, who then?

And maybe that’s where I start to doubt that, for as good as deGrom has looked recently, I’m not totally convinced he’s in the clear. Yes, the velocity that was missing earlier this season is largely back, but deGrom’s peripherals across the board are not quite up to their lofty 2015 counterparts:

DRA

2015: 2.96
2016: 3.47

K/9

2015: 9.7
2016: 8.6

TAv:

2015: .224
2016: .232

cFIP:

2015: 80
2016: 88

Yet despite all this, there are blips of encouragement sprinkled throughout deGrom’s season. His BABIP has stayed pretty much the same. He’s on pace to surrender fewer taters than last season, even as opposing batters are swinging at fewer of his pitches out of the strike zone and making more contact on balls in the zone.

So what’s different? For one thing, deGrom’s pitch selection has become noticeably more aggressive this season. According to Brooks Baseball, deGrom is foregoing his four-seamer at a level we haven’t seen since his dominance last October. Back then, deGrom was exploiting antsy playoff hitters by swapping the heater for a lethal change. This time, it’s the sinker, which is now essentially the same speed as his four-seamer, that is the primary beneficiary. Even while mixing in the occasional curve and slider, deGrom is going to that sinker time and again, especially over the past month. It’s no wonder his groundball rate and groundball-to-flyball ratio are both, for the moment, are seasonal career highs.

And as games have gone on longer, deGrom has only gotten better. First time through the order, opponents have an OPS of .611. Second time? Still just .623. After that, teams are still just .600 OPS against him.

One start shy of 69 for his big-league career, deGrom has been historically good, at least with respect to expansion-era ball. And the good news is that for this season, the schedule shapes up pretty nicely for him down the stretch. Assuming the Mets’ rotation stays on its current schedule, deGrom figures to have perhaps 14 more starts this season. (That would give him an even 30, matching last year’s workload.) He would have seven starts at home and seven on the road. Most enticing, though, is that eight of those would come against a combination of Atlanta, Miami, Philadelphia, Colorado, and San Diego. His last challenging assignment would be on September 14 in Washington.

After that, it would be on to Citi Field to face the Braves and then finish up the season with two starts against—you guessed it—the same Phillies that deGrom with such ease this past weekend. So maybe deGrom does have enough time left this season and the kind of upcoming opposition where he can get those 2016 numbers more in line with last year. He’s certainly pitching better now than he was in April. Whether that trend can continue down to the season’s final days might be the ultimate determinant in whether this team—which is currently tied for the final wild card game slot—has a chance for another run through October.

So grab your spreadsheets and let’s go back on the last three months:

122 dingers: That’s the most taters the Mets have ever mashed in the first half of a season, two more than the ill-fated 2006 team that was perhaps a curveball away from the World Series. More importantly, it’s 47 more than last year’s team had at the break. That’s a significant increase, and one the Mets will gladly take, thank you very much, but the worry here is that it’s not sustainable. To which you might reasonably respond: Maybe? No one knows how this trend plays out for the year, but it’s not an insane developement by any means. Asdrubal Cabrera (12) has shown 20-homer power in his career and has two All-Star selections to show for it. Yoenis Cespedes (21) had a career-high 35 last season and seems like a sure bet to eclipse that mark and even threaten the team record of 41. Neil Walker (15) maybe feels like the outlier here, with his career-high of 25 coming two years ago, but compared to what Daniel Murphy is doing just down the Acela line, it seems quaintly understated in some way. Point is, I don’t fear the Mets not hitting home runs at some point. I fear them not doing enough when they’re not hitting home runs.

335 runs: The Mets have played 88 games thus far, so they’re averaging 3.8 runs per game, which is Not Great. For comparison’s sake, the 1962 Mets scored 329 runs in their first half in six fewer games. That’s 4.01 runs per game. Thankfully, Mets pitching is just a tad more capable this year than that, but you see what I’m getting at. If the Mets don’t score more in the second half, it won’t matter how good the pitching stays.

18 steals: The National League average right now is 46 steals per team. The Mets are not even at 40 percent of that figure. When steals are this few and far between, it’s not that you’re a slow team so much as you are incredibly disinterested. Also, hitting more dingers means fewer opportunities to get on base and steal, but the Mets largely do not steal because they do not care to steal. (Then again, that they’re tied with Milwaukee for the fewest triples in the NL, they almost definitely the slowest team.) They’ve got an outside shot at beating the 1973 Mets (27) for the fewest swipes in a full season in team history. If David Wright remains the club leader this season—with a whopping three—then a new low benchmark is all but assured.

749 strikeouts: This year’s Dodgers actually had the most strikeouts (866) of any team ever in the first half. Dan Warthen’s staff wasn’t quite that electric but they did post the second-most of any first-half Mets team, and the franchise’s three highest first-half totals have come in the last three seasons. Assuming Zack Wheeler actually makes his way back to the rotation in the second half—and Steven Matz and Noah Syndergaard’s respective arms don’t fall off—they should keep pace with Los Angeles and Washington in the whiff department. (It was, relatively speaking, the best first-half K/9 in team history and by a considerable margin.)

80 dingers allowed: Balls are flying out at a crazy pace as of late, but Mets pitchers (at least compared to the rest of the league) are holding their own, just two ahead of St. Louis for fewest allowed in the NL. Historically speaking, it’s still a pretty terrible result compared to Mets history—that 2003 staff giving up 109 in the first half, holy frijoles—but it’s about the same as the 1969 staff did in its first half, and so long as the Mets continue to successfully limit the number of runners that get on base, the damage inflicted by such taters will remain minimized.

3.329 strikeouts per walk: The eighth-best rate of any first half ever. Cool! Less cool: The Yankees, Cubs, and Dodgers have all been even better this season.

1 Bartolo Colón: Yet again the undisputed league leader. And in that fact, there is hope.

Photo Credit: Jake Roth-USA TODAY Sports

And so now the Mets, who were 44-37 heading into July 4, are on pace for 88 wins on the year which is a figure that would likely keep them competitive for the National League wild card slots and, quite possibly, yet another division title over Washington, which appears both more formidable and (most importantly) far less injured than it was a year ago. But for as inconsistent as the offense has been and as much as the starting rotation seems like it could fall off a cliff, either through the looming specter of UCLs snapping or bone spurs, uh, spurring, the season is far from lost. Quite the contrary, the fate of the Mets is far from sealed. They very much control how this season will play out, but perhaps feels equal parts comforting and terrifying, but it’s a lot better situation than many other National League teams.

It has no bearing on this year’s expectations, but it’s not an insignificant exercise to think about where the Mets were at this time last year, which was 41-40. They went 49-32 for the rest of the regular season, and though replicating that feels optimistic for this year’s squadron, I would take into account first that the team that will finish the season is not the team you currently see out on the field. There are moves to be made, trades to be negotiated, call-ups that will prove themselves unexpectedly valuable. (For the second year in a row, that means you, Michael Conforto.) Zack Wheeler will likely be back in the rotation, thus preserving some of Bartolo Colon for the later weeks when his ability to eat up late-game innings will be utterly invaluable. Lucas Duda will be back from injury. Someone will likely be acquired to shore up the infield depth and/or add some pop to the lineup. Say what you will about Sandy Alderson but he has shown a clear predilection to making the moves that need to be made. Yeah, sometimes it works out that you get saved from yourself and get a Yoenis Cespedes instead of Carlos Gomez or Jay Bruce, but you have to be aggressive to make yourself that kind of institutional luck, and there’s no reason to think, as long as the Mets are still competitive in two weeks’ time—say, five games back or fewer—they’ll kick every tire out there on a move that could net more wins in the here and now, even if means a slight sacrifice for 2017 and beyond.

And so you hope all that happens. And you hope that, in turn, signals some course correction for an offense that ranks 28th in runs scored, sixth in dingers but 28th in doubles, and sports a batting average one percentage point off of Atlanta for worst in MLB. And you hope Wheeler’s comeback is enough to bolster a staff fighting like hell to keep the injury demon’s appetite quenched until at least November and everyone has already dispersed. And you hope that this offseason, when the Mets watch Cespedes walk away (for real this time) and negotiate some buyout on the remainder of David Wright’s contract and feel the pressure to either trade Matt Harvey or buy out his arbitration years in the hopes of avoiding an ugly Boras-y squabble down the line, you’ve accumulated enough good memories from this season to get yourself through all of that.

There is so much baseball left to play this season, and I would say the odds are better than 50-50 that the second 81 games show off a more competent Mets team than the first 81. Maybe that’s a dangerous setup for something unpleasant to come, and maybe that’s the kind of thinking that, in the end, makes the long winter feel colder than you’re prepared for. But it’s a hope that can’t help but be felt this time of year, when you’ve made it to the halfway point and, wouldn’t you know it, there’s still some light up ahead.

The second half of the 2016 season holds infinite, unrealized possibilities. It could all go very wrong, but you sit and wait and (yes) hope that, somehow, yet again, it all goes very right.

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On Wednesday, he publicly belittled longtime Mets P.R. director Jay Horwitz after Horwitz pressed him to explain to reporters why Syndergaard was pulled from the game earlier than expected. “There wasn’t any questions on it,” Collins briefly retorted before explaining that Horwitz—“the puppy dog,” in his words—insisted he update the media regarding Syndergaard’s health.

On Thursday, he apologized for making those comments. “I was out of line for saying what I said at the press conference,” Collins said. “He was just doing his job, and I wasn’t doing mine.” He also discussed his frustration with always having to talk about player injuries: “I’d like to enjoy a victory one time for more than five minutes.” Aside from the weirdness of bolting after giving an injury update related to your best pitcher, the idea of laying into Horwitz is like dressing down your accountant for coming up one deduction short. It’s unseemly and simply isn’t necessary.

On Friday, he sounded downright giddy at the prospect of having Jose Reyes on the major league roster, a full day before the Rockies officially released him and the Mets, in fact, signed him to a minor-league deal. Reyes was a batting champ and Collins’ best player in his first season as Mets manager in 2011. That was also Reyes’ last season in Queens. Now, having served a massive suspension for, according to police, choke-slamming his wife into a glass door, he is again under contract by the Mets and will likely be back at Citi Field in a matter of weeks, if that. (He’s already been promoted to Double-A Binghamton.)

On Saturday, he talked about his direct role in getting Michael Conforto demoted to Triple-A Las Vegas. “He came off the field and I was just looking at him, and I could just see that he had reached the state of mental confusion,” Collins said. “I just want him to go get some confidence and get back here.” Back in mid-April, I wrote how Conforto had clearly earned the chance to be an everyday player and not be platooned out against left-handers. As Joe Sheehan ably pointed out in his newsletter this weekend, Collins never did give the young left fielder that opportunity and probably contributed to his precipitous slide out of the show.

After the game that night, Collins publicly ripped backup outfielder Alejandro De Aza for a lack of hustle on a botched bunt attempt. On the season, De Aza now has a .170 TAv and an OPS+ of 28. Not three weeks ago, Collins praised De Aza—”this guy is a good player”—and pledged to find him more time in the lineup. Since that day, De Aza has played in 15 games (starting six) and is 2-for-30 at the plate.

The Jose Reyes mess is its own entire debacle on which Bryan wrote at length last week, and I largely agree with what his thoughts. Even taking every conceivable baseball reason out of the equation—all of which are secondary, by a wide margin—there are myriad human reasons why the Mets should not have signed Reyes and it’s sickening that they feel such a duty to give him another chance at the privilege of playing baseball. He’s already been cheered, a mere one game into his comeback, and I’m sure my irritation over the situation has only just begun.

But Collins’ excitement at getting Reyes back could barely be contained, and it wasn’t a very good look. It reminded me of the worst parts of the past 25 years, when the team would put aside character and integrity and sign players purely because they thought someone could help them win games. (To that end, rarely did it ever work out, usually resulting in some kind of incident or further embarrassment.) I should be stunned when teams now approach batterers as some kind of new market inefficiency, but I am, even as it invariably reminds me of Mets teams I’ve tried for years to forget about, with the infighting and tone-deaf decisions and so forth.

The fact is, ever since the World Series, Collins has had a rough go, not just with on-field decisions but, as I’ve documented, the off-field aspects as well. And although he’s the oldest manager in MLB, this is not an ageist argument. Plenty of baseball managers older than Collins have found continued success. Maybe it’s just the extra attention. Maybe it’s dealing with management such as the Wilpons, although one would hope Sandy Alderson would act as more of a filter from all that badness. Maybe it was nothing more than one really bad week. We all have those!

I don’t know the reasons for Collins’ crankiness and misguided statements, and just as he shouldn’t soul-search Conforto, I’m not going to play amateur psychologist with Collins. But it’s a thing with him and it’s been a thing for a while now and it’s the kind of thing I hoped the organization had left behind years ago. Maybe the season will right itself before long—and Collins with it—but I’ve seen this movie before and I don’t care for the ending. And all I really know for sure is that Collins, with his actions and words, is making this season worse than it needs to be.

On the bright side, Collins was able to acknowledge Steven Matz’s gimpy elbow on Monday without resorting to insults, so maybe he’s making some progress there.

Photo Credit: Dale Zanine-USA TODAY Sports