On Sunday morning, I read the Mets had lost their final game before the All-Star break the previous seven years there had been an All-Star break (which is to say not including 2020). Hence, I kept my hopes in check that the Mets would extend their momentum to a six-game winning streak and burnish the sense that they have become unstoppable. The surprise in the short term wasn’t that they lost to the lowly Rockies, as any team can lose to any team at any time. The surprise in the context of a season that once appeared anything but promising is that there were hopes to keep in check.
The Mets have given us a license to realistically hope. They pull into the break — despite bowing, 8-5, in their “first-half” finale — in playoff position. The slight lead on the pack of Wild Card wanna-bes is gratifying, but even better is the knowledge the Mets are in it until they’re out of it. It’s quite a step up from trying to rationalize, as we attempted in 2023, that maybe if they get lucky they still have the slightest chance to get close to not being altogether done.
Sure would have been nice to have swept the Rockies. I thought we might once Pete Alonso remembered he’s an All-Star and a Home Run Derby participant. Pete, who’s definitely a star in any season if not an indisputable All-Star this season, belted his nineteenth long ball on the year, his first in nearly two weeks. That blast knotted affairs at two apiece in the fourth. A subtler rally — a single and three walks — put the Mets ahead several batters later. Jose Quintana had settled down from a shaky first, and here came that segment of the game where the decidedly good team takes over decisively from the decidedly bad team.
But that business about any team losing to any team at any time rang a little too true. The Rox, who entered Sunday thirty games under .500, retied the score in the fifth and continued to add on in every frame through the eighth. While Jose Iglesias was rapping out four singles, Michael Toglia produced the biggest sounds with three home runs, while Ezequiel Tovar backed him up with a pair that also popped. OMG, you can’t win them all.
Still, it wasn’t wholly one of those sleepy Sunday-before-the-break losses that feels characteristic of an Amazin’ letdown, the kind that serves as prelude to the Mets predictably wandering off a competitive cliff once the schedule resumes. A good fight was put up in the bottoms of the eighth (two runs) and ninth (two baserunners). Reaching the middish-season pause with a 5-1 homestand encourages us to anticipate rather than dread. If you can’t cheer a win in your final game before the break, at least you can feel like you’re rooting for a winner.
I know it doesn’t work that way but yesterday felt like one of those, “Get it out of your system,” days. In this case “it” was giving up HRs to batters with low averages or who strike out a ton.
Lot of questions going into the 2nd half. The big one for me is how we navigate one less man in the bullpen when we go to a six-man rotation. Do we keep both Houser and Butto even though they probably can’t pitch back-to-back or does one leave (here’s hoping we tell the minor league options God to piss off and DFA Houser)?
But all the questions this year are along the lines of, “How will they make the team better for the stretch run.” That’s a lot better than the questions we were asking a year ago.
How the Mets will work their bullpen with a 6-man rotation is a big question. They aren’t going to push the starters deeper into games with bigger pitch counts. And we just saw the Mets’ depleted, flawed, and overworked bullpen struggle even more while a man short during the Diaz suspension.
I vote for starters being available out of the bullpen on their throw days to compensate for the shorter bullpen.
I wonder if the Mets signaling the 6-man rotation once Senga’s back is really a bluff to cover up, maybe to their own players, that they’re willing to give up a starter.
The pitching is still a mystery, but in order to take this team seriously in the second half, McNeil and Alonso are going to need to step up their game a bit. They have short circuited too many opportunities.
I believe, and hope, that your optimism is warranted. Still, there have been too many seasons where the Mets came back after a decent run to the All Star break to just totally fall apart on their return. Once burned, twice shy, and we’ve been burned more than once. Still, things are looking good.
About a week ago, coinciding with Diaz’s suspension and the Mets cooling off to fall back below .500, the Cardinals and Padres were 6 over .500. Since then, they’ve both fallen back into the wildcard scrum. The Padres lost their hold on a wildcard altogether.
The Mets have been streaky all season, and that hasn’t stopped since they climbed into the wildcard race. They’re not alone. All the teams in the NL wildcard race have been streaky. The wildcard standings have churned. Maybe the Mets will rise above the scrum and keep a wildcard the rest of the way, like the Cardinals and Padres looked like they were doing for a moment. But for now, the Mets are in the same boat as the other teams in the wildcard scrum. Only the Braves have stayed above the scrum, and they’re perilously close to falling into it.
The Mets certainly aren’t worse than the other wildcard contenders. But I’m not convinced yet they’re much better than the rest of them, including the reigning NL champs. Which is to say that Sunday’s loss might be the start of a downturn and someone else grabbing the Mets’ wildcard. But if the 2nd half keeps churning like the 1st half and assuming the Mets don’t sell away the team, they’ll climb back up while the teams on top fall back down, and they’ll get their wildcard back.
No one claimed Joey Lucchesi, so he’s back with the Mets. That makes the Maton trade even cheaper. Maton looked good in his 1st outing and got the job done in his 3rd outing. Let’s hope his bad 2nd outing turns out to be abnormal.
.516 winning percentage = 84 wins = seems just about enough to get me to cough up for a whole bunch of post-season games that will never be played (by the Mets, anyway).
I guess for anyone feeling that Lindor and Nimmo were “snubbed” for the all-star game, it just proves that this game is completely meaningless. I am not watching 1 minute of any ASG coverage. It’s my 4-day break, too. :-)
Yeah, but you gotta look at how they are playing now. When they were going bad, they did not have Alvarez, Vientos, Iglesias, or a healthy JD.
If Stearns is worth his salt, he will have to get us more than one effective reliever. And we’ll see if we can count on Senga.
Objectively, I don’t think it’s an accurate assessment, despite the claims to the contrary, to classify Lindor and Nimmo being left off the AS team as a “snub” Reynolds’s/Profar have superior/similar stats, as do Turner and Abrams.
Mets baseball is back tonight!
I reiterate what Seth said about McNeil and Alonso. If McNeil can remember that he was Luis Arraez and Steven Kwan before they showed up and play closer to that, he would be a weapon, especially if he stayed in the lower third of the line-up, cashing in RISP’s and setting the table for Lindor and Nimmo. I hope Alonso’s participation in the home run derby and all-star game unlocks something and reminds him that he’s one of the best sluggers and RBI men in baseball.
We can’t expect the rest of the line-up to keep carrying McNeil and Alonso the rest of the way. The youngsters can regress and role players can cool off. The veterans who slumped to start the season can slump again. JD Martinez was already slumping going into the all-star break, maybe because of his spikes-related foot injury. (Why does any player, let alone a DH, need new spikes every 3-4 games anyway? Are they made from clay?)
I hope Senga comes back to a starting staff that maintains at least a league-average level. We can and should complain about the chronically short outings that have overtaxed the bullpen. But I’m grateful they’ve done as well as they have considering the starting pitchers were all question marks coming into the season. Quintana was not supposed to be a question mark, but he became one. Senga is a question mark coming back from injury.
And the bullpen. A relative strength at the start, now depleted, overworked, and no lead is safe. I hope Butto and Nunez keep it up, Diaz figures out how to work around his comeback from injury, and enough relievers stick to fill out a bullpen that needs to compensate for a starting rotation that rarely goes more than 5, if the day’s starter goes 5.