Not This Good...Or Are They?

They’re probably not this good, are they? How could they be? Fifteen wins in nineteen games seems to give us all the answer we need, a stretch that’s unfurled since their last pairing of consecutive losses, not to mention the active streak of three victories during which the most recent ascension or explosion feels it can’t be topped, yet the next day it is. The odds say sooner or later the Mets who are making a science out of finding ways to win will accidentally lose a game, and from there a few balls will bounce in their opponents’ favor, and suddenly…

Welcome to the inversion. The above paragraph was written just over a month ago, except on Opposite Day, when every positive about the Mets now was a negative about the Mets then, meaning we used words like “bad” and “lose,” if you can remember back that far. There were a lot of Opposite Days for the 2024 Mets, who once relentlessly depressed us, which seems impossible, since we now know them only for relentlessly uplifting us. You know how the temperatures have been in New York lately. The Mets are playing at a crisp 180 degrees from where they were in May when we decided they were going to stay ice cold for the duration.

Instead, they’ve burned a path through June. From a nadir of 24-35, they have risen to 39-39. It’s a plateau that looked like Everest when they gathered at base camp to make this particular climb. Surely .500 wasn’t their goal. It was too high. Yet here they are, planting a flag for the moment atop Mount Break Even.

How did we get here? Why ask how? Team meetings, licensed characters, progression to the mean…take your pick. I choose to process what’s happening without questioning it too much. When the Mets were dreadful, that looked like what the Mets were. Now that the Mets are marvelous, I think I’ll just marvel at them.

Wednesday night, the only thing the Mets did wrong was get rained on. Shocking to realize they can’t overwhelm the weather as they do their opposition, but give them time. The 87-minute precipitation pause probably cost callup Ty Adcock his Met debut (he was warming in the pen when the tarp rolled out at Citi Field) and it made staying awake a challenge for some watching from home (I snoozed through the seventh), but the club’s momentum never dampened. Up 4-0 on the Yankees in the bottom of the fifth in what was already an official game, the Mets came back once the grass was sufficiently dry and ground their municipal rivals into the dirt. Eventually, it became an official ass-kicking, with a final of Mets 12 Judge 2.

Sean Manaea walked a few too many of the nettlesome neighbors, but that’s what double plays are for. Sean threw three pitches that each turned into a pair of outs. “Just the Two of Us,” indeed. With the lead up to 7-0 following the weather delay, Danny Young did what pitchers everywhere do: he gave up a home run to Aaron Judge with Juan Soto on base. As long as Judge couldn’t hit an eight-run homer — and not even he can do that — we were gonna be OK. We’d already had a long ball from Francisco Alvarez and were going to get one apiece from Tyrone Taylor and Harrison Bader, although I napped as the latter flew. There were all kinds of other runs and runs batted in, and there was Adrian Houser, once upon a time the internal bane of our existence, now closing out a three-inning save and a Subway Series sweep.

Could a person want more than a ten-run throttling of the so-called Bronx Bombers, described to us by the best booth in town? Well, I always want to add to the all-time Met roster, and though I was deprived of typing in the name “Ty Adcock,” I did get to expand the mothership of lists to include outfielder Ben Gamel, who checked in for defense in the ninth to become Met No. 1,240 overall. And will ya look at that: a “24” right in the middle of Gamel’s chronological ranking, apropos of Michael Mays, amid a group of dignitaries (including Cleon Jones) wearing Mets No. 24 jerseys, throwing out the first pitch Wednesday evening in memory of his father Willie. Isn’t it beautiful how the Mets’ institutional amnesia that the Greatest Ballplayer Ever played for them has lifted and stayed lifted?

Isn’t everything beautiful about the Mets as we speak? Is it baffling that such sentences are being composed? From the perspective of earlier in the season, absolutely. But the season went on and the Mets did, too, becoming something wholly different from what we were sure they were. Emotional cost certainty is in flux as a result. That’s the potential downside of any surge from nowhere to somewhere. I read something in April about fans of really good teams and fans of really bad teams being able to deal with losses better than fans of .500 teams, because if your team is really good, one loss is a veritable little fish within a great big pond of wins, while if your team is really bad, one loss is just one more loss that doesn’t surprise you in the least. The fan of the .500 team, however, sees any given loss as a referendum on the course of the season. Are we really this bad? Are we really this good? We don’t know. The finding out suddenly has stakes.

Which, we are beginning to be reminded, is why they play the games. The Mets’ arrival at .500 coincides with the recognition that there are definitely teams in this league and, for that matter, the other league who appear not quite as good as them, but very few who seem all that much better. The Yankees are the latest powerhouse we’ve faced that is obviously headed to the postseason, yet clearly isn’t impervious to injury or imperfection. All among the Braves, Phillies and Dodgers have struck me the same way. Incredible talent at the core, but if they’re dinged up enough, they have depth issues like anybody else. Of teams against whom the Mets have gone head-to-head to date, only the Brewers, who we played so long ago it was March, and the Guardians have come across (to me, anyway) as in a league of their own. Teams get hot, teams cool down. We’re about to welcome in the steaming Astros, who were twelve under .500 in this very season, ebbing lower than even us. They’re now where we are.

Can our .500 club, having passed a passel of NL wheel-spinners to become what would have to be objectively considered a playoff contender, actually continue to be, you know, this good? We are not impervious to injury or imperfection. We are still without our closer. We are also without two other bullpen mainstays in Sean Reid-Foley and Drew Smith, the latter having gone on the IL Wednesday, which explains why somebody like me is closely monitoring the movements of Ty Adcock. Ben Gamel is here because Starling Marte isn’t. Yet we’re not really missing anybody the way we’ve been playing as a whole. No Edwin Diaz amounted to no problem for two nights as we constructed leads so tall not even Hammerin’ Yank Aaron could completely cut them down to size. Everybody but Jeff McNeil is hitting consistently, and McNeil’s bat, as evidenced by the deep lineout that brought home a run in the New York-New York finale, is showing a bit of a pulse, too. Yet the collective sizzle will at some point fizzle. That’s not glass half-empty fatalism talking. It’s simply what happens in every season. The collective fizzle turned to sizzle. It was bound to happen, regardless that there was no sign it would.

Every season it’s like this, if not necessarily in a fashion as extreme as 0-5 followed by 12-3 followed by 12-27 followed by 15-4 to get to 39-39. Downs. Ups. Frustration. Elation. Not knowing exactly what comes next. Not knowing exactly how we’ll handle it. Not knowing if we’re really as bad or as good as we’re certain we are or if we’re just prone to taking a wildly divergent route to middling. Again, that’s why they play the games.