2017 NL East Champion Mets ready for the playoffs

The articles one reads on baseball blogs mostly concern themselves with the team at the moment. Sometimes they discuss the past game, an injured player, or they look back at team history.

Here we will turn the clocks forward and imagine an article you might see right here at Mets 360 on Monday October 2nd, 2017. By then Mets 360 will be the most highly read of all the Mets themed blogs and the 2017 regular season will have ended the day before.

Despite yesterday’s loss to the Pittsburgh Pirates the Mets, who had clinched the NL East on Friday, finished the regular season with a 95-67 record. Their closest pursuers, the Washington Nationals, ended with a 92-70 record giving them one of the two wild card spots. Meanwhile 90-72 Atlanta is on the outside looking in as far as the playoffs are concerned.

The Mets have come a long way in just the last two years. You will recall that back in 2015 the team finished 86-76 while missing the playoffs by just one game. There was the controversy on that season’s last day when Terry Collins (undoubtedly ordered by GM Sandy Alderson) started a well rested Dillon Gee instead of Matt Harvey. Harvey, the ace of the staff, had already logged 196 innings and would have been pitching on three days rest.

In a Glavine-esque irony Gee picked that day to break his long streak of going five or more innings in every start. He was gone before the second inning was over, the game was lost, and the playoffs were missed.

Many fans thought that the reason the team fell short was its ill conceived attempt to field a playoff team with poor defenders Wilmer Flores and Daniel Murphy at shortstop and second base, respectively. It wasn’t until mid-May when Matt Reynolds was called up to play short that things started to perk up. With Dilson Herrera at second after the Murphy was traded to San Francisco in July the club finally had a solid, though unspectacular, defense up the middle.

After that crushing final day loss in September we fans watched as the drama played out with the manager and the GM. Collins asked for (some pundits say “demanded”) a two-year extension. Alderson offered one and the compromise reached was that Collins was fired and replaced by veteran skipper Ron Gardenhire.

A few days after that episode we learned that Alderson was “only 49% certain” that he wanted Collins back.

The offseason was highligted by the blockbuster trade during the winter meetings. Some Mets fans believe that the team overpaid when they traded Noah Syndergaard, Kevin Plawecki, and Brandon Nimmo to the Rockies for Troy Tulowitzki. Had the Rockies not agreed to pay 32% of Tulo’s salary this deal likely never could have happened. When Syndergaard had to be shut down for Tommy John surgery in June of 2016 the deal did not look quite as bad to some of the fans.

Last year in 2016 the team finally broke through and made the playoffs as a wild card with a 90-72 record. The lasting image of the regular season was the ugly collision in July at Citifield when best friends David Wright and Michael Cuddyer smashed together chasing a popup down the left field line. The captain spent three weeks on the DL with a sprained knee. Cuddyer had it much worse with both a concussion and separated shoulder. His playing days as a Met were over.

That injury opened the position for prospect Michael Conforto who quickly established himself as a solid hitter batting .281 with eight home runs after the All-Star break. His defense was nothing to write home about but Cuddyer had set the bar low so the rookie actually was a marginal improvement out there.

Even with the first round playoff loss, the 2016 Mets showed all of baseball that they were a team on the rise.

This season saw Lucas Duda outpoll Anthony Rizzo for the starting first base spot in the All-Star game. Herrera at second was solid both in the field and at the bat. Tulo, excepting for his two visits to the DL, was terrific when he was there. Reynolds carried on acceptably for him when Tulo was absent. Meanwhile Wright, now the team’s elder statesman and clearly no longer a star, gave the team a .270 batting average, 18 home runs, and drove in 85 runs.

Travis d’Arnaud made the All-Star Game as a reserve. Conforto settled in well as the team’s leftfielder, Lagares continued to supply Gold Glove defense in center, and Granderson in his final year with the team was adequate in right. The club having moved Dominick Smith from first base to right field in the minors see him as the heir apparent there.

Harvey, Steven Matz, and Jacob deGrom anchored the division’s best starting staff.

Is a World Series title in the offing? We’ll know that in a few weeks. But for now: Let’s Go Mets