Will The Real New York Mets Please Stand Up?

If you’re a baseball fan – particularly a fan of the New York Mets – logic sometimes doesn’t apply. A good run will lead to long thoughts about its continuation well into the future. Conversely, a spell in the doldrums will cause a fan to think their team will never win another game…ever…in perpetuity. The thing about baseball, though, is that fortunes can change on a dime and you may not even notice. The every day-ness of the sport is a mixed blessing: if you’re going well, tomorrow may bring the start of an epochal slump and on the other side of the coin, every day is a chance for redemption. As Earl Weaver famously said after a surprising and bitter defeat in the World Series at the hands of the Mets, “This ain’t football; we do this every day.” And so we fans can get lulled into false senses of reality, in defiance of any and all logic. We all knew the Mets’ 11-game win skein wouldn’t last forever, and we made brave jokes about finishing the season 159 – 3, but still… We actually looked down in the standings at the putative favorites – the Washington Nationals – with the slightest measure of pity. Of course the good times were going to continue to roll; of course the Mets are this good. Not scary, crazy good, like 1986 or 2006, but good enough to probably outlast an admittedly weak division and take a surprise title.

18 days later, we’re singing a different tune. After a spate of injuries have taken their toll, after porous infield defense has been starkly exposed, after a decided lack of fundamental skills and baseball smarts has been exhibited, the Mets suddenly cannot get out of their own way. All that good, timely hitting that was exhibited during the heady days of April has evaporated. Bad habits are being sunk into and the whiz-bang hitting coach suddenly is nowhere to be found. The young players, who looked so polished and mature a month ago, now look as green as last week’s bread. The sluggers are hitting singles, the singles hitters aren’t hitting anything. Such is the nature of slumps and the easy pull is to say “See? I knew it all along! That first month was just a tease, all smoke and mirrors and peek-a-boo feathers…” The Mets are currently trying to slog through a 7-11 morass in the immediate afterglow of their hot start and we fans now shake our heads at the all-too-familiar. Juxtapose the Mets’ current situation against their current tormentors, the spry young Cubs. Chicago’s lineup looks like a giant wave of raw offensive talent, making the Mets look feeble in comparison. The Mets have lost four straight to these kids, each loss seeming inevitable.

Absent from all the grousing, you’ll notice, has been the starting pitching. On the whole, it’s been marvelous, a fact that gets obscured when it goes unsupported by offense and done-in by a shaky bullpen. The early success this season was a three-legged stool, with standout starting pitching, good situational hitting and a reliable-at-worst bullpen. Then David Wright pulled a hamstring, Travis d’Arnaud busted a pinkie and Juan Lagares got a strain under his armpit. Then Jerry Blevins took a liner off his forearm, Buddy Carlyle came up with a sore back and Carlos and Alex Torres both lost the plate. With two-thirds of their foundation rendered ineffective, is it any wonder that things look as they do? But that’s the thing: this current bad patch is just as real as the opening hot streak. The injured will return, the luck will even out: the law of averages dictates that. Again, the every day-ness: baseball luck evens things out. Look no further than those Nationals, now stalking the first-place berth that was supposed to be their birthright. They are the Mets stood on their head. They started off with an abysmal stretch that bottomed out at 7-13, on April 27, just as the Mets were sitting at 15-5. But an amazing comeback from a 10-2 deficit in the next day’s game immediately reversed the Nats’ negative momentum and sent them on a 12-3 run which has put them right inside the Mets’ collar. The hoary cliché goes that you’re never as good as you look when you win, nor are you as bad as you look when you lose. It looks like the Mets and the Nats will both put that maxim under the microscope repeatedly between now and October.

It’s going to be agonizingly fun.

Follow me on Twitter @CharlieHangley.