We’re inching ever closer to the arrival of pitchers and catchers at the training camps in Florida and Arizona. By the way, did something else go on in Arizona this past weekend? Suffice to say Pete Carroll had his very own Carlos Beltran moment. I digress… In any case, now is the time when the computers start to whirr, the algorithms are calculated, the data is fed into the whiz-bang gizmos and the pre-season predictions are spat out. Over at Baseball Prospectus, there is a proprietary prediction system called PECOTA – no, nothing to do with former Met Bill Pecota – that is used as a general tool for prognosticators far and wide. This year, the gee-gaw is predicting our New York Mets to finish with a 2015 record of…drum roll, please…82-80. That’s the bad news. You can hear the air hissing out of the Met fan balloon even as you read this. Another disappointing, playoff-less campaign that does nothing but leave David Wright a year older and not a step closer to the promised land.
Oh, but wait, though…
The PECOTA system calls for the San Diego Padres, after a flurry of off-season flapping and rejiggering, to finish with a tally of…83-79, which the dingus figures to be good enough to nail down the second Wild Card spot. Can that be right? Can the Mets – these Mets who have done scarcely enough to improve their on-field product externally from last year’s 79-83 – be predicted to finish in second place in their division and a bare game out of the big dance? Is that possible?
If that’s the case, it means the regular season will be a bit fraught. As we all know, a baseball season is the definition of “ebb and flow.” There’s a game every day and if you put too much freight on any one of them, you’re setting yourself up for disappointment. The best teams in history lost 33% of the time – one game out of every three will go an unpleasant direction. If this Mets prediction holds up, that means nearly every one of the upcoming 162 would have playoff implications. That’s the recipe for one lulu of an ulcer for a Met fan. While some see this as marvelous news, it can also be argued that this is a mere setup for yet another year of finishing out of the money – perhaps a more exciting one, but nothing more than another fruitless endeavor. Let’s face it: as fun and exciting as 1985 was, everybody would admit that ’86 was better.
Over here, that one-game margin holds out a glimmer, a chance that with a lucky break or two – granted, foreign territory where the Mets are concerned – they’ll be able to beat that deficit and claim a Wild Card spot. With a margin that thin, a game here or there can mean the difference between challenging for a trophy and another year of October golf. Something like that would take stout pitching, which, by all accounts, the Mets have in spades. It would also take heralded youngsters to perform as advertised, as well as minimal regression from the likes of Travis d’Arnaud, Lucas Duda and Juan Lagares. It will take extraordinary physical health. Perhaps most importantly, it will take nerve and astute manipulation of resources by the manager – admittedly, the area where the Mets would most likely come a cropper. An occasional lucky bounce would help, too.
History is not on their side. We can only hope fortune is.
Follow me on Twitter @CharlieHangley.
If it’s only because the Mets fans deserve it like no other, it would be a just reward.
Unfortunately if a good manager is worth 2 or 3 wins in a season, how many loses does a bad manger equate to?
The Mets up their win total by 4-5 games with a switch from Terry to Wally. It will piss me off to no end if they do in fact finish just out of the playoffs and we can all point to those 4 or 5 “Terry games” where his bonehead moves (or lack of moves) cost us the postseason.