The Mets’ Hot Start Will Come In Handy Later

“Calm down; it’s only April.”

“There’s a long way to go, and Washington will recover.”

This is what the Mets fan has heard over the past two-and-a-half weeks. Over that span, the Mets have started 2015 like a house afire, lighting up NL East opponents to the tune of a 14-5 record from the initial spark on Opening Day. While fans from the Bronx smirk and call them a flash-in-the-pan, the Mets’ start is going to go a long way towards seeing a successful – i.e. playoff – campaign emerge. One more quote for you: “You can’t win a pennant in April, but you can lose one.” The Mets have had some great experience with that hoary cliché – see 1976 and 2001 for but two examples. The times they’ve found themselves on the positive side of that quote have been well documented lately: 1969, 1986 and 2006 have been cited as occasions when the Mets got off to similar starts as now, and were able to see it through to – at the very least – the deep end of the playoffs. So, if we’re looking toward the Mets making the postseason, history has told us that a start like this is nearly essential.

As this 2015 season dawned, it seemed like everybody had the Mets pegged as basically a .500 team. Oh, sure, there were a few pundits or…ahem…”experts” who had the team scratching out 84 or so wins and putting themselves, at best, “in the mix” for the second Wild Card. If they turn out to be right, if the Mets revert to being a .500 team for the rest of the season, that will result in a final win total of 85 – the optimistic end of people’s pre-season prognostications. The question is this, though: have they shown us enough that we fans can be confident about them doing a lot better than that? Met fans, of course, are renowned for carrying their un-confidence around like a cartoon thought bubble. Look no further than the past six days: losses in two of three games at Yankee Stadium, where starting pitching either faltered from the outset or was betrayed by a sudden switch to stupidball and losses in two of three games in Miami, where a Daniel Murphy miracle homerun was all that stood between them and being swept. That all this null activity has come on the heels of a franchise-historic winning run makes the cut feel a little deeper, like the whole hot start thing was a phony all the time: some of us feel like we’ve been duped and even worse, let ourselves be duped. However, this should be a temporary condition.

The thing is, the historic streak and the hot start actually did happen, however much it may look like a mirage right now. The Mets did begin the year 13-3. For real. The wins won’t be taken away, trust me. With these victories in the bank, even the pundits are taking notice. After the weekend, Dan Szymborski, Master of the ZiPS projection system, had the Mets winning 87 ballgames and winning the NL East over the Nationals by a game.

And here’s another thing to remember: it was largely accomplished without the help of David Wright, Travis d’Arnaud and Jerry Blevins and completely without the help of Jenrry Mejia, Bobby Parnell or Vic Black. Wright is due back sometime after this weekend, d’Arnaud a couple weeks after that. Parnell and Black will probably be able to contribute sometime around Memorial Day, Blevins by the end of June and Mejia just before the All-Star break. All this could — should? — conspire to push the Mets over the magical 90-win threshold, even in the absence of acquiring some badly-needed middle infield defense.

Bottom line: if the Mets are going to fall back to .500 for the rest of the way, it’s far better to fall back onto a 13-3 cushion than a 5-11 one.

Follow me on Twitter @CharlieHangley.