Mets’ dream of a playoff spot and 90 wins still alive

At the beginning of the year, the Mets’ path to the playoffs was clear – beat up on the bottom teams of the division and play close to .500 ball against the rest of MLB. Everyone considered the Phillies to be one of the worst teams in the league. I considered the Braves to be barely better than that and that the Marlins, while a step above, were basically a .500 team. My hope was for the Mets to go 40-17 against that trio and 50-55 against the rest of the teams on their schedule for a 90-win season.

After a three-game sweep of the Marlins, the Mets are 23-11 against the three teams they need to dominate. That’s a nice total, but slightly behind my target pace. The Mets have cleaned up so far against Philadelphia (8-1) and are doing quite well against Miami (9-4). It’s the hated Braves (6-6) who are spoiling the plan.

The Mets are 5-1 against the Braves in Queens but just 1-5 against them in Atlanta. Perhaps the lowest, non-injury related, point of the season came in mid-June, when Atlanta took a three-game set and beat both Jacob deGrom (a 2-1 setback) and Matt Harvey (a 1-0 loss). That was in the middle of a seven-game losing streak that left the team a game under .500 at 36-37.

In the 35 games since then, the Mets are 22-13. That’s a .629 winning percentage, one that works out to a 102-win season over an entire year. That’s a fantastic pace, one made even better given that the Mets played 22 games in that span versus teams over .500 for the season. The only three games in that stretch against the teams to dominate were the last three against Miami.

The Mets still have 23 games against the teams to dominate, with the majority of them coming on the road. They have seven remaining with the Braves, 4 R/3 H, six against the Marlins, 3 R/3 H, and 10 against the Phillies, 7 R/3 H. The Mets have a pretty drastic H/R split this year, as they are 38-18 in Citi Field and just 20-32 on the road.

But all three of those teams are different than when the Mets played them earlier in the season. The Braves, especially, are a different beast from earlier in the year. After losing three of their top four offensive players from a season ago, Atlanta figured to be a very poor offensive team. But several of their guys got off to strong starts at the plate, which led their first-half offense to be right about league average.

But reality is finally settling in for the Braves’ offense. They’ve scored three or fewer runs in 18 of their last 23 games and have totaled 62 runs in that span, an average of 2.7 runs per game. The Braves were sellers at the deadline and Freddie Freeman is back on the DL for the second time this year. Atlanta has won just three of its last 14 games and at this point it’s not unreasonable to think they could finish in last place.

Everything with the Marlins begins and ends with Giancarlo Stanton. They were hoping to have him back from the DL by now but his recovery has been slower than expected due to pain that doesn’t show up in an X-Ray. Maybe Dan Jennings can go yell at him or something. Meanwhile, Miami was a deadline seller, too.

That brings us to the Phillies. The Mets have had the most success against them and Philadelphia traded away more useful pieces than either Atlanta or Miami. But the Phillies are playing the best ball of any of the three bottom teams in the division, having gone 13-4 since July 17. It remains to be seen if this is the start of a turnaround in the City of Brotherly Love or merely some kind of dead cat bounce.

Can the Mets go 17-6 against these teams the rest of the way to meet my preseason expectation of 40 wins? Maybe but the good news is that they may not have to play that well against the dregs to make the playoffs. With Washington not running away with the division, the NL East is up for grabs, in addition to a Wild Card spot. Currently, the Mets have the sixth-best record in the league. With five teams making the playoffs, that would be a problem. But the Mets lead the East and would make the postseason today.

Along with the unexpected performance of the Nationals, the Mets have a re-tooled team with a greater chance to compete against the rest of MLB. Finally, the schedule is the easiest of all teams in baseball going forward. The Mets play just 14 games the rest of the way against teams over .500 and nine of those are at home.

Right now, FanGraphs projects the Mets to finish with 87 wins, which gives them a 45.7% chance of winning the division and an 8.3% chance of earning a Wild Card berth. Baseball Prospectus gives them a 69.7% chance of making the playoffs. VegasInsider establishes the odds of the Mets winning the NL pennant at 7:1, tied with the Pirates and ahead of the Cubs.

So, the big boys think the Mets have somewhere between a 50 and 70% chance of making the playoffs. If we were told in March that those would be the odds on August 6, most of us would have signed up for that in a heartbeat. After six straight sub-.500 seasons, a winning record seems well within reach this year. But that’s never been the goal. The Mets are in good shape to make the playoffs and a 90-win season is still on the table.

That’s something that would have seemed preposterous back on June 24.