Mets hold their own while playing a challenging schedule

In all professional sports leagues, the conventional wisdom is to play .500 versus the good teams and then clean up against the bad teams. But does it work? Here are the MLB teams that essentially played .500 versus teams who were .500 and above last year and how they fared overall:

Team	vs. .500+	PCT	Overall	Playoffs
Rays	48-44	.522	99-63	Yes
Phillies	47-43	.522	90-72	Yes
Twins	37-36	.507	87-75	Yes
Yankees	47-46	.505	82-80	No
Astros	42-43	.494	90-72	Yes
Rangers	42-45	.483	90-72	Yes
Red Sox	51-55	.481	78-84	No

Five of our seven teams followed this plan to the playoffs. The ones who didn’t messed up by not dominating the bad teams. The Yankees went just 35-34 against teams under .500 and the Red Sox were even worse at 27-29.

The Mets have played 16 games and as of today, all of them have been versus teams over .500 on the season. And the Mets are 8-8. They’re holding their own against the good teams. We’ll see how they fare once they start playing the poor teams in the league.

But the thing is, that there are only 11 teams under .500 in the league right now. The good news is that two of them are in the NL East, meaning the Mets will get 26 games against bad teams right there. The Mets went 16-10 against the Marlins and Nationals a year ago. And that was with them being a 75-win team. If this is a playoff team this year, how much better can they do against those two squads?

The bad news is that with only 11 bad teams – and five of them in the AL – the Mets will only play around 65 games against bad teams. If you go back to the chart above, you see the Twins were a game over .500 against the good teams and wound up with 87 wins. But that’s helped tremendously by playing 89 games against the bad teams. The Mets simply won’t have that many games, unless something unexpected happens to either the Braves or Phillies.

Of course, this is not an ideal way to look at the issue. It’s a back-of-the-envelope way, one which for simplicity makes a lot of assumptions. The most obvious ones are the grouping of teams with dissimilar records together. Last year the Padres were 82-80, so a win against them was counted the same as one against the 104-58 Braves.

We could make it more complex and account for differences in winning percentage more varied than just .500 or better or under .500 – but that still wouldn’t fix everything. No team plays the same throughout a 162-game season and when you play a certain team can matter a lot. The 56-106 2023 Royals had a 7-game winning streak, along with a stretch where they went 10-1. If you played them in one of those time periods, they weren’t exactly a .346 winning percentage squad. And if you played them any other time, they were even worse.

But it would be a giant headache to try to work around that particular issue, assuming it could be done at all.

Still, for a team projected to have a win total in the low 80s, it’s a very encouraging sign to see how they’ve started the season against a challenging schedule. Here are the teams they’ve played to date:

Team	Overall	Non-Mets
Brewers	10-5	7-5
Tigers	9-7	7-6
Reds	9-7	8-5
Braves	10-5	9-3
Royals	11-6	10-4
Pirates	11-6	11-5
Total	60-36	52-28

The combined winning percentage for the teams they’ve played so far is .625 overall. It will be tough to find another unique stretch of 16 games where the Mets will face teams with a record this good. The Mets have a 14-game stretch in mid-June – when else? – where they face the Padres, Rangers, Cubs, Yankees and Astros – HOU currently under .500 but that could change by then – that might challenge this current streak. But those games are bracketed by facing the Marlins and Nats.

And if you take out the results versus the Mets, the teams they’ve played have a .650 winning percentage. They’re not fattening up their records by playing the team from Queens.

Meanwhile, the Mets have two more games against the Pirates and then three more in Los Angeles against the Dodgers before they finally face their first bad team in the Giants, who are currently 7-10. And San Francisco has two games against Miami and four against Arizona before the Mets come to town, meaning it’s possible the Giants will be above .500 when they play, too.

No team can control the schedule; you just play the squad in front of you that day and hope you catch a team here and there while it’s not hot and playing the best ball of the season. However, there’s simply no way to look at how the Mets have played thru 16 games and not be impressed. We have to assume that at some point the schedule gets easier and that Kodai Senga and J.D. Martinez return to bolster the team.

In the interim, let’s hope that the offense keeps producing like it has recently, putting up five or more runs in six of the last seven games, totaling 50 runs in that span. And if a starting pitcher wants to step up and throw seven innings in an outing, that would be welcome, too.