Checking in with my preseason prediction for the Mets

In the immortal words of the Talking Heads in their seminal song “Once in a Lifetime”, David Byrne observed his large automobile, his beautiful house and his beautiful wife and asked, “How did I get here?”  Looking at the Mets’ two-thirds of the way through the baseball season, another part of the lyric shouts out to us, “My God, what have I done?”

I took a month off from writing this column due to a family vacation in Rome at the beginning of July, so my last effort on this site was from the beginning of June.  I was despondent when I wrote that piece.  The Mets were coming off an epically bad month of May – which put them 15 games behind the Phillies.  I was down on everything.  Channeling my inner Randolph Duke, I shouted “Sell Mortimer Sell!” from every rooftop.  Pete Alonso: gone.  Jeff McNeil: gone.  Anyone want a pitcher?  I’ve got three starters we’re not using.  I was willing to sell anything, including the air rights over the pitcher’s mound at Citi Field.

What a difference a couple of months can make.

Somehow, the Mets went on a terrific run.  Suddenly, they sported a deep lineup.  Amazingly, the Mets are a really solid defensive squad.  “OMG” became a Mets anthem.  Grimace?!?  How did we get here?

Like most teams not in first place in their respective divisions, they need more starting pitching and bullpen reinforcements, but these are obtainable commodities.  As the trade deadline approached, there were articles saying that the Mets were going “all in” on a playoff push.

Happily, David Stearns improved the team with solid, but unspectacular additions that did not mortgage the future of the team.  No “can’t miss” prospect was sacrificed to obtain three middle of the road bullpen arms, a left-handed rental bat and a back end of the rotation starting pitcher.

So what happened next?

The Mets became the Mets and played themselves out of a Wild Card spot.  From a mere .5 games out of the top Wild Card spot just last week, they are now 1.5 games behind the third Wild Card team – the Arizona Diamondbacks.  Losers of two out of three against the lowly Anaheim Angels, the Mets reminded us that they are a mere seven game losing streak away from another September of Irrelevance.

What will the rest of the season bring?  It is easy to see how these Mets win 30 games the rest of the way.  They have series against some of the worst teams in baseball: the A’s, the White Sox, the Marlins, the Reds, the Nationals, the Rockies and the Blue Jays are all in front of them.  Feasting on these teams will be crucial to a successful rest of the season.  A 17-4 record against these bad teams means they only need to go 13-15 against the rest of the schedule.  30 more wins (88-74) puts them well within reach of a Wild Card berth.

As a long-suffering fan of the Orange & Blue, however, one can also make the case that this recent hot streak is an outlier and that this team cannot possibly overcome the hole they dug themselves into the first eight weeks of the season.  The loss of Kodai Senga saw to it that the Mets will go an entire season without two starts from its “Ace” from last year.  Paul Blackburn is never going to be mistaken for a top of the rotation starter.  Edwin Diaz is still a shaky presence at the back of the bullpen.  None of the imported relievers are 8^th inning/high leverage guys.  The current crop of starters almost never see the 7^th inning – meaning more stress on a dubious relief corps.

The pitching is one area of concern, but the fact is that this team will make it, or not, on the strength of its lineup.  In their 2 out of 3 losses to the Angels this past weekend, the Mets left a small village on base.  The team went 6-35 with RISP and left 27 runners in scoring position stranded.  In fact, other than a 15-run outburst against the Twins, the lineup has struggled mightily over the last two weeks.  No batter has symbolized that decline in production more than Pete Alonso.  The fact is that Pete is playing himself into a one-year contract unless he has an unbelievable last 8 weeks of the season.

At the beginning of the season, I predicted that the Mets would hang around the Wild Card race until the end of the season, but they would fall short.  With 49 games remaining, if the Mets go 28-21, they will be at 86 wins.  That won’t be enough to play games in October.

I’m sticking to my prediction from months ago.  Close, but no cigar.