You can root for the Mets without being convinced of their doom
Banner day is Sunday before the game against the Padres. You should head to the game and help convince the Mets you want them to do Banner Day every year. Seriously. Make a banner, go to the game, take pictures, tweet pictures, talk about the banners.
I’ve mocked up a little design that I think would make a cool banner, or at least part of a banner. Or even a t-shirt. So, celebrate the Mets 50th anniversary with a banner and have some fun on Sunday!
Mets Today asks: “Is this the soft spot in the schedule?”
Three games against the Pirates followed by four games with the lowly Padres — a seven-game span of less than mediocre opponents. What makes it all the more intriguing is that this stretch is “the calm before the storm” in that it comes right before perhaps the toughest section of their season — the next 8 series include facing the Phillies, Cardinals (for four), first-place Nationals, Yankees, Rays, Reds, first-place Orioles, and Yankees again. Whew!
I think strength of schedule is an argument that doesn’t mean much in baseball. It’s more suited for the short season that the NFL plays, although many people had the New York Giants buried based on the schedule difficulty and they ended up winning the Super Bowl. There are so many hot and cold streaks in baseball that you can get a good team that’s slumping and beat them, and get a bad team that turns in three good pitching performances in a row and sweeps you. Sometimes the timing is that you face the top three pitchers in a rotation, and other times you get the soft underbelly. Losing to a bad team doesn’t eliminate you from contention and more than beating a good team clinches a competitive season. This is part of the reason I don’t care about a balanced schedule.
So no, I’m not concerned that the Mets have a difficult stretch coming up. I think it’s more important to concentrate on how the Mets themselves are playing since certainly the Mets can beat any team if some guys are hitting and Johan Santana and R.A. Dickey are dazzling. It’s also worth noting that although the Yankees and Phillies may project as tough teams, they aren’t that right now. The opposite might be said about the Nationals and the Orioles.
Still, the Padres should be a very beatable team, and you’d like the see the Mets get their act together and do so. Winning the series against the Padres would put them at their high water mark for the season and that’s a great place to start when you’re facing the defending division and world champs back to back.
Memorable series in Toronto? Perhaps not. The Mets flirted more with last place than with first this weekend, but they got out of the country with a win and perhaps that’s a step forward.
No NL East team swept this weekend, providing the Mets some solace. The Mets also have managed to squeak out some wins while they’ve been struggling, perhaps doing some good towards minimizing the damage. Avoiding long losing streaks is a good way to avoid undoing all the progress you’ve made during winning streaks, and simply being 4-6 over the last 10 instead of 2-8 has done that. A good way to have a winning record is to win more games when you’re playing well than you lose when you’re playing poorly, since all teams do both for at least some portion of the season.
It’s important to minimize the length of said losing streaks as well, and for the last couple of decades the National League’s favorite way to do that has been to face the Pittsburgh Pirates. The Mets will travel to Pittsburgh for a three game set, and while it’s true that they’re not a good team, it’s important to note that they rank 3rd in the NL in team ERA and the Mets will be facing their two best pitchers in Bedard and McDonald. The counter argument is of course that the Pirates can’t hit a lick and the Mets will be tossing the top of their rotation as well, with Johan Santana, R.A. Dickey and Jon Niese getting the starts.
It’s worth noting that the Mets are three games over .500 more than a quarter of the way through the season and haven’t been a losing team even for one game all season long despite being almost universally picked to finish last. It isn’t because everything has clicked either. The starters have probably been better than expected overall, but they’ve been prone to absolute disaster starts as well. The bullpen is incredibly streaky, and it almost seems that as Frank Francisco goes, so go the Mets. The offense that should’ve been the Mets best feature has been spotty, although David Wright is hitting for two. Ike Davis has been pretty much a disaster and the two positions that the Mets really didn’t have any depth, shortstop and catcher, are two positions the Mets faced injuries at . Both Ruben Tejada and Josh Thole went down while putting up strong offensive numbers, and their backups certainly aren’t up to par.
And still the Mets roll on. Time to take care of some Pirates.
Conor Coen wins the seatcrew.com Mets tickets! Enjoy the game!
And the Mets win the ballgame!
That’s a five game winning streak to put them at 5 games over .500 for the first time since just after the All-Star Break in 2010. It also puts them inches from first place. (And in solid Wild Card position) It’s a sweep of the defending division champions and not just a sweep but a sweep that including them pitching their two best pitchers.
With the Knicks eliminated that’s one less team for people to distract themselves with and not notice that the Mets might actually be pretty good. Off days with the Mets on a winning streak are the best type of off days.
Well obviously it’s not a must-win, it’s May 9th and the 31st game of the season!
Still, there’s a certain symbolic worth to winning this game. It’d be a sweep of the defending division champions. It’d be beating their second ace pitcher. It’d be answering a losing streak with a bigger winning streak.
And it’d put the Mets five games above .500, which is somewhere they haven’t been all season, nor all of last season. They haven’t been five games over .500 since July 19th of 2010. This was just after the All-Star Break when they rushed Carlos Beltran and Luis Castillo back and got steamrolled by the soon-to-be World Champion San Francisco Giants at the beginning of their run.
The Mets should have a fair shot at this. Dillon Gee hasn’t quite gotten the results he’d have liked, but he’s getting a lot more swinging strikes than previous years and walking fewer. This should be a good recipe for retiring the weak-hitting Philadelphia Phillies. They have Cliff Lee going, but he’s going to be limited returning from injury and the Mets have been beating on the Phillies pen the last two games.
So it’s not a must-win game, but it’s still a game you’d really like to see the Mets get.
I don’t usually do game recaps, and I don’t usually buy into “they would’ve lost this one last year” arguments trying to compare this team to that one. This game was too much fun not to keep talking about though.
Halladay gave up a hard hit ball to lead off the game that required a great catch to turn into an out, but after that he was pretty steady until the 6th when a tight zone and good patience by Andres Torres with two outs led to a walk. Nieuwenhuis laced a single into left and that brought up our uncrowned Captain. David Wright rocketed one down the line that Mayberry misplayed off the side wall and two runs scored to tie the game. Meanwhile Jon Niese battled some control problems but only allowed those two early runs through five innings.
The Mets would battle and fight through the next couple of innings, having runners on base and not scoring and allowing runners to reach base but not allowing them to score. Josh Thole may have suffered a concussion, which sucks.
If you believe in poetic moments and turning points in seasons there was a huge one in the 7th inning. With two on and one out Hunter Pence grounded to second base where Daniel Murphy flipped to Justin Turner who threw to first. Shane Victorino slid a good three feet wide of the bag to take out Justin Turner and was ruled out for interference. You may recall a similar play in late August of 2007. It was the top of the ninth in Philadelphia with Marlon Anderson on first and Endy Chavez on third with one out and the Phillies leading 3-2. Shawn Green grounded out to shortstop and Anderson went in hard at second, keeping Rollins from turning the double play and allowing Endy Chavez to tie the game. Except Anderson was ruled to have interfered on a play much less clear cut than last nights. Instead the Mets lost that game, got swept in a four game series against the Phillies, and failed to completely bury them in the division. That one game may have been the difference between the playoffs and what ultimately happened in 2007. Who knows how things are different from there. Now the Mets get one of those calls that helps them win a game and go back to three games over .500 and 2.5 games ahead of the last place Philadelphia Phillies. Is it karma? The universe correcting it’s course back to one that features the Mets establishing a dynasty and perennial playoff team? Is it the turning point in a season that the Mets were universally picked to finish last but haven’t been under .500 at any point?
Probably not. It was a great win culminated by Jordany Valdespin collecting his first major league hit in epic fashion with a 3-run home run off one of the game’s best closers. It instantly became a Mets classic, but it’s still just one win in May. The Mets will face so many ups and downs and turning points this season that it’ll be near impossible to pinpoint this game in May when it all started going right. Would the Mets have won this game last year? Well..maybe. After all, many people compared this game to the Omir Santos game winning home run off of Papelbon back in 2009. 2009’s team doesn’t seem like one that you’d describe as resilient, having been the first losing season since 2004.
Still, there’s a lot to like about this game. The Mets hung in there against a tough pitcher. Jon Niese didn’t let the wheels fall off. Except for Torres misplay in the first allowing Jimmy Rollins an extra base, they played pretty crisp defense. They made pitches when they needed to and exploited the Phillies weaknesses. They took a four game losing streak and responded with a three game, and counting, winning streak.
Is this season going to be a gusty team that fights and scraps to stay above .500? A scrappy contender that finds a way to get at least a wild card spot? An overachieving bunch of rookies that show promise but ultimately revert to what they were predicted to be? It’s too early to tell, but no matter where it winds up it’s going to be a fun ride.
The Mets are 10-5 against the other NL East teams this year and they have six more coming up this week. It’s against the Marlins and the Phillies, the two teams behind the Mets in the standings. They’re both capable teams, and the Mets face some good pitching, but it’s the perfect time to reassert their intra-division dominance and keep a winning record going.
The Mets have showed a nice resiliency this season with managing to avoid falling below .500 despite a couple of losing streaks. 4-2 would maintain their .667 winning percentage in the division as well as put them back to their 4 games over .500 high watermark. With Tejada (likely as of Sunday evening) going to the disabled list the Mets could use some of that resiliency. Jordanny Valdespin spent just enough time back in Buffalo to make sure he didn’t leave the oven on, and is on his way back to the majors.
The Mets do face some good pitching, but Roy Halladay hasn’t been perfect this year and Cliff Lee is making his first start off the DL. Hopefully there’s some rust there. The Mets miss Josh Johnson in Miami, but Carlos Zambrano, Mark Buehrle and Ricky Nolasco have been pitching pretty well. Maybe this is the week Ike Davis and Lucas Duda start acting like the bash brothers I hoped they could be.
The Mets are now 2-1 in series sweeps. It’s never a good thing when you get swept, and it doesn’t even matter who the opponent is. Obviously you tend to eye weaker teams with the thought that you’re supposed to get a few free wins off them, but that’s not how baseball works. The Mets ran into the Astros while they were playing well, with the back of the rotation, with a still struggling Ike Davis, and with a couple of players affected by the flu. It’d be as foolish to eye these three games and use it as confirmation bias that the Mets are a last place quality team as it would be to take the 3-0 sweep of the Braves as evidence that the Mets will win the division.
So it’s time for the Mets to crawl home and lick their wounds, reassess the fifth spot in the rotation, and maybe the last bullpen spot as well. Meanwhile the Yankees just lost two of three to the team picked to finish last in their division. The Phillies and Braves traded bullpen explosions through 11 innings before Chipper Jones made it 15-13, final. Roy Halladay started that game btw. Chris Schwinden or Roy Halladay, the result was the same.
Perspective. Sweeps suck and the Mets have a lot of adjustments to make. They’ve been knocked to the mat, but they’ve got plenty of time to stand back up and start swinging. They’ve got a day to dust themselves off and go back on attack mode. Certainly they could take this blow and keep reeling, but I think the Mets have shown a tendency to bounce back pretty well under Terry Collins. They’re due for some home runs, and hopefully as the weather warms up a little and Ike warms up a little, they’ll start hitting more. Scoring more, winning more, and hopefully pitching better to boot. May starts out 0-2, but plenty of time to salvage that. The six games against the Phillies will be important in distancing themselves from them in the standings so that if and when they get Chase Utley, Ryan Howard, and Cliff Lee back the Mets have some breathing room.
As you probably know by now, Hofstra held Dana Brand’s 50th Anniversary of the Mets conference last week. I wrote a paper on the new age of Mets fans, like myself, who have not seen a Mets World Series Championship. I talk about the differences in rooting for the team without remembering them going all the way, without that light at the end of the tunnel. I emphasize how different it is for us not to have lived through all the great stories told about the ’86 and ’69 teams and how a lot of the changes to baseball like the Wild Card or black uniforms are things we’ve pretty much always had.
Check out some of the other bloggers who were there, particularly Greg at Faith and Fear in Flushing who put a lot of work in making it a conference Dana would’ve been proud of. On the Black. A Gal For All Seasons. Metstradamus. The Eddie Kranepool Society. Mets Police. And probably a bunch I’m forgetting this morning.
You can read my paper in its entirety here.
Clearly Barry Zito’s ERA is a factor of small sample size. (sing it everybody!)
He’s coming into tonight’s game with a 1.125 ERA having given up only two runs over 16 innings. This is unsustainable, as I suspect the Mets will demonstrate.
If the Mets score 6 runs in 5.1 or less it would triple Zito’s 1.125 ERA.
If they only score five they’d have to do it in 2.1 innings to triple it.
4 runs in 8 or less innings would double it.
If they only score 3, they’d have to chase him in 4 innings to double his ERA.
For his ERA to dip under 1, he only needs 2.1 scoreless innings, but if the Mets score once he’d need to go 11.