Home Cooked Fish Fry

Alright, we've already established that the Mets play much better at Citi Field than they do on the road, but this is getting a little ridiculous.

Not that I'm complaining. Anytime the Marlins, who as any reader here knows I am no fan of, come in here all high and mighty after sweeping 4 from the Mets mere weeks ago, and come out of here having had the revenge sweep handed to them, you can't help but feel good. Home streak or not, it's always fun to kick the Marlins around and make them suffer in the process.

Not that any of these games were particularly easy. The Mets sandwiched a pair of frenetic comebacks around a brilliant performance from Jonathon Niese to do it. It's nice to see Niese back and doing his thing, but more surprising is the way they have hung around in games where they've fallen behind early. Sunday, in particular, was a good example of this. After Takahashi, who seems to have come back to earth a bit, fell in a deep hole, things seemed somewhat hopeless. But the Mets, in a trait that wholly avoided them last season, hung around, chipped away, and out of nowhere there's Jeff Francoeur hitting a game-tying HR, and then they're scraping the lead run across in the 8th, and there's K-Rod making it hairy in the 9th, but, hey, Cody Ross, little bitch that he is, struck out to cap off a rather sweet sweep.

So, now, here are the Mets, sitting just a tick above .500, hanging around on the fringes of contender-ship. It's markedly better than anyone really wanted to give them credit for, and a lot can be said about the way they've done it. That is to say, they've been doing it without major (or any) contributions from a lot of the guys you'd figure would be in the thick of it (Bay, Francoeur, Beltran), Wright scuffling half the time and Reyes taking weeks to find his sea legs. It's been less them and more guys like Angel Pagan, who seemed to spend most of the offseason learning how to play baseball, and the catching tandem of Barajas and Blanco, and perhaps most surprising of all, R.A. Dickey and Hisanori Takahashi pitching well. These are guys who were unceremoniously plonked in the middle of the rotation. These are guys whose signings were met with scoffs and laughter. But they're winning games for this team. The contributions of these guys have meant that we can't just go to sleep on the Mets, as much as it feels like we should at times. These games they're losing are usually fairly winnable (last Monday notwithstanding). And right now, this is anyone's division. This Summer is going to be kind of interesting.