Ride The Wave

The Mets schedule in July was, to say the least, murderous. Somehow, they managed to go 13-12 for the month and then got themselves tied for 1st place of all things on August 2nd. The schedule from here becomes markedly easier for the Mets. Monday night, they found themselves in Loria's Ivory Tower in Miami to play the Mickey Mouse Marlins. If anything, the Mets could have been accused of a letdown game, seeing as how they went from playing in front of a rowdy packed house at Citi Field to playing in front of about two dozen people in Miami, but then again, a majority of the audience was rooting for the Mets since Marlins fans were probably home huffing paint thinner. It should, then, be of little surprise that the Mets treated the Marlins with just the right amount of regard: None whatsoever. Michael Conforto crashed his first Major League Home Run, Yoenis Cespedes banged out 3 doubles and the Marlins pathetic offense was the perfect antidote for Bartolo Colon as he threw 8 solid innings to guide the Mets to a 12-1 victory which, combined with a Washington loss, gave the Mets sole possession of 1st place. On August 3rd.

The Mets now are starting to garner a smattering of attention now, since they've now actually started to generate enough offense to back up their already great pitching staff. This was really all that was necessary. For weeks, I and everyone else who's paid this team any kind of attention could have told you that all the Mets need to do was to just average about 4 runs a game and their pitching could do the rest. So now that they have actual hitters in the lineup and aren't just looking at Lucas Duda and saying, "Hey, please carry us on a regular basis," they actually look like a team with teeth. Granted, there's still a long two months of baseball to be played, and they have to keep the hitters hitting while also worry about not burning out their pitchers too soon, but this is actually starting to look like a team with some teeth. You know, kind of like we hoped they would.

It helps, of course, that their schedule has lightened up. The Mets play one of the weaker schedules in MLB from here on out, which includes this trip to Miami (and one more in September), 3 games in Tampa this weekend, and other teams like Philly, the Colorados, Boston, Cincinnati and Atlanta. Lay it all out there and it's pretty simple: If the Mets beat the teams that they're supposed to beat, and just hold serve against the better teams, they should find themselves in pretty good shape come September.