Eyebrow Raiser

The Mets finished off their sweep of the Marlins like they were supposed to do last night, although I can't say I was really encouraged by the way things finished out. For 8 and a half innings, everything was just fine. Matt Harvey laid the smackdown on Florida, like he's supposed to do, and bucked that annoying trend he'd had of having bad games in the Puke Green Hell Hole. Juan Uribe hit a 3-run Home Run, Cespedes and Duda continued to come up with big hits, and the Mets raced out to an 8-0 lead and everything was just hunky dory.

But then in the bottom of the 9th, everything just went completely haywire, and I find it a little more disturbing than I probably should. Eric O'Flaherty, who was picked up off the scrap heap prior to the game, made his Mets debut and finished out the 8th inning, but then in the 9th, he started getting dinged around a little bit, and then Hansel Robles came in and the Marlins dinged him some more, and then suddenly someone who wasn't Greg Dobbs but may as well have been hit a 3-run double, and 8-0 turned into 8-5 and now Jeurys Familia had to come in the game. And Familia hasn't exactly been his usual lockdown self of late, and Dee Gordon got a hit and this Elmer Cookie Miguel Rojas fellow scored with some Marlin shit-eating grin on his face, and now it's becoming What The Fuck Is Going On Time. It's ceased to be funny because against any other team, the Marlins would have probably done what they do best and just laid down and died. All we needed was Stanton to materialize and clock one off of the Mystery Machine in Center Field to turn this into a full blown catastrophe. Familia did himself no further favors by walking Derek Dietrich, but mercifully Christian Yelich pounded one right to Lucas Duda at 1st to end the game.

This is sort of where not having Jenrry Mejia is biting the Mets in the ass. Bobby Parnell wasn't himself to begin with and now he's struggling. O'Flaherty was brought in because Alex Torres proved himself incapable of providing any kind of positive contribution, but he also seems to be a shell of what he once was. So he's a crapshoot. Tyler Clippard has pitched well but he can't be called upon every night. Robles pitches like a rookie relief pitcher, probably because he's a rookie relief pitcher and for every good outing there will invariably be a stinker. And Familia might be suffering from overuse or underuse or general ennui, but whatever it is, he's got some things to work through. Add this all up and it's enough to temper whatever optimism this now 6-game winning streak has generated, primarily because everyone still has that 2008 Bullpen PTSD, only the Mets haven't contended in such a long time that it's never had a chance to manifest. Well, now it's manifesting. And when your bullpen allows 6 runs in the 9th inning to a team that has no business scoring 6 runs in a game period, it's troubling. I feel troubled even though the Mets won the Damn Game.

This, of course, is just the peril of bullpens in general. Bullpens are generally a horrendous mishmash of ragamuffin dreck thrown together in a stew because relief pitchers aren't quite good enough to be starters, but they're also not quite bad enough to not be Major League quality pitchers. So you just sort of have to hope you catch lightning in a bottle with these relievers and they all pitch well at once. It can happen to anyone, but don't be fooled, because a reliever that has a great year one year will more than likely have a horrible season the next year, because that's what it is to be a relief pitcher. We just have to hope that this is merely an occasional hiccup and not something that's going to snowball.

The Right Roles

A problem the Mets had earlier in the season, and in fact a problem that's reared its ugly head several times over the course of the past several years has been a lack of reserve depth, particularly on the offensive side of things. The Mets have managed to field lineups that are decent, but tenuous and when someone inevitably goes down, a suitable replacement is nowhere to be found. So, what ends up happening is that guys like Alex Cora, or Jason Pridie, or Omar Quintanilla, or Andrew Brown end up playing way, way more often than players of their caliber should be playing. Not surprisingly, the team suffers for it.

When the Mets are performing at an optimal level, as they appear to be over the past 5 games now, it's these reserve guys that are playing about as often as they should be playing that come up with necessary hits. Such was the case of Eric Campbell in the 8th inning last night. Campbell has been one of my leading flogs this season (slightly above Jon Niese, but way behind the leader in the clubhouse, Daniel Murphy) because he's not good enough to be an every day player, nor will he ever be, and even when he's pushed into action on a semi-regular basis, he's exposed. But with these new faces on the roster, Campbell's face time has decreased and so what you end up with is he has less chances to look bad, and it exponentially increases the chance that he might do something useful with the playing time he does find. In the 8th inning on Tuesday night, with the game tied 1-1, Campbell came up to pinch hit for Niese with 2 on and 2 out, after Flores had popped up a bunt attempt and Tejada had struck out. And all he did was stick his bat out and knock a little floater over the shortstop's head, just enough to score Lucas Duda with the lead run and open the floodgates for Juan Lagares and Curtis Granderson to drive home 3 more runs afterward as the Mets came away with their 5th win in a row.

Campbell's case is the most obvious example, but for the moment the entire team is functioning at an optimal level. Were this 3 or 4 weeks ago, Campbell would probably have started in left and gone 0-for-4, Niese would have taken the tough-luck loss in spite of allowing 1 run in 7 innings and the Mets would have spent the night smacking themselves in the head with their bats wondering how they lost a 1-0 game to a team that looks like they're already on the 5th Green. Instead, the Mets waited out David Phelps, eventually tied the game in the 6th thanks to a clutch hit from Ruben Tejada and an equally clutch slide from Wilmer Flores (whose fan club has traveled all the way to South Florida), and eventually pull away late.

Niese was the beneficiary tonight and outside of the one start against the Dodgers when he probably shouldn't have pitched, he's rather quietly been just as good as the other starters on the team, which I have to consider appreciable. Niese was one of the guys on the hot seat at the beginning of the season and for about 2 months he looked like he was pitching with one foot out the door. I've talked many times about how he continues to trade high on a good year he had 3 seasons ago but he's started to recapture that form, probably because there's now too much competition around him and he feels pushed. On the one hand, that's not always the sort of thing you want to do to motivate a player, but then again, some players just need to be kicked in the ass a little bit. I guess you could say that about most of the team but some examples are more stark than others.

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.

Back To Even

And yet somehow, after everything that's gone wrong this season, with things being as ass-backward as they could possibly be, the Mets are once again tied for 1st place, after sweeping a series from the Washington Nationals at Home, culminating with a rousing victory in front of a sold-out crowd on The Biggest Game In The Galaxy on ESPN.

Think about that for a second.

When was the last time the Mets sold out a game in the middle of the regular season against a divisional opponent? When was the last time the Mets sold out a game on a Sunday Night? Hell, when was the last time ESPN deemed the Mets relevant enough to show on a Sunday Night? Yes, it might not have been quite so long in actuality, but consider just how badly the Mets fans have been starving for a weekend of meaningful games in the middle of the Summer like this. I've heard this weekend's series referred to as the biggest games in the history of Citi Field, and I'm not so sure I can argue with that. Ever since the place opened, there's been no positive memory. No reminder that the Mets fans can create Shea Stadium in this new place. This is why nobody's really warmed to Citi Field, because the Mets were never good enough to create that kind of a vibe. This weekend was a reminder of what we'd been missing during the 6 lost years.

The Mets and Nationals had been kind of dancing and jabbing all season long. The Nationals were injured. The Mets couldn't hit. The Mets couldn't beat the Nationals. The Nationals couldn't pull away. And then they come in to Citi Field, where they usually just bludgeon the Mets and the Mets finally punched back. The first two weren't things of beauty, but they ended the right way. That brought us to Sunday Night, which in and of itself was kind of strange, The Mets, sort of like a Buzz-Bin band from the early 90s, were creating enough of a stir that someone at ESPN actually noticed and this game, which all of a sudden kind of feels like Mets/Phillies '07-'08, was now kind of a marquee matchup.

It was like Mets/Phillies from that era. I made that comparison before the season even started. The Nationals were all too high and mighty and crowned themselves before the season started. But the Mets have had other things in mind all season. Their pitching held up their end of the bargain. The offense, not so much. But now they have some offense, and now the Nationals had better start paying attention, because the Mets just ran their asses right out of Citi Field.

The Mets accomplished this primarily because their best pitchers did what they were supposed to do. Noah Syndergaard went out on Sunday Night, in what was easily the biggest start of his life, allowed a 1-out Home Run to Anthony Rendon and spent the better part of the next 7.2 innings very calmly disposing of the Nationals. In one rather quick 5-pitch burst in the 3rd inning, the Mets supplied him with all the offense he needed as Curtis Granderson, Daniel Murphy and Lucas Duda each blasted Home Runs off of Jordan Zimmermann (not so you'd notice from ESPN's camerawork), which had the fans bouncing off the walls. I wasn't even there and I could tell you that that was the air finally returning to the Mets. That was 6 years of pent-up frustration beginning to boil over. The fans finally had an outlet to express their noise. That outlet was Syndergaard. Syndergaard worked through 8 innings for the 3rd time in a row at home, bridging the game directly to Tyler Clippard, who shut down his old teammates to close out this 5-2 win to give the Mets, believe it or not, a sweep of the Nationals and a percentage-point share of 1st place. 1st place in August is something the Mets haven't ever come close to sniffing in the Citi Field era. So when they say Citi Field reminded them of Shea Stadium last night, it's because this is the first time Citi Field ever had the chance to remind anyone of Shea Stadium.

Believe it or not? Maybe it's time we all started believing again.

The Place To Be

Very quickly, the Mets have managed to regroup and make some moves to fix the issues that the team was having. It cost the Mets little in terms of impact talent; the players that were given up are still a year or two away from Major League contributions. In their place now, the Mets can boast Kelly Johnson, Juan Uribe, Tyler Clippard and their big catch on Friday afternoon, Yoenis Cespedes. Yes, these players are essentially rentals for the remainder of the season, but if nothing else, this was a show of support by the front office and a message to the fans that this team is indeed going to go for it as opposed to sitting around twiddling their thumbs while opportunity slips away.

I'd not been around for the Padres series, obviously, and given the way Wednesday and Thursday went, it certainly seemed like the ship was sinking. But then again, how many times have we felt that way about the Mets this season. When it seems particularly awful, as it did going into Friday, the Mets somehow pull it together. Here the Mets were, coming off a 2-4 road trip and coming home and going 3-4 and sitting at 5-8 post All Star Break, with the Washington Nationals, the Mets chief competition coming to town. The Nationals, who routinely have come into Citi Field and just beaten the Mets senseless, had won something like 44 of the last 47 games they'd played at Citi Field, and each loss seemed worse than the one before it. But that was also during the Wilderness years for the Mets. It seemed daunting, but the task was rather simple: Just step it up and beat these turkeys and show them they mean business.

So far, that's what the Mets have done. Matt Harvey pitched his ass off for 8 innings on Friday, only to depart a tie game, but Wilmer Flores, who's now everyone's favorite player, hit the winning Home Run in the 12th.

Last night, it was Jacob deGrom's turn to take the mound. deGrom, despite not having his best stuff and despite getting pinged to death by the Nationals all night somehow managed to grit his way through 6 innings and allow only two runs when at multiple points he appeared ready to melt down. But deGrom didn't give an inch when he needed to most, and by keeping the score 2-0, he gave his teammates time to come back. And by teammates, I mean Lucas Duda, who's gone back to being Lucas Duda and mashing Home Runs all over the place. Duda's hit 8 Home Runs in the past 8 (?) days, probably because he now has real Major League hitters hitting behind him, and now with Cespedes in the fold, that's even more protection. The results were pretty obvious; not only did Duda hit two solo Home Runs to tie the game, but in the 8th, the Nationals walked Cespedes in front of Duda with Joe Schmegeggie on the mound and Duda responded by blasting an RBI double over the head of Jayson Werth to plate the game's winning run.

These two wins, in the grand scheme of things, have done little for the Mets in the standings, other than to draw them within one game of the Nationals for 1st place in the NL East. They're still only 7-8 since the All Star Break, and now 5-4 for this homestand, but the attitude on and around the team seems completely different. I guess everyone seems to be pointing to Wilmer Flores and his display of emotion on Wednesday night. Here was a guy who probably had every good reason to be pissed off at the team and yet the thought of being traded away absolutely broke his heart. Zack Wheeler showed a similar display of emotion on Friday, far from the public eye, when he went so far as to call Sandy Alderson and ask not to be traded. As strange as it seems now, given how miserable the past several years have been, players really want to be a part of this team, and when the fans sense just how much the players want to be here and be a part of what could happen, well, it endears them to the fans. Wilmer Flores now gets a standing ovation and fans are roaring his name every time he comes to the plate. The passion of the players isn't always quite so in your face as it has been these past few days, and now it's spilling over onto the field. Citi Field was sold out last night and it appears it will be sold out again tonight, on a Sunday night no less. It's starting to get very interesting.