Mets are doing exactly what a .500 baseball team should do

More than two months into 2019 and the New York Mets look, at best, like a .500 baseball team capable of beating horrible teams and unable to topple the playoff-bound ones.

We’re now more than two months into the 2019 campaign and the New York Mets have yet to distinguish themselves as a true winning or losing baseball team. Instead, they’ve done exactly what a .500 baseball team will do: bounce around a few games above or below the even-mark.

The team owns a winning record versus three teams this season. They’ve beaten up on the National League East cellar-dwelling Miami Marlins and Washington Nationals—at least based on the overall record. The Detroit Tigers also lost their series against the Mets, giving them a winning record against a third team this season.

The winning records stop there. The rest of their opponents this season have either gotten the best of the team from Flushing or have split their games against them. This is what a .500 baseball team does. They get pounded by the great teams, have some luck against the bad ones, and go back-and-forth with the middle-of-the-road clubs.

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New York will get wins against the Atlanta Braves and Philadelphia Phillies only because those are division games. As we saw when the Marlins swept the Mets last month down in Miami, those series are sometimes unpredictable. You have to prepare to lose games to everyone in your own division regardless of the talent on the roster. Even so, it’s tough to imagine the team winning more games than they lose versus them.

It’s those games outside of the NL East which define where the Mets are. At 2-2 against the Cincinnati Reds and 1-2 against some other teams they’ve only seen once, we get a clear picture of where this organization is.

They cannot win series. At best, they’re pulling away with a victory in any three-game set they get. Their weekend series against the Arizona Diamondbacks was a perfect example and a continued phase of dropping two out of three.

They were brutalized by the Milwaukee Brewers this season which gave us an idea of whether they could hang with the big boys or not. They couldn’t. When they faced the Los Angeles Dodgers at the end of May, they handed them at least two wins.

The bullpen is blowing games, the starters are putting them down early, and the offense is failing to show up.

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Meet your 2019 New York Mets. They are the poster children of an 81-81 season—if they’re even lucky to reach that win total.