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3 harsh realities Mets fans all wish weren’t true but are
The truth hurts and this one might leave a bruise.
Nothing hurts quite like the truth. The New York Mets have served the fans plenty of painful facts of late. Your body doesn’t hurt because you’re approaching 40. Those tears aren’t flowing because a commercial about underprivileged dogs just aired. You don’t have fog on the brain because you’re getting sick with anything other than baseball fandom.
Like a scratch on a rental car, a text to a spouse from an ex, and a bat in the attic, we would like these problems to resolve themselves. Unfortunately, they often don’t and get worse the more we try to sweep them under the rug.
These three harsh realities facing the Mets will pose a threat to your happiness over the next few weeks.
1) The Mets starting rotation isn’t good enough to win a championship
The Mets starting rotation is good enough to get them to the postseason. Is just reaching the playoffs the goal? It’s like going to a restaurant for the ambiance and not even touching the menu.
The Mets starting pitchers have had their ups and downs like all facets of the roster. However, given the importance of starting pitching, we can see how far behind they fall in comparison to other teams.
Lacking a true ace, the Mets will need plenty of those upside starts out of their starters in order to make it to the postseason. We’ve seen Sean Manaea deliver a couple of them recently. Then the tank runs out of gas the next time out and he’s pulled after only a couple of innings and a whole lot of walks.
Playoff baseball is played a little differently so the lack of innings the starters give them isn’t as great of a concern. Bigger is how quickly things can get out of control when the starting pitcher doesn’t have “it.”
In a lot of ways, the Mets starting staff has overachieved based on many preseason expectations. With only Paul Blackburn added and the bullets of Kodai Senga and Christian Scott being uncertain ammunition to potentially use, the Mets will have to hope the heat turns up for their starters in a year where it has been more mild than anything.
2) The Mets offense is too reliant on home runs
The narrative around the Mets offense has become the lack of hitting with runners in scoring position. Indeed a problem, this year’s Mets team is surprisingly relying heavily on home runs. This becomes an issue when you’re going against better pitching as we witnessed last weekend against the Seattle Mariners. How many of those 149 home runs (ranked sixth in MLB) have been against bad teams and/or basement-level pitching?
The Mets haven’t been completely absent against good pitchers this year. Many of the ones they clobbered in June during their hottest days were versus number one or two starters on opposing staffs. That was a much different Mets team than we’ve seen of late. This one has Brandon Nimmo and Francisco Alvarez hitting below their weight in the second-half.
In the second-half, the power bats have been much more silent. Only six different players have hit home runs with Pete Alonso leading the way with 7. The fall for Nimmo has been the most dramatic. Along with 0 homers after the All-Star Break, he has a .140 batting average to lug around.
When the Mets aren’t consistently hitting home runs, the offense suffers. Ranked sixth in round-trippers, their 574 runs scored is down at number 11 in the MLB rankings. This might not tell us too much about them. About the rest of the league, it suggests they’re finding other ways to score runs.
3) Any trip to the playoffs for the Mets will not last long
Will the Mets even get to the postseason? It’s looking like they’ll have only the third Wild Card spot to claim. That’s not so bad. The 2022 and 2023 NL Pennant winners came from this third spot.
After all of the battling in August and September, to make it to the postseason and get bounced quickly would leave a bitter taste in our mouths. There will be second-guessing about whether it was worth buying at the trade deadline (it was and always will be). What about not buying enough?
The Mets haven’t shown the kind of life teams of destiny tend to at this point of the season. The red hot Arizona Diamondbacks and San Diego Padres are more in the realm of “get hot at the right time” while the Mets fall into the “peaked too early” category.
Can the Mets win a playoff series? Sure. Could they win a best of three series? Yep. But beyond one hard-fought battle on the road with a New York victory flag raised after, it’s tough to see the Mets competing alongside others.
The hot and cold nature of this year’s team is a harsh reality that isn’t going away anytime soon. This is the type of team that’ll feel like they won a championship just by getting to the postseason at all. Playing tired of late and without many of the hitters they need to perform doing much at all, way too much will need to change for the better for the Mets to do a thing in any playoff run they can make.
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