I have to be honest. I have no idea what’s going on or what is going to happen. I’ve never seen anything like this season.
I’ve never seen a starting pitching staff composed of two brilliant yet occasionally erratic pitchers in their forties; two flashes in the pan miraculously resurrected, in their youth, after reasonable people had given up on them; and one middle-level prospect throw-in who steadily starts looking more and more as if he might at least deserve, if not win, the Cy Young award. Even if there had been a pitching staff like this in the past, I’ll bet it wasn’t the best starting staff in the National League through the first half of the season.
I’ve never seen a team win 3 out of 16 games, RIGHT AFTER winning 20 out of 30 and JUST BEFORE winning 8 out of 9. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a winning team that can looks so good and so bad in such rapid and unpredictable succession.
This season is nutty with injuries. Yet here too, it’s not in a conventional way. Unless you count Martinez, none of the most important players on the team have been affected by this sneaky injury plague. But almost the whole middle layer of the team is out or has been out for at least 15 days.
The best players on the team are not exactly slumping, but they’re not exactly not slumping. With the exception, for the most part, of Reyes, they all have more than their share of 0 for 4 days and right in the mix they have days when they dominate. None except Reyes is at last year’s level, but offense in the league is not at last year’s level. It seems quite possible that with just a very small increase in production in the second half, Beltran, Wright, and Delgado, could all clear 30 homers and 100 rbis. All three will once again have their bizarrely identical rbi totals. Yet, it doesn’t really feel that way. Still, look at their numbers. Where did they come from? Why are we complaining? Look at the standings. The number on the left is 46, one of the best numbers in the league. That’s right, isn’t it? That feels right, doesn’t it? Yes and no.
One thing that throws everything off is that the team is lacking focal personalities. LoDuca was absolutely central to the team’s spirit last year, and for the first part of this year. But all the bullshit lately may have caused him to lose his footing. Bullshit (i.e. off-the-field press-related, paper-selling crap) often affects pennant races and offseasons. Remember when Cone was rattled by the article he wrote about the Dodgers in 1988? Delgado was our smooth sure rock last year. I still think he’s a great player to have on the team and a great bat in the lineup, but as a force and an influence, he has faded a little this year. I am positive that David Wright is going to end the season with something almost identical to his numbers for the past two seasons. But he seems ill-at-ease this year. He doesn’t feel like a miracle or a boy wonder. He feels like a young man struggling to live up to his enormous reputation. The Mets lack the guy on the smooth and steady tear, the guy who gives the season ballast, the guy we can hold onto in our heads, when it feels like we may be going under.
We are lucky that there are no better teams in our division. But I’ve rarely gotten to the middle of the season with such a confused sense of how good or not good the Mets are.
My prediction is that the story of this season will be written in the second half by the unexpected success or failure of injury replacements. That’s not normally the way things work, but that’s what it may come down to. That can be really interesting. And it can be really disastrous.
Why is it that every time I try to take stock of what is happening this season, I feel like I am saying something obvious, that I am shrugging, that I am helpless and mystified, hopeful but frightened. It is because I have reason to feel all of these things, along with all of my fellow Mets fans. I don’t know what the hell is going on. But I know that I am along for the ride.
Dude, that is without a doubt the BEST PIECE I’ve read on the state of the Mets this year, and beautifully captures the sense of what I, too, am feeling.
One day I’m really up… and the next I’m sort of down, only to be followed by a semi-up day, then another… and another…. and then the rug that is the Mets is swept right out from under my feet…. lol.
Everyone at FU simply must read this piece. It’s must summer reading! I’m going over to the Lectures thread at FU right now, and I’m going to recommend it to all!
Beautifully done. But then, I can’t recall ever being disappointed in anything I’ve read here!
Thanks to Deb for sending us over here! You have really captured what many fans (and probably a lot of the Mets) are feeling this year. It certainly has been a strange if not unsettling season so far, but honestly, when I think about it, it is really not so different from the second 1/2 last season either. Last season, we got off to a great start, but once we lost Duaner, then Pedro, then El Duque, plus the recurring injuries to Floyd, it was the injury replacements who took over (Ollie, Maine, Chavez). The difference of course was that we built up enough of a lead in June that there wasn’t really a question we would make the playoffs. But I actually don’t think this team is much different than the one that played the second half of last year including the playoffs. A double digit lead can make things look a whole lot brighter, but in reality, if we had any sort of playoff race last year, we would have felt just as up and down as we do this year.
in any event, great piece – we are certainly all along for the ride!
Dana,
I have to agree with you once again. It is like you read my mind. The season is very nerve wracking. Up one day, down the next. Great playing in Philly, disaster in Denver. Yet you are right, we are still doing well enough to be in first place. I think the problem is that there is no consistency. It seemed like last year was more on an even keel. When someone got hurt, others took up the slack and we rolled with the punches. This year when someone gets hurt, you don’t know if anyone will take up the slack. But a true fan will always have that ray of hope that their team will be successful. Here’s hoping that Mets get going again in Houston and become the team that they were in 2006.
Thank you everyone for your very kind words. And I definitely agree, SNK, that this is just like the second half of last year. What I found I couldn’t do then and find I can’t do now is analyze anything in the way one can normally analyze measurable forces in baseball. I just don’t know what cards we have in our hand. You can’t say: we have enough offense and relief pitching but not enough starting pitching and defense or anything like that, because you have no idea at all how much you have of anything. In all categories you might have anywhere from a little to a lot. All you know is that it has worked reasonably well thus far, but you don’t know if it will continue to work. You are not dealing with known quantities. It is driving me nuts, and as long as we’re in first place, it is fascinating. If we drop out of first place, I will have other emotions.
Yup, well said…unnerving, exciting, fascinating, aggravating…this season (and last) have been all of those things…it defies reason that we are still in first just as it defies reason that so many players are underperforming or injured at the same time… but ya gotta believe!!
To me, it seems pretty simple. Pretty much all of the problems that people were concerned about at the start of the season in large part are coming to pass. Shaky rotation without a true ace, a bullpen not as good as last year, stopgap measures at second base, and unreliable (and, in Alou’s case, injured) corner outfielders, Delgado coming off wrist surgery, and no genuine righthanded threat.
Add to that the fact that you will inevitably have injuries and hot and cold streaks over the course of 162 games, and the fact that Julio Franco cannot pull the ball if his life depended on it, I don’t think anyone can honestly say “holy smokes, who woulda thunk it??”
The fact that the Mets are in first place strikes me as more due to the fact that the NL overall is mediocre to lousy, especially the NL East.
This team has youth, to be sure, but just as was the case last season, in many respects it is a “win now” construction. (Unless someone thought Alou was the new anchor of the team). I recognize that the free agent market in pitching was mediocre (and think Zito’s contract was idiotic) but based on baseball’s current economics, the Mets have the luxury of being able to stock young talent and do the big signings. Yet they seemed, internally, to have a budget cap that wasn’t really all that rational (and, to be clear, I don’t think they needed the Yankee “all star at every position” model, nor do I think that works terribly well.)
But I think they should have aggressively pursued the Gil Meches and Jeff Suppans of the world. They tweaked things, and my sense is that, at least in some corners, they were just happy to get to the playoffs. No sense of rage that St Louis took what was rightfully theirs. If my suspicion is correct, well, I guess the chickens came home to roost.
I love posts like this! Keep up the great blog, I’ve bookmarked it and added it to my RSS reader to check out more often.