It’s amazing how you can ask a dozen different Met fans about the state of the team and you get a dozen different answers ranging from the worst imaginable doom and gloom forecast to an incredibly bright future filled with perennial pennant runs.
I bring that up because after years of being so down on this team, I’ve really started feeling good about them again. That’s mainly because of what I see with our pitching. Matt Harvey was the first to tug on my heart strings in 2013, but watching Jacob deGrom this past season and seeing Jenrry Mejia and Jeurys Familia emerge as weapons in the bullpen pushed me over the edge. I now look at what we have and what’s yet to come in Steven Matz and Noah Syndergaard and I can hardly contain my excitement.
Sure we have issues that need to be resolved, but as Gil Hodges once said, as long as you have the pitching everything else is small potatoes. He was talking about Seaver, Koosman, Ryan and Gentry, and call me crazy but I feel we have a similar quartet in Harvey, deGrom, Wheeler and Thor. I’m convinced we are finally on the upswing.
Mike Puma of The Post, spoke to several baseball people, rival team executives, and MLB managers who all believe the Mets have the arms to make some noise this season.
“They are legitimate,” one official said, referring to the Mets. “They are right there with the Marlins for the No. 2 team in the division. [General manager] Sandy Alderson talked about 90 wins last season, they are not that, but right now maybe they are an 85-86 win team and that lets you hang around until you can maybe make a trade that gets you there.”
“From what I have seen, the Mets have moved the bar and they should be a team that expects to go ahead and have impact,” Pirates manager Clint Hurdle said.
That assessment comes based on the Mets’ pitching more than on a lineup that averaged 3.88 runs last season.
“The magic number for everybody is about four runs,” Hurdle said. “You find a way to get four, and they’ve got the pitching I believe that every time they go out there they’ve got somebody who is going to have a chance to win. So I think it’s going to be an exciting time for them.”
An AL executive who has scouted the Mets said the team probably doesn’t need to make a move at shortstop, given the lack of available talent at the position.
Braves manager Fredi Gonzalez is putting the Mets in the mix to compete for the NL East title.
“Their pitching and they went out and got Cuddyer, along with having [Juan] Lagares in center, and with a healthy David Wright, that’s a pretty good lineup,” Gonzalez said.
If pitching truly wins championships, we appear to be very well positioned for the short and long haul in that department, and not just with our starting rotation but with our bullpen too. Our stable of young power pitchers is now the envy of all baseball and we may be witnessing the evolution of a great Mets run of baseball that could begin as soon as this season.
