You know that feeling you get when you do something so amazing–like make an insane basketball trick shot or miraculously catch a falling box of cereal just before it crashes to the ground–you even surprise yourself, but you look around and no one witnessed you do it, like it’s just been wasted?
I can only imagine that this is the feeling the entire New York Mets pitching staff (yes, even Jon Niese recently) has felt for the large majority of the season.
It was widely assumed coming into 2015 that pitching would be the team’s calling card, with offense and defense each doing its best to ruin any chance for a postseason berth. But there must be a line drawn somewhere. We can’t keep squandering one incredible start after another and just shrug it off, not if all that October baseball smack in spring training was real.
Should the stellar pitching start to slow down and start giving up, Heaven forbid, four or even five runs on a daily basis (New York currently has the fifth-lowest team ERA at 3.42), I don’t even want to imagine how much worse things could get.
Entering play on July 2, there were eight teams in the majors that have conceded less than 300 runs this year, including the Mets (288).
If the playoffs started today, 6 of the 8 would be in, with only the Cubs (who sit 0.5 games behind San Francisco for the second wild card spot) and, you guessed it, the Mets on the outside looking in.
It’s worth noting that the median amount of runs scored by Major League teams this year is 320, 44 more than the 27th-best Amazin’s have scored. It’s almost painful to think of where they could be in the standings were they to have a league average offense and have tallied nearly 50 more runs. My guess is that the Washington Nationals would be looking up at us instead of the other way around.
The season is certainly not lost, though. For a team that has scored 2 runs or less in 38% of its games, it’s almost unbelievable that the Mets are only 2 games out of a wild card spot. But it’s wrong to think that this level of hitting throughout the remainder of the season can get them to the playoffs. At some point, those crazy trick shots need to be rewarded.
