It’s hard to witness the moment that a team finally clicks, especially when that team has been trying to turn things around for half a decade. Yesterday’s 8-3 win over the Houston Astros in the seasons final game felt like it meant something. While the team will still finish below .500, they won more games than last season and a little bit of winning energy was infused into Citi Field.
Energy is a very hard thing to measure for a baseball team. With so much momentum required to win, people have talked all year about the Mets needing to learn-how-to-win in 2014, so that they’re prepared to win in 2015. This season on the whole didn’t feel like them ‘learning to win.’
September was a different story. They finish the month with a 14-10 record, one victory shy of their season high marks in April and July. Still, it felt different. Before the game, Terry Collins seemed to foreshadow that very ideal. “In the past, it’s always been about these guys have collapsed in September. We haven’t done that. We’ve actually played well, and I think at the end, the guys are going to be rewarded in the future” (Zach Schonbrun, NYT).
Sandy Alderson addressed the state of the team Sunday after the game.
“If we’re going to be one of the top five teams we’ve got to be in the top five with run production, we’ve got to be in the top five pitching-wise. Do I think we can get from eight to five with what we have? I think it’s possible but that doesn’t mean we’ll rely on what we have. But I do think we need to get better in that regard, but we don’t have to get a lot better. If we can go from, like I said, middle of the pack – I think we’re eight or something like that – if we can get up to three or four we’ll be in great shape”
So the manager and general manager both seem optimistic about 2015. Alderson seems to feel that adding 10-12 wins will get the job done. The question is, did game 162 feel like the spark?
It was the way in-which they won. They payed homage to Bobby Abreu in his final game while Lucas Duda smacked the ball around the yard. Even Ruben Tejada got in on the home run hitting. There was applause and energy in a stadium that has been filled with empty seats for so much of the summer.
Alderson has led us this far. He’s re-tooled the minor league system, stocked the pitching staff with more arms than a manager could know what to do with and is now just a few moves away from putting a winning team on the field. 2014 might have sucked on the whole but games 161 and 162 showed us that winning baseball is on the horizon in New York and Sandy Alderson is leading us there.
