It's been a bit of a slow start for the 2021 New York Mets, but the same could be said for the entire National League East. Expected to be one of the strongest divisions in baseball, the Mets are in the only Eastern Division team with a record above the .500 mark. The Mets are indeed rather fortunate that they have the opportunity to right their ship without worrying about a division rival getting off to a hot start and putting them into a deep early hole.
I mentioned in yesterday's post that the Braves had a rough day yesterday. They had been shut out in both games of a doubleheader, being no-hit in the second game by a past-prime Madison Bumgarner. (Kind of hard to believe that guy is only 31, but he's been pitching in the majors since he was 19.) I didn't find out until later that the Braves only had one hit in the first game. I wonder how the New York area papers would handle it if the Mets played a doubleheader and only managed a single hit and no runs over 14 innings. It would probably read like coverage of Armageddon.
The Mets encounter a fair amount of skepticism for anything they do, based mostly on the dismal track record of the Wilpon regime. The Braves, meanwhile, always seem to get the benefit of the doubt. The Braves certainly have been much better run over the years, but there were an awful lot of folks in the media who were going way out on a limb with rosy optimism for Atlanta this season.
I thought that the Braves didn't have a great offseason at all this year. I thought they put an inordinate amount of faith in Drew Smiley, who hasn't been a really good starter since 2015 in Tampa Bay. He missed all of 2017 and 2018, then had 140 combined innings over the last two seasons. Even Charlie Morton at age 37 is a significant gamble.
The Braves got significantly outsized contributions from Marcell Ozuna and former Met Travis d'Arnaud in last year's 60-game miniseason. They're not getting that at all from those guys early on in 2021. Their bench leaves something to be desired, too. An injury to Cristian Pache has forced them to use the immortal Guillermo Heredia quite a bit as of late. Pablo Sandoval has been a good story for them early on, but the guy is morbidly obese, will turn 35 in August, and hasn't been an outstanding hitter in a very long time.
I'm not trying to say that the Braves suck or anything silly like that. But it's amazing to me how everything is magnified in New York and mostly glossed over in Atlanta. The Braves enjoy some of the most sycophantic coverage in all of baseball. The "professional" press that covers them has read more like fanboy bloggers than journalists for as long as I can remember. Even the national guys maintain a level of deference to the Braves that I find astounding.
I read a piece in the New York Post by Joel Sherman today that made me shake my head. I generally enjoy Sherman's writing. I think he's by far the best baseball writer in the New York press and better than many national writers. But I thought today's contribution missed the boat in a couple of different ways.
Sherman pointed out the mediocre-to-bad records in the NL East and compared that to the current state of the NL West, where only the Colorado Rockies sit below .500. But a chunk of Sherman's evidence of the superiority of the Western Division seemed a bit shaky to my eyes:
The National League goes through California — did you notice the Giants are in a golden state, nestled between the Dodgers and Padres in the NL West with the league’s second-best record (14-8)? San Francisco begins a revelatory 22-game stretch Thursday in which it faces the Padres or Dodgers 10 times. But the Giants' strong start should reinforce that after all the offseason wreaths thrown at the NL East for trying in a time of inertia that the NL West might be better (even with Colorado) and that in a return to the standard playoff format of five teams per league, the only sure route into the postseason is by winning a division.
Now, I'll concede that no team in the NL East has shown themselves to be in the same league with the Dodgers and the Padres right now. But if your claim to Western Division superiority also rests on the 14-8 record of the San Francisco Giants, you kind of lost me.
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