A mediocre team can fool you for a while, but this New York Mets club is for real.
Despite Wednesday afternoon's clunker in St. Louis, the New York Mets are flying pretty high these days. Their total of 14 wins is tops in all of Major League Baseball. More notably, this year, they pass the eye and smell tests as a genuine contender. That's important, because we've seen the Mets tease their fans in previous seasons with fast starts before dropping like tech stocks at the end of the last century.
There's an awful lot for a Mets fan to like about the team this season. Sure, the Mets are running the second-largest payroll in MLB, which definitely matters. This past winter, GM Billy Eppler was allowed to shop in the luxury aisle by Steve Cohen, which previous GMs in the Wilpon era could only dream about. But Mets fans who have been around for a while understand only too well that your team could spend a bundle and still really suck.
But the new Mets front office went a different route. They made the big-ticket purchase when they unexpectedly signed starting pitcher Max Scherzer, but the other additions were more of the meat and potatoes variety rather than gourmet dining. Eduardo Escobar, Mark Canha, and Starling Marte were all solid major league ballplayers, but they weren't the sexiest names out there.
When the Mets traded for starting pitcher Chris Bassitt, I looked him up to see exactly what sort of pitcher he was. I'm sure I never spent a minute of my life contemplating Bassitt before he became a Met, but he's become one of my favorite guys on the team. Bassitt doesn't light up radar guns, but he's an excellent pitcher and a great competitor. Chris is the right guy at the right time for the Mets' pitching staff, even if his paycheck is only about a fifth of Scherzer's.
There was a lot of noise in both the media and Mets Twitter for the team to deal away second baseman Jeff McNeil in the offseason. Instead, the club seemed to bank on McNeil's .319/.383/.501 combined batting line from 2018-2020 as more indicative of the type of hitter Jeff could be. At least through the club's first 20 games, McNeil is making that decision look like a smart one. Jeff is slashing .328/.388/.492, playing both 2B and LF. He's scored 11 runs and driven in 7. McNeil seems to have given up trying to be a home run hitter, which is the right decision, but he's still accumulated 7 extra-base hits — 5 2B, 1 3B, and 1 HR. When the talk of trading McNeil was constant, I figured we Mets fans would be looking at the next Justin Turner or Travis d'Arnaud — players whose careers flourished after leaving the Mets. Instead, we can hope that McNeil's renaissance season continues here in New York.
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I'm still not convinced.
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