Reese Kaplan -- Come 2022, are the Mets Ready for the Series?

It's been a long and frustrating period for Mets management and fans alike to realize the team has gone through the period of 2017 through 2021 without sniffing the postseason.  

Steve Cohen's acquisition of the team gave everyone a lot of hope, but to be fair you have to remember he inherited a club in the throes of losing as a way of life.  Consequently when under his ownership in the 2021 season not a lot changed.  As a result the club finished under manager Luis Rojas with a 77-85 record, 11.5 games back of the Division winning Atlanta Braves.

After that season mercifully ended, Cohen and company used the first full year's outcome to ascertain a great many things that needed to change.  Rojas was sent packing and the club set out seemingly yet again to find a General Manager candidate with neither sexual misconduct nor drinking issues in his regular behavior.  

The announcement that Billy Eppler was being brought to the Mets was greeted with a combination of relief and skepticism.  The relief was felt mostly by the fans and media who longed for an experienced person to take the reins from the hodgepodge of would be GMs of the recent past.  Skepticism resulted from the less-than-stellar record Eppler produced while working under arguably a difficult owner in Arte Moreno. 

A lot of that uncertainty evaporated when it came time to pick a manager.  The Mets in the past had been tied to a great many newcomers and retreads with less than spectacular records.  This time around they wanted to get it right and they sought out one of the best candidates ever to be name a major league manager, Buck Showalter.  Yes, other names were bandied about but it became clear fairly quickly that the job was Showalter's if he chose to accept it.  

With management folks in place, the Mets then set about revising the roster to try to turn a below .500 club into a winning one.  Everyone was shocked when the heretofore miserly team went after the biggest available starting pitcher free agent, Max Scherzer, and got him.  Then they added complementary players to the roster like Starling Marte, Mark Canha, Chris Bassitt, Eduardo Escobar and Adam Ottavino.  

While the Marte move was universally applauded, the others were less enthusiastically received.  Preseason is never an indicator of the regular season, but no one was quite sure what to make of the new-look Mets.

Then as the season began the club was winning regularly, yet contributions were not coming from the places that were expected.  Marte started off slowly, as did returning veteran Francisco Lindor.  However, Mark Canha was off to his hottest start ever, Eduardo Escobar was running hot and cold, Jeff McNeil looked like the perennial .300 hitter of old, Pete Alonso was looking to be on the road to his best season ever, and various players on the bench and in the pen were contributing positively.

Of course, the injury and slump bugs that hit the team early and hard did not help.  Jacob deGrom has yet to pitch.  Max Scherzer went on the IL for the usual arm related woes but then complicated things with a dog bite on his pitching hand.  

Tylor Megill was pitching so well in an emergency fill-in role, it made the loss of deGrom almost a wash, but then he fell to injury himself.  Reliever Trevor May went down as well.  Pretty soon the Mets were reaching deep into the minors to find never expected help to fill all these voids.

Now slumping was another issue.  Everyone was in something of a philosophical haze when they sent Robinson Cano and his struggling bat to the DFA list.  The Mets in the past would never have swallowed that much money and admit a roster mistake.  Then there was Dom Smith who had contributed so much in the past few seasons demoted to Syracuse to find his way once again.  

Despite all of these issues, the Mets are ending June atop the Eastern Division, ahead of the surging Atlanta Braves by 4 games.  The 45-26 record is good for a .634 winning percentage, one that would lead to nearly 103 wins if it continued throughout the rest of the year.  

Bear in mind that deGrom, Scherzer and Megill are all due back to rejoin Carlos Carrasco, Chris Bassitt and Taijuan Walker.  That level of starting pitching is going to be pretty insurmountable for many opponents.  Many of the previously slumping bats have come to life as well and there's still room for improvement at third base and behind the plate.    

All of this roster production and potential improvement suggests that for the first time in 6 years the Mets are indeed ready to play some October baseball.  While you always think you're the best of the best, how far they go is a matter of health, productivity and matchups.  

They need first to win the Division, then the NL Championship and then onto the World Series stage where anything can happen.  Still, fans are enjoying the new ownership and the new players added to the team which are resulting in something folks around here have not experienced in a long, long time -- pride for being Mets fans.