Mets360 - Mets find their sea legs two-thirds of the way through 2020

By Brian Joura September 6, 2020

After Saturday’s game against the Phillies, the Mets had a 44.4% chance of making the playoffs, according to Baseball-Reference. Given how bad they had played recently, that seemed almost encouraging. Considering how their pitching has been decimated, how they’ve suffered a Covid suspension of play and how the manager/front office has made some truly head-scratching decisions, should we be grateful for their current position, one where they have a pretty decent shot at the post-season?

As in most years, there have been a fair number of things you can point to as breaking in the Mets’ favor, along with a bunch of things that have just gone wrong.

If you were told before the start of the season that on September 6, that five of the nine hitters with the most PA on the team had an OPS of .842 or greater, including Michael Conforto with a .961 OPS, Dominic Smith with a .992 mark and Robinson Cano with a .994 – you’d probably be ecstatic. And if on top of that you were told that Jacob deGrom had a 1.76 ERA and that Edwin Diaz and Seth Lugo had combined for a 2.08 ERA, well, you might think the Mets were in first place.

But if instead of that good news, you were told that Marcus Stroman opted out without throwing a pitch, that Steven Matz, Rick Porcello and Michael Wacha were a combined 2-10 with a 6.83 ERA and that Justin Wilson had an ERA of 5.27 and that Dellin Betances was at 6.10 and on the IL – well, you might figure this as a last-place squad.

And on top of that, there have been some serious growing pains with whoever is responsible for decisions that in the past we would have considered to be exclusively in the manager’s domain. Everyone wants to like Luis Rojas. He’s a young guy with a great baseball pedigree who has worked his way up the managerial ladder. His players unanimously praise him. He aces the people part of the job. It’s just the decisions – both the in-game ones and the bigger-picture items – that have caused so much consternation, at least from this vantage point.

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