You can tell the Mets are still in it because it’s the second week of September and Mets fans are still panicking.
It’s a truism to say about any sports team, especially any baseball club: whenever a team is doing well, there is always some segment of fans that can’t concern themselves with anything other than answer to the question: “what happens if they stop doing well?” In that sense, the difference between Mets fans and, say, Cubs fans (whose team is still within conceivable distance of losing the second-place NL Wild Card slot to, say, the Mets, and have the same .500 record as New York over the past 12 games) is one of degree, not kind.
That’s a fairly bold statement – the Cubs fanbase has worked long and hard on pessimism and it would be wrong not to acknowledge them as leaders in the field – but the Mets have set a certain amount of precedent for their fans. It matters not at all that the only regular with the 2007-2008 Mets who is still with the team is David Wright (Jon Niese and Bobby Parnell pitched 21 innings of forgettable ball between them in the 2008 season), because in a very real way it feels like the entire organization since then has been collapsing, continually, with no end in sight. You can count the bright spots in the Mets organization since those failed playoff runs on one hand, and they are almost exclusively individual, not team, achievements. RA Dickey’s 2012 National League Cy Young Award and Johan Santana’s no-hitter were both feel-good things for Mets fans, but served only to somewhat lessen the disappointment of those seasons.
Which brings us to 2015, and the last couple weeks of the season.
The only rival the Mets have for the National League East is the Washington Nationals. The Nationals are, charitably put, a group of old and/or injured and/or ineffective players being dragged into contention by starting pitchers Max Scherzer, Jordan Zimmermann, and Joe Ross, and of course, presumptive National League MVP Bryce Harper. With Bryce Harper, the Nationals are hitting .254/.323/.407 (.730 OPS) and are fifth in the NL in OPS. Without him, they would be hitting .244/.302/.381 (.683 OPS), tied with Miami for second to last. The Nats’ lineup might be one of the most unbalanced, shambling, mutant things since Barry Bonds and the 2004 San Francisco Giants – and even they got an inexplicable career year from JT Snow. All the Nationals have behind Harper is Yunel Escobar, who is hitting pretty well … for a shortstop.
Meanwhile, in Yoenis Cespedes, the Mets have a guy hitting almost as well as Harper since joining New York, and in Jacob deGrom and Noah Syndergaard they have a top two having just as good or better years than Scherzer and Zimmermann respectively. We’re not going to get whole-hog into the Matt Harvey thing in this space, but there’s been just as much talk, at much lower volumes, about Joe Ross also getting shut down in the latter half of the month due to reaching a pre-set innings limit, and he’s still making starts (if waning in effectiveness).
In recent years MLB has changed the weight of the schedule such that it is both frontloaded and backloaded with the majority of the divisional contests, with interleague and interdivisional play making up most of the middle months of the season. That means there’s a lot of swing in the last few contests – much has been made about the final series of the season for both the Mets and the Nats being against one another at Citi Field – but it also means that in a division as bad as the NL East is this year, there’s a lot of chance to feast on weak opposition.
For instance, what set off this recent round of handwringing for Mets fans was dropping two of three to the Miami Marlins (both losses of the late-and-close walkoff variety that could have easily gone New York’s way) while the Nationals put up four straight wins against the Atlanta Braves to close some of the gap. And that’s unfortunate for the Mets – but once they’re done in Washington on Wednesday night, they get to go to Atlanta for four games of their own, where they get the opportunity to match the Nationals’ feat against a team that’s 13-36 in the second half of the season. They’ll then get three more games against the Braves in the last full week of September. And then there’s one more series with the Marlins and Phillies each, with a four-game set in post-deadline Cincinnati for flavor. The only series the Mets shouldn’t cruise through so long as they stay focused is a three-game series against the Yankees, and depending how the rotation for the Bombers lines up, they could easily walk away with a series victory there, too.
That’s not to say the Nationals have it any harder – in fact, they have it easier, because their late season interleague rivalry series is against the Baltimore Orioles, a team having one of the most ghastly post-deadline swoons by a contender in recent memory – but they’re also playing catchup. At this point, Washington’s goal isn’t to take the division back by the time the first and final regular season series of October arrives; it’s to make those three games against the Mets even mean anything at all.
So the panic continues for Mets fans, because panic is what every fanbase defaults to when it hasn’t been successful in a while, looks like it’s on the verge of making it back to the postseason, and worries it’ll all be yanked away. And it’s louder and frankly weirder because this is a team in New York, with all the attendant loudness and weirdness that comes with the zipcode.
But the fact of the matter, for both Mets fans and Nationals fans, is this: there is functionally no path to the top of the NL East for Washington that doesn’t involve beating the post-deadline, resurgent Mets. If the Mets can take care of business in the remaining games against Washington the way they took care of business Monday and (just) Tuesday night, they’ll win the East. If not, they don’t deserve to.
