Well, it starts here. It starts now. It starts in St. Louis, where the very best baseball of 2015 has been played on a consistent basis. It starts against a Cardinals team that, save for the occasional difficulty in keeping its fingertips off another team’s data operating system, does just about everything right.
It starts with 10 games in 10 days against the three best teams in the National League, the three division leaders, the Cardinals and the Nationals and the Dodgers, 10 days that will go a long way toward defining who the Mets really are. That will be important information for the team’s players, for sure, and for its manager, who believes they should be better than five games north of .500.
Most critical of all, they are 10 days that should alert the men who own and run the team if the dual pennant races in which they find themselves are real, or if they are mirages, if their place two games south of the Nationals is legit or merely a product of Washington’s inability to run and hide just yet, if their status a game behind the Cubs for the second wild card is little more than a parlor trick whose shelf life is nearly over.
“We’ve still got 70 games to play,” Mets manager Terry Collins said Sunday, when the Mets entered the All-Star break on a four-game winning streak, playing as well as they had played since April.
“At the break to be over .500, yeah, that’s a nice accomplishment. It’s certainly not the end-all. We’re a little frustrated we’re not more over .500. All we’ve got to do is continue to play and grind this out.”
And then the caveat: “We come out of [the] break with 10 games against three teams in first place. So we’ve still got a tough road ahead.”
Three with the Cards. Three with the Nats. Four with the Dodgers. If the Mets break even or better, then there is no reason to keep wondering whether they have the chops to go the distance. Five and five, or better, against those three teams, with 10 difficult games suddenly gone from the schedule? Make no mistake. That brands them contenders.
You know that’s what the fans are hoping for, because it’s been egregiously long since they were afforded a reason to look forward to August (let alone September), and holding their own against three first-place teams will justify their hope they will finally test the deep end of the National League pool again.
You hope that’s what the Mets’ brass wants. And, yes, that sounds absurd. Of course that’s what the men who run the Mets should want. They were quick to dash off the news of the club’s attendance gains this year; meaningful games across the season’s final two months will only augment those figures and, correspondingly, the corporate bottom line.
But if the Mets do emerge from this gauntlet with their season intact, it will also finally push the team into a corner from which only two outcomes are possible:
1. It will force them, at last, to recognize their status as playoff players and force them into making the kind of moves that playoff players make; helpfully, the trading deadline will loom only five short days after this stretch of games is over a week from Sunday.
2. Or it will force them, once and for all, to recognize their own fraudulence, their lies and half-truths about how, given a chance to make a real run at the postseason, they would honor that pledge. Because if the Mets are still in their dual races in 11 days and they do nothing, then it clearly means they were planning on doing nothing all along.
They will have sold their fans another bill of goods.
And will surrender whatever shreds of credibility they still have.
This ought to be a special week and a half for everyone concerned with the Mets — and that includes the owners and the GM, who rightfully and correctly endure so much of the fans’ wrath, and who now have a chance to finally alter that narrative and change the conversation. It’s supposed to be a good thing to play big-boy baseball again, to act the part of varsity lettermen. This is the fun stuff.
Everybody should want 5-5 — and dream about 6-4 or 7-3. The Mets have their rotation set up for the Nats. They are playing terrific baseball. If there will be a time for them this year, it will be here, and now, starting Friday in St. Louis. Everyone needs to be at their very best.
Even the men at the very top of the corporate flow chart.
Especially them.