PITCHING IN: With Johan Santana (left), Jon Niese (center) and Matt Harvey fronting a rotation that includes Shaun Marcum and has Zack Wheeler waiting in the wings, the Mets have starters to give them hope. (
)
PORT ST. LUCIE — It’s “the biggest day of the year for us as a staff,” Terry Collins said yesterday, and it carries weight for the players, too. For the first time, the entire team convenes in one room and takes stock of its expectations.
Collins and his Mets players voiced their standard optimism after completing their initial full-squad workout at Tradition Field yesterday, and let’s get real: Odds are strong we aren’t looking at a playoff team here.
Yet it’s the words of an anonymous official from a competing National League team that offer the faintest glimmer of hope for this club. Words that balance, if by only one degree, the notion Collins served straight Kool-Aid to the Mets yesterday:
“If you can pitch,” the official said, “you can compete.”
Combine the Mets’ relative strength of their arms with the proper mindset, the seeds having been planted by Collins in his annual introductory speech, and you have the road map, nothing more, to a miracle.
“It’s more about focusing on what you’ve got in your clubhouse than what you didn’t get or what everybody else has,” Daniel Murphy said. “This is a group of guys we’re ready to go to war with. That’s all you can really control or focus on. It’s a good group.
“I think that what I got from [Collins’ speech] was, we’ve got the men in the room to play the kind of baseball we want to. That’s all we could control.”
Of course, minutes after Murphy spoke these words, the Mets announced their second baseman would fly to New York to have his right rib cage examined. Oy, the Mets.
Murphy and the team expressed hope this will prove nothing more than a spring-training annoyance, much like what David Wright endured last year en route to collecting two Opening Day hits. Hey, at least all of the pitchers appear intact, and they’ve been here for nearly a week.
Any chance the Mets have at shocking the world emanates from their pitching. The R.A. Dickey trade to Toronto “does weaken them,” a second official from a different NL team opined, but with Matt Harvey and Zack Wheeler on board, “I don’t think they are brutal. Best guess would be 75ish wins?”
Wright joked yesterday about seeing “less big books” around the clubhouse, and he added, “Crossword puzzles are going to get done a little more slowly.” Those were nods to the intellectual Dickey, from whom the Mets seem to have easily detached themselves.
“I think we’ve got plenty of talent to fill his shoes,” Jonathon Niese said. “That’s the past. We all move forward. I know we’ve got the guys to put the innings in.”
Said Harvey: “We’re all talented enough and good enough that if we go 200-plus [innings], we’re going to win a lot of games.”
Yes, if Harvey, Niese, Johan Santana, Shaun Marcum and Dillon Gee all surpass the 200-innings mark, with Wheeler close to joining the rotation, the Mets would be in awfully good shape. More to the point, Collins, in the last year of his contract, wants his guys thinking about the possible.
“Just because we don’t have 15 $20-million a year players sitting here, doesn’t mean this is not a good team,” Collins said, repeating what he told the team. “But it’s up to you guys. We’ve got to work harder, we’ve got to play harder. We’ve got to play better. And then go compete.
“If you execute and compete the right way, who knows what the outcomes will be?”
The 2012 Mets finished 12th in the National League in runs scored and 10th in runs allowed. Pretty lousy. As a point of comparison, the 2011 Orioles ranked eighth in the American League in runs scored and 14th — dead last — in runs allowed. Last year, without any big-name additions, Baltimore dropped to ninth in runs scored, climbed to eighth in runs allowed and, thanks to some crazily good play in one-run games, soared from 69 wins to 93.
Don’t bet the house on the Mets duplicating the 2012 Orioles’ success. Don’t bet even a folding chair. Just keep in mind that equally strange things have happened as a 2013 Mets playoff run, and that pitching and mindset matter greatly.
Besides, as Murphy said, “If you can’t be excited about the first day of spring training, you’re never going to be excited.”
(And then Murphy headed to New York. It’s never easy with the Mets. You know that.)
kdavidoff@nypost.com