This story was excerpted from Anthony DiComo's Mets Beat newsletter. To read the full newsletter, click here. And subscribe to get it regularly in your inbox.
Before Wednesday’s game against the Cubs, Mets manager Buck Showalter and hitting coach Eric Chavez held a closed-door meeting with the team’s position players. The message was simple: Stop looking at the big picture. Stop pressing. Focus on having four good at-bats per night.
It’s only natural for a tightness to develop as clubs approach the postseason -- particularly clubs such as the Mets, who haven’t qualified for the playoffs since 2016 and who feature a lineup lacking in October experience.
“It’s definitely tough,” Chavez said. “With analytics, there’s a lot of information. We’ve talked about getting the right amount of it. I think when things start not going our way, we need to kind of pull back. There’s a competition part of this that when we step between the lines, it’s just, ‘I’m going to refuse to lose to you.’”
Overall, the Mets’ offensive numbers in September have not been bad, but they have been consistently inconsistent -- nine runs one night, two the next. Chavez believes that as the stakes have risen, Mets hitters have gradually strayed from the process that most teams seek to achieve: swing at strikes, hit the ball hard, don’t go chasing. A prime example came in the third inning of Tuesday’s loss to the Cubs, when Pete Alonso saw a first-pitch cutter on the outer edge and tried to pull it, grounding to shortstop to bust a Mets rally.
“We feel like we do have the right group of guys,” Chavez said, explaining why he felt now was the proper time for a meeting. “That’s the thing about having Buck, who’s been around forever, and myself on this staff. We’ve been around baseball. We’ve seen a lot. I’ve seen a team collapse in the last month having a nine-game lead. A lot of crazy things have happened in September. This is a physical game, but there’s a mental toughness that it takes to play this game that people don’t understand.”
The fact that the Mets have struggled during a stretch of 16 consecutive games against teams with losing records may seem difficult to square. The reality is that focus can be more difficult to maintain against lesser teams with lighter crowds in the stands. Physically, players grow tired during the end of a six-month grind. What’s more, pitchers such as Erick Fedde, Mitch Keller, Javier Assad and Adrian Sampson -- all of whom have beaten the Mets in recent weeks -- are working to position themselves for jobs next season. They have as much incentive to perform as the greats of the game do.
“It never came out of our mouth that this was the easy part of the schedule,” Chavez said. “That was written about. There’s nothing easy about the baseball schedule. The actual season is a lot tougher than the playoffs. This is the hardest part. … You have to have a lot of luck and a lot of health on your side. But September? This, to me, is the most fun part of the year.”