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.
NEW YORK -- One week ago, on Memorial Day, the Mets’ season crossed the one-third mark. That is an important distinction. For many baseball executives, the first third of the season is about evaluation. The second third is about action. The final third is about accelerating to the finish.
In recent years, however, especially since MLB’s postseason format expanded to six teams from each league in 2022, the order of events has tended to shift a bit later. With so many clubs feeling like they have a shot even relatively deep into the season, bubble teams have taken more time to determine whether they are legitimate contenders.
In a regularly scheduled press conference last week, president of baseball operations David Stearns said he has yet to see any notable developments on the trade market and doesn’t expect things to begin heating up until the second half of July. And that, for the Mets, should be a good thing. If the Trade Deadline were today, the Mets might logically be inclined to sell. Instead, they have six more weeks to evaluate their roster.
Perhaps at this point, the Mets don’t deserve any sort of benefit of the doubt. They have, after all, spent most of their season in or around the basement of the National League. And while injuries have taken a toll, many of New York’s issues have been self-inflicted.
The best thing working in their favor is that MLB’s modern playoff format is forgiving. Since that 2022 expansion, the final bubble team to qualify for the postseason in each league has averaged merely 86 wins. The Mets, at 26-33, would need to play .592 ball the rest of the way to reach that mark. It’s not exactly an unreachable figure (even if, for comparison’s sake, New York only produced a .571 winning percentage during a much-improved May).
Some of the cavalry will be back soon, which should help. Most notably, injured starters Jorge Polanco and Francisco Alvarez should both begin Minor League rehab assignments this week, while Francisco Lindor has also started baseball activities and could return before the end of the month. Kodai Senga, for what it’s worth, is already two starts into his own rehab assignment.
The currently healthy Mets will need to play better, too, and Stearns, to his credit, has tended not to be Pollyannish when discussing these things. He knows as well as anyone the extent to which the Mets have underperformed. He understands they will need to win much more consistently to avoid becoming Deadline sellers.
“We have not had a good year so far, there’s no question,” Stearns said. “We’re not where we thought we would be. We’ve dug ourselves a hole.
It’s not an insurmountable hole, but it’s definitely a hole. And we’re going to have to play a lot better baseball to do what we want to do this year."
Forget any comparisons to the “OMG” Mets of 2024. That was a different team with different players, different problems and different solutions. These Mets just need to keep doing what they did over the weekend, when they swept the Marlins behind their three best starters, producing a consistent offensive attack over a full series for the first time in weeks.
The degree of difficulty will ratchet up this week, when the Mets travel to the West Coast for the last time this season to meet the pitching-rich Mariners amid a challenging offensive environment at Seattle, as well as the always-difficult Padres in San Diego. Losing, say, four of six on that trip would only increase the calls for a Deadline sell-off, which could come to include impending free agents like Clay Holmes and Freddy Peralta.
But as Stearns put it: “We’re not there yet. We’ve got time, so we’re not there yet.”