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.

LOS ANGELES -- What has made the Mets’ April so notable is not simply the fact that they rapidly erased an 0-5 start and are now, 18 games into the season, on a 90-win pace. It’s that the Mets did all that despite facing the toughest schedule in Major League Baseball.

As of Friday morning, the combined win percentage of all Mets opponents was .569 -- highest in the Majors. Five of the six teams they’ve faced have winning records -- Milwaukee, Detroit, Atlanta, Kansas City and Pittsburgh -- and the sixth, the Reds, only recently dipped back to .500.

Things, of course, don’t get any easier from here. The Mets on Friday will open a six-game West Coast swing through Los Angeles and San Francisco, beginning with three against a perennially contending Dodgers team fresh off a billion-dollar offseason.

“It’s going to be a great test to a good start of the year,” Mets shortstop Francisco Lindor said. “Some people might disagree with me that it’s a good start. I think it’s a good start. So yeah, I’m looking forward to it. When you play the favorites to win the World Series, it’s going to be fun.”

Unsurprisingly, the Dodgers are off to their usual strong beginning, producing a 12-9 record thanks in large part to the fruits of their offseason spending spree. Through 21 games, Shohei Ohtani has four home runs and a 1.040 OPS. That’s one less long ball than Teoscar Hernández, another free-agent signing who has become a cog in the middle of Los Angeles’ order. On the pitching side, one-time Mets target Yoshinobu Yamamoto has recovered from a poor debut to produce a 1.80 ERA in three starts since that time.

“It’s the big leagues,” Mets manager Carlos Mendoza said. “I don’t think if you look at the schedule, there’s a soft spot now anymore. It’s one team after another.”

Historically, the West Coast has offered an important proving ground for the Mets. In 2010, for example, a surprisingly spunky Mets team dropped nine of 11 in San Francisco, Arizona and Los Angeles, including two games on walk-offs, while also losing outfielder Jason Bay to a concussion that wasn’t immediately diagnosed. They never really recovered, loitering around .500 for the rest of the season and finishing in fourth place.

Five years later, the Mets touched down in Los Angeles on Fourth of July weekend as a seemingly broken team, with one of MLB’s weakest offenses. As talking heads envisaged their demise, the Mets surprisingly took two of three from a strong Dodgers team, scored another series win in San Francisco and within weeks had stormed to the top of the NL East.

“You can’t take it for granted,” Lindor said. “I’ve been on teams where you look up and you’re like, ‘Holy s---, we just got swept by a team that wasn’t supposed to [be good]. So I think we’ve just got to stay within ourselves, and go out there and play as hard as we can, no matter who’s on the other side.

“I think the atmosphere [at Dodger Stadium] is going to be fantastic, but we had to play the Pittsburgh Pirates and the Kansas City Royals as hard as we’re going to have to play the Dodgers and San Francisco. Same thing with Arizona. Same thing with Cleveland. Any big league team is trying to have a great start.”