LAS VEGAS — The Mets and Cubs are similar and different.
Big-market teams, check. Accepted losing for several seasons to get to an overall better place, check. Did that construction under a top baseball official who cultivated a championship elsewhere — Sandy Alderson (A’s) with the Mets and Theo Epstein (Red Sox) with the Cubs, check.
The meaningful difference is in area of emphasis: Alderson centered his reboot around dynamic young starting pitching, Epstein around vibrant young bats. It is the difference between arm and hammer.
Fittingly, the first significant steps in this brewing rivalry played out as differently as the teams’ strengths. The Cubs won all seven games between the clubs in the regular season, the Mets all four in the postseason. So even though the overall ledger said Cubs 7, Mets 4, the October triumphs made this advantage Mets.
At least for Round 1.
Because you have a sense on the horizon is Round 2 and 3 …
“There is a solid potential to do this for a bit,” Cubs manager Joe Maddon said. “They are young and good, and so are we.”
The Mets and Cubs are not going away.
They played the first of a two-game series on Thursday night to end spring training before the onset of another season of promise. If the optimism needed accentuating, the teams were in the right place. I wandered in and out of sports book on the main Strip and found what I suspected — the odds-makers love the Cubs and Mets.
The sports book for MGM hotels has the Cubs as the 2/1 favorites to win the NL title, the Mets next at 3/1. Caesars Entertainment had the Cubs the 9/5 favorites followed by the Giants at 4/1, then the Mets and Dodgers at 5/1. The Venetian had the Cubs at 5/2, the Giants at 16/5, the Dodgers at 5/1 and the Mets at 11/2.
That the Cubs are the top pick at each casino reflects, yes, that they are the darlings of this season and that the expectation, therefore, is that heavy money will flow on them, so the books are keeping the odds lower.
“Somebody has to be the favorite,” Maddon said. “It is complimentary.”
It also symbolizes two issues why even though the Mets are the defending NL champs, there is a sense of chasing the Cubs: 1) Bats are likely to stay healthy and sustain in a greater way than pitching arms and 2) The Cubs are in better position to augment around their strengths as the season goes along.
The Mets parted with a bevy of prospects last year in trades, especially upper-level pitching, notably Michael Fulmer. They have that terrific rotation, but there now are not a lot of well-regarded arms percolating just below and the best of their prospect base, in general, is in the lower minors.
Baseball America actually has the Mets’ system ranked 15th in the majors and the Cubs 20th, but ESPN has the Cubs fourth and the Mets 16th, and Baseball Prospectus has the Cubs 12th and the Mets 21st.
When it comes to prospects, beauty is always in the eye of individual front offices and usually it just takes one high-end prospect to make a deal conceivable. But what makes the Cubs stand out is that in the offseason they deepened their positional group further by adding Jason Heyward and Ben Zobrist and retaining Dexter Fowler. Thus, players who don’t qualify as prospects, but are still young and attractive such as Jorge Soler and Javier Baez could be added to a prospect or two such as touted third baseman Jeimer Candelario, who is blocked by Kris Bryant.
The Mets have Juan Lagares, who like Soler has been pushed out of an obvious starting role. But they just do not have the overall, in-the-majors or close-to-the-majors talent to deal that the Cubs do.
If a Sonny Gray or Jose Fernandez becomes available in July, the Cubs will be players.
Of course, the Mets do not have to be players for that because of the strength of their rotation — assuming health. But did they do enough to supplement around their strength? Their offseason priority was Zobrist and they thought they had him in their grasp, when he was actually taking a physical in Chicago.
Was Neil Walker a good fall-back position along with Asdrubal Cabrera and Alejandro De Aza and, especially the retention of Yoenis Cespedes — a bigger late keep for the Mets, than Fowler was for the Cubs?
Both clubs made their breakthrough last year, found each other waiting in the NLCS. Was that only Round 1?