CHICAGO — Remember Toonces the Driving Cat?
For some inexplicable reason, in this recurring “Saturday Night Live” sketch, Toonces’ human owners thought it would be a good idea to let the enthusiastic feline take command of an automobile. The gambit typically concluded with Toonces driving the entire family over a cliff. Most important, the hijinks never failed to entertain.
For some inexplicable reason, the Mets’ owners thought it would be a good idea to let Brodie Van Wagenen run their baseball operations. They continued this gambit even after Van Wagenen’s initial decisions took the team over a cliff. And so form held on Wednesday with the passing of the trade deadline putting the Mets in the extremely unlikely position of go-for-it buyers.
Was this the smart play? Of course not. But if you can’t be smart, you might as well be entertaining, right?
“Everybody’s having fun,” Jacob deGrom said Wednesday night, after his stellar effort helped the Mets post a 4-2 win, their sixth straight, over the White Sox at Guaranteed Rate Field to pull 4½ games behind the Nationals in the race for the second National League wild card. “We’ve been throwing the ball well and keeping us in games, and these guys are putting up runs. So it’s nice to see and hopefully we can keep it rolling.”
The Mets are rolling to the tune of a 12-4 record, and that’s why Van Wagenen held onto Zack Wheeler, whose impending free agency should receive a big blow in the form of a Mets qualifying offer this November, as well as Noah Syndergaard. Marcus Stroman arrived on Sunday and Jason Vargas departed, a net gain even if the salary dump of Vargas to the Phillies, a contending team in the Mets’ own division, made little sense.
“Obviously the last eight hours or so have been huge for us to know that Wheeler’s staying here, all the guys are staying here,” said Michael Conforto, who delivered a two-run, ninth-inning single to cap what was a three-run, game-winning frame.
The Mets’ loyal, long-suffering fans might as well get fired up, too. Look at it this way: After they won again Wednesday night, FanGraphs calculated the Mets owned a 19.5 percent chance of qualifying for the postseason. What would you say the likelihood was that the Mets could have leveraged Wheeler into an important future piece? Higher or lower than 19.5 percent? I’ll bet the under.
In deGrom, Syndergaard, Wheeler, Stroman and his childhood rival/friend Steven Matz, the Mets have their most compelling and high-end starting rotation since 2015, when Matt Harvey and Bartolo Colon occupied the spots of Stroman and the then-injured Wheeler, and you know how that went.
“We have basically five pitchers that can be top one or two, if not a number three,” said Todd Frazier, another walk-year guy who stayed and proceeded to stroke the game-winning single in the ninth. “Who wouldn’t want that?”
Of course, those ’15 Mets stood three games out of the National League East penthouse and two games over .500, not 11 ½ out and four under like these guys, when the deadline struck. And the person running those Mets, the highly respected Sandy Alderson, executed a flurry of acquisitions, highlighted by obtaining Yoenis Cespedes from the Tigers, that injected an entirely new vibe into the club. Can this roster shuffle, engineered by a far less accomplished general manager, do the same?
“We’re the underdogs,” Van Wagenen said before the game in a telephone news conference, repeating a narrative he first offered right after the All-Star break. Underdogs do prevail on occasion. Maybe if Toonces had received enough chances behind the wheel, he could’ve won the Indy 500. And perhaps the Mets actually can defy the odds and pull this off.
Even if they don’t, you’re a little more intrigued by the Mets now than you were a week ago, aren’t you? For these Mets, for whom optics clearly mean more than long-term viability, who might not be capable of constructing long-term viability anyway, that constitutes another victory amidst a week full of them.