Just before the Mets completed a June swoon that threw their season into a serious state of disrepair, a club official — the old Bill Parcells adage about you at some point being what the won-loss record says you are be damned — tried to put the past 15 months in Queens into perspective.
The message was the Mets probably weren’t as good last year as their 101 regular-season victories suggested (maybe the team’s elimination in the wild-card round of the playoffs proved that true) and were better this season than their record indicated.
Since that club official’s assessment, the Mets have won six of nine games, including a 4-2 road trip through Arizona and San Diego.
It was a small sign of life heading into the All Star-break for the Mets, who open the second half on Friday against the Dodgers at Citi Field.
FanGraphs, which provides daily updates on teams’ postseason chances, gives the Mets a 14.6 percent probability of a wild-card berth.
The Mets’ chances of making up 18 ½ games on the Braves in the NL East race are considerably lower — zero percent, according to the website — so any focus on this season rightfully revolves around securing one of the NL’s three wild-card berths. In that race the Mets are seven games behind, but with five teams ahead of them.
Until the 42-48 Mets can get back to .500, it’s probably fool’s gold to get too invested in how close they might get to the lead for the third wild card.
The Mets’ sense of urgency is obviously the ground they have to recover in the second half, but also this: The trade deadline is Aug. 1, leaving team officials with 15 games to figure out a path.
It seems logical that double digits in victories over that stretch might be necessary to justify retaining walk-year players of value (David Robertson and Tommy Pham in particular) instead of trading them.
“I think there’s a lot of things in the last week that are very positive,” Brandon Nimmo said before the Mets departed for the All-Star break on Sunday. “I think there are things that we can look toward in the second half that do mark that we can turn this thing around.”
He was referring to a starting rotation that had begun showing life — Max Scherzer’s clunker in the first-half finale notwithstanding — and working deeper into games. It’s a rotation that is expected to receive a boost with Jose Quintana’s expected return from the injured list next week, giving the left-hander potentially three starts before the trade deadline.
Nimmo is among the few holdovers from the 2019 team that went into the All-Star break 10 games below .500.
Those Mets went 27-10 over the next 5 ½ weeks and managed to stay alive in the wild-card race deep into September, finishing with 86 victories. If there was a third wild-card team in each league that season, the Mets would have reached the postseason.
We have also seen it head in the opposite direction for the Mets: In 2021 they reached the All-Star break 48-40 and leading the NL East by four games. That was a season that ended with 77 victories for the Mets and no playoffs.
These Mets, with a record $364 million payroll, will be regarded as the biggest flop in franchise history if they fall short of the postseason.
What’s the key to this second half?
“The one magic key, there is none,” Buck Showalter said. “You have got to have all different things clicking. If something is not working well, something else picks it up.
“There is no perfect team or perfect player, and that’s why it’s the epitome of a team game and the key is when something is not the way it can be there’s some other phase that picks it up. There’s not one key, there’s about 100, and it’s hard to win games and some days the game makes you think you have got it figured out and some days you don’t think it will ever let you off the deck. Just keep chasing it and it will usually reward you if you stay true to it. Our guys have and they have stayed together, so they are giving themselves a chance to play better as they go forward.”
The Mets are six games below .500, which suggests something other than a good team. If they are better than what their record says they are, now would be the time to continue what they started on July 1 and send Bill Parcells an autographed team photo.
