You don’t need an Ivy League degree (Mets owner Steve Cohen and baseball president David Stearns have them) or analytics expertise (the Mets employ as many numbers crunchers as anyone) to understand that the 2024 Mets’ chances to make the playoffs and eliminate the hated Braves are better than ever now.
While FanGraphs puts the Mets’ October opportunity at 76.2 percent, their chances seem even better than that.
All the Mets need to do is win the highly anticipated series in Atlanta that starts Tuesday night. That’s it, take two out of three and their ticket is punched for very meaningful games in October (and even if they win only one of three, they still hold the edge with a series to go in Stearns’ old stomping grounds of Milwaukee).
Stearns told The Post in spring training he believed they had a “playoff caliber” team, and for today he looks right about that, and just about everything else, too. He is as good as advertised when Cohen signed him to a near-record contract, complete with postseason incentives that weren’t expected to come into play until 2025. Fairly, too, it doesn’t hurt to have a tiny bit of luck (more on that below).
The Mets hit Atlanta with all the advantages, with the obvious exception of recent history, where the Braves are practically pitching a shutout against the Mets.
- The Mets are the hotter team. In a league of ridiculous parity (excepting the White Sox, who already tied the 1962 Mets record with their 120th defeat), the Mets’ 63-37 record since June 1 is the majors’ best, as is their 15-5 September mark.
- They hit better than the Braves. The Mets possess one of baseball’s deepest lineups, and lately they are even getting enormous contributions from the two fellows who replaced MVP candidate Francisco Lindor. One guy is more remarkable than the next.
Rookie fill-in shortstop Luisangel Acuña, a “blessing” according to one Mets person (no pun intended), has a 1.000 slugging percentage over the week, which is better than most everyone but Shohei Ohtani. (Not even Mets people saw this coming, not after Acuña posted a .654 OPS in Triple-A.)
Now for that little bit of luck. Rival execs suggest Acuña was the highest-ranked prospect the Mets were seriously listening on at the deadline. Wisely, they didn’t trade him, and the belief of team execs now is that he’s a player who prefers the big stage, where they find themselves now. Meantime, Lindor’s leadoff replacement, the very veteran Jose Iglesias, leads the majors among players with 260 plate appearances with a .337 batting average — not bad for a guy who signed minors deals four years running.
(The one casualty of Lindor’s painful back injury is his MVP hopes, as Shohei Ohtani, fairly, clinched the award with an historic and otherworldly week.)
- They are the healthier team. The Braves are without several stars, including Luisangel’s brother, reigning MVP Ronald Acuña Jr. (it must feel good to have the star Acuña for a change!), plus Spencer Strider, Austin Riley and Reynaldo Lopez.
The Mets, quite frankly, bring the better active roster.
If they do make it, credit to the players, who exceeded almost exclusively middling expectations. And credit to Stearns and Co. Stearns was the guy Cohen wanted all along, and he looks worth the two-year wait.
If Stearns didn’t bat 1.000, he came closer than just about anyone, and that wasn’t easy in a transition year when they allocated under $100M for new player deals (or less than 10 percent what Cohen spent the previous three seasons on player contracts). The misses were mostly in low-cost flyers — Adrian Houser, Jorge Lopez, Jake Diekman, Michael Tonkin — and scarcely worth mentioning, barely tip money for the owner.
Stearns hit homers on the three biggest decisions among many excellent calls.
Luis Severino overcame four years of injuries and a 2023 season in which he declared himself “the worst pitcher in the majors,” thanks to better health and enormous work. For $13M, he’d be the NL rotation deal of the year if not for rotation-mate Sean Manaea ($26M for two, plus an opt out).
Manaea already was showing serious improvement when he decided to emulate likely NL Cy Young winner Chris Sale after watching Sale shut down the Mets midseason. Manaea changed his arm slot, altered his pitch mix and turned into a seven-inning star, the kind that barely exists in MLB anymore.
The biggest call, ultimately, was to bring Carlos Mendoza across town after missing out on managerial star Craig Counsell (as good as Counsell is, the Mets look wise not to have outbid the Cubs). Mendoza, a Manager of the Year candidate, is proving to be the needed steady leader.
Yes, everything is going their way. But if they don’t make it out of Atlanta alive, no one will recall they improved dramatically from last year’s debacle, came back from an 0-5 start, or that for 100 games anyway, they were baseball’s best team. The pressure is on, but this time they look like they are more than up to the challenge.
