Won & Hardly Done

Now it’s getting serious, to the extent that anything can be serious after fourteen games. The Mets are off to a seriously good start and maybe then some. I’m not sure when a start just becomes the season, but fourteen games will do for our purposes. A seven-game road trip with five wins, a seven-game homestand with five wins.

What’s to complain about? That’s a rhetorical question. I’m not interested in a cataloguing of petty gripes, thanks. There are going to be lousy nights, because baseball is notorious for its lack of winning ’em all, but maybe we’ll learn to take the less rewarding of ’em in stride. We do in the abstract. Sitting through them is another matter.

Sitting through games like Thursday afternoon’s 6-2 Mets victory, on the other hand, is a genuine pleasure. Carlos Carrasco gave up a run in the second inning, and guess what — neither the world nor the game ended. The Carrasco who got clobbered by every team in every earliest frame last year like the first inning was the personification of Kyle Schwarber himself overcomes adversity this year. Not that he’s faced much adversity. The batters who face Carrasco would tell a different story from their perspective. Between that single run scoring in the second and the leadoff runner reaching in top of the eighth, eighteen consecutive Giants bit off more Cookie than they could swallow. Eighteen San Franciscans up, eighteen San Franciscans down…and you know how steep those hills in San Francisco can be.

Any particular magic to eighteen consecutive batters retired? No more so than ten wins in fourteen games. Except Carrasco of the 1.47 ERA filed away six perfect innings in a row before allowing a solo home run after seven-and-two-thirds, which is simply very sweet, and the Mets are the first team to reach double-digit victories in the majors. I know that latter statlike factoid because one of MLB’s media rights holders tweeted a big graphic that shouted 10 WINS on our ballclub’s behalf, which made me think that if you give the Mets 14 games, they’ll give us something special.

At the very least, they’ll give us 148 more games.

Hopefully, they will continue to hit like they did at various inflection points of Thursday’s homestand finale, with Eduardo Escobar going deep for the first time as a Met; Francisco Lindor going deep for the fifteenth time as a Met at Citi Field (he’s already in the Top Twenty in that particular category careerwise); and Mark Canha chipping in a clutch two-out, two-run single to extend the Mets’ lead to 5-1 in the third. From there, Carrasco could relax and we could practice breathing easily.

The Mets’ 10-4 record represents the fourth-best 14-game start in franchise history, tied with 1972, 2006 and 2007, trailing only 2018 (12-2) and 1986 and 2015 (both 11-3). Those seasons had loads more games, too, along with varying trajectories and endings. I don’t throw this data point onto the informational table to draw absolute conclusions in April. Just showing you that a start of 10-4, good buddies, doesn’t happen often. Might as well enjoy it until the first pitch of the fifteenth game.

To co-opt a phrase from the late, great C.W. McCall, let these Metsies roll!

Still standing tall outside Citi Field and therefore not a dream is that Tom Seaver statue, a miracle of Metsian sculpting reflected upon in the latest of episode of National League Town. Listen here or anywhere you choose…except maybe over 1010 WINS, whose all-news format makes it an iffy choice to hear Mets podcasts.