Something Tasty Might Be Cooking

Friday night’s was the kind of game you were glad to stay awake for and through. The Mets jumped out to an early lead in San Francisco, built a substantial lead as things reached their midpoint, and tacked on late. Late is pervasive where West Coast start times are concerned. The first inning was late. The ninth inning was technically morning. But all of the innings registered collectively as positive, as the Mets won their fifth consecutive game, routing the Giants, 8-1.

So, the big, bad Mets we recall from slices and chunks of April and May and the first half of June are back, right? Right?

Don’t all assent at once, just consider…

• They’re in the midst of a legitimate winning streak.

• They lead their division.

• Their leading man, Francisco Lindor, is acting as if his bat had never fallen into an abyss.

• Their long-running Dean, Brandon Nimmo, is spry as a sophomore.

• Their quintet of kids — Masters Acuña, Alvarez, Baty, Mauricio, and Vientos — are together on the roster for the first time ever, each lately contributing a little here, a little there, none making us wholly regretful of his presence.

• Pete Alonso is playing defense.

• Juan Soto is driving balls up the middle.

• Tyrone Taylor and Jeff McNeil are regularly tracking such orbs down.

• Clay Holmes is gutting out five effective if not efficient innings, which is OK, because we have Rapidly Recidivized Rico Garcia back, following the ten minutes when he’d inexplicably wandered away from the organization, and Rico will have help when lefty Gregory Soto arrives from Baltimore.

This Soto, poised to become the first Met ever to go by Gregory (my mother, who named her only son after Gregory Peck, would have appreciated that), figures to enhance a deepening bullpen, provided he doesn’t implode more than once or twice, as all bullpen acquirees do as a rite of passage…and all Met relievers do on occasion.

The Mets have occasionally looked lost. If you judge “lost” as their default mode, they’ve provided ample samples to support your conviction. But they’ve also, on multiple occasions, looked like they’re not going to be beaten in a given game or string of them. That’s the appearance they put forth in their sweep of the Angels and at the beginning of their series against the Giants. The Giants are a contender. They threw an ace at the Mets in Logan Webb. The Mets threw him right back, and stole his lunch money in the process (I’m assuming Logan Webb keeps his lunch money at second base). Just one game. Just five games. Just sixteen games over .500. Just a half-game ahead of the Phillies. It’s at least as compelling as the part of the season where they slipped and slid and unnerved us plenty.

In addition to an assortment of outfits like the Giants — 2025 strivers scrapping to emerge from a Wild Card fray and play another day or more come October — Major League Baseball features a top tier of teams that have eluded wire-to-wire perfection while intermittently making cases for themselves as genuine championship threats. Toronto. Detroit. Houston. Milwaukee. Chicago in the form of the Cubs. L.A., as in the Dodgers. Philadelphia, phooey. That other New York assemblage, the one implicitly represented by the giraffe that inevitably stumbles in Citi Field’s not choreographed in the slightest Borough Mascot Race. Ours is one of those top teams, too. Dragged by downs that detract from the ups. Elevated by ups that ought to overshadow the downs but don’t always. We’re all almost great. We’ve all got something preventing us from indisputable excellence. Time awaits to tell all our tales. Only one will be repeated warmly and widely for the ages.

Every really good team may be the equivalent of Mike Piazza when we first got him or Juan Soto now that we have him. Piazza and Soto were ALWAYS great in highlight packages, and, according to our clearheaded perspective, ALWAYS killed us. Then they became Mets and we saw double plays grounded into and pop flies that ended rallies and the stuff of mere mortals. Great? If he’s so great, why isn’t he batting a thousand like he did before he became a Met? THIS IS WHY WE CAN’T HAVE NICE THINGS!!! Conversely, we experienced the entirety of David Wright, which is to say the groundouts and strikeouts that didn’t make the montages last weekend, let alone the uninterrupted images of excellence that probably haunted fans of our opponents the way Piazza pre-1998 and Soto pre-2025 haunted us, except who the hell wanted to talk to fans of our opponents to find out what they thought about anything? We lived with David every day of his career, so we might have been skewed from believing he was predominantly phenomenal. No man is a hero to his valet, no idol doesn’t go 0-for-4 while leaving eight men on.

Few reasons to stew right now.

There’s good in a season. There’s bad in a season. As many times as we’re repeatedly reminded “you’re never as good/bad as you look when you’re winning/losing,” the blend remains eternally perplexing. Yet when you’ve got as many ingredients for good as these Mets do, and they’re cooking together delectably, maybe try to enjoy a hearty spoonful before deciding in advance that the next taste will be a little off.