It Gets Long Early

When the Mets aren’t winning every day, everything they are doing badly glares, while everything they are doing well hardly matters to us. The Mets aren’t winning every day. Everything, therefore, feels terrible.

The starting pitchers are doing well, doing the most you could reasonably ask for, at any rate. None of them hasn’t lasted less than five innings, which after 2025 translates experientially to going at least eight and handing the ball to John Franco on a daily basis. So huzzah for adequate length out of the gate and nobody within our rotation singlehandedly shoving the Mets in a hole early. Freddy Peralta’s second start, in St. Louis on Wednesday, kept up a pace similar to the one he set on Opening Day. Freddy went five, bore down when he had to, and persevered into the sixth. Ace enough for now.

Juan Soto is batting .346, buoyed by his first homer of the season in the Busch Stadium finale. Luis Robert, Jr., who already won the Mets a game, has his average above .300. It’s a small sample size, but Mark Vientos has reached .400. Those digits look mighty good.

When closer Devin Williams has had something to close, he’s shut it effectively. Brooks Raley gives up big hits only in strange dreams. Most of the bullpen has pitched capably in innings that don’t begin with a phantom runner on second. If you’re not automatically shuddering when a Met reliever makes an appearance, you can infer Met relief isn’t necessarily lethal to the Mets cause.

Good stuff in several places. But the Mets aren’t winning every day. In fact, they’ve lost three of their past four games, including the most recent one, a 2-1 defeat that took ten innings to wind down to its inevitable conclusion.

Everything, therefore, feels and looks terrible.

There isn’t just one elephant in the room. There have been 53 of them in scoring position since Saturday. Only six of them have scored. The Mets’ RISP output Wednesday was 0-for-11. That’s eleven baserunners situated to score on a base hit, and no base hits delivered. That’s a lot of elephant mess left behind. Can’t get runs in during regulation, suddenly you’re playing extra innings practically every day. It’s a strain on the bullpen. It’s more pressure to do what isn’t being done, which is driving a runner in from a base like second…which they give you just for showing up in the tenth and eleventh innings.

After six games, most Mets aren’t hitting, and even the Mets who are hitting aren’t driving in runs consistently. Maybe six games shouldn’t be played before the second day of April. Blaming the calendar probably amounts to misplaced frustration, but on this day in 1984, the Mets opened their season on what was then the earliest date in their history. It took being the opponent in Cincinnati, the site granted the Baseball-wide Opener annually, for the Mets to be compelled to strap it on so soon. In the past decade, when COVID and lockouts haven’t lurked, March has emerged as the new April. It’s instinctually too soon to be this dismayed by how the Mets are playing. Honestly, last week’s Opening Day romp notwithstanding, it’s too soon for the Mets to be playing.

But they are, kind of. They’re not necessarily keeping track out of outs while in the field (Lindor) and not necessarily taking care as they wander off first base (Lindor again), though you understand such lapses are the aberration and will not be the norm. You force yourself to go through the self-evident exercise of reminding yourself that six games, let alone the first six games of a loooooong season, are only six games. A 3-3 record that could be better could also be worse. Mostly, it could be practically irrelevant in the scheme of the next 156 games, save for the nagging fact that every game counts.

We’ve mastered basic arithmetic. We know six isn’t nearly as many as 156. Yet MLB implores us to watch our team from the very beginning of a season and take it seriously enough to bet on, never mind that we have conditioned ourselves from a tender age to wager nothing less valuable than our emotions on most every pitch. It’s not too soon to notice when something is off. It’s never too soon to turn such a situation around.