Laura Albanese: It's still early for Mets, but it's still OK to have questions about them
Mets shortstop Francisco Lindor looks on from the dugout during the fourth inning against the Minnesota Twins at Citi Field on Thursday. Credit: Jim McIsaac
They’re supposed to stay optimistic. The Mets are supposed to believe they can bail themselves out of this thing. David Stearns is supposed to say that there’s a lot of baseball left to be played.
They can’t survive otherwise — they can’t look at the calendar, see that it’s only the last week of April, and already declare this season dead on arrival.
But the rest of us can start to wonder.
Logically, this team still very much has a chance. To quote their president of baseball operations Friday, “I know where we are in the schedule and I know how long this season is.” And going into this weekend series against the lowly Rockies, there were still 137 games left to play.
Being seven games under .500 in April is suboptimal, but it doesn’t automatically sound the death knell, particularly with how weak the National League East is shaping up to be early on. The Mets still had a 43.4% chance to make the playoffs, according to FanGraphs, and hey, they had won a whole two games in a row.
And still, you have to wonder if they’ve already taken too many punches; it doesn’t help that the hits keep on coming.
Francisco Lindor will be in a boot for the next week, and it’ll be a full three weeks before the Mets reimage his strained left calf, manager Carlos Mendoza said. They don’t have a grade on the strain because “it’s in a tricky” part of the area, and doctors are still examining Lindor to rule out the possibility of another injury. Mendoza couldn’t specify what exactly they’re looking for, but given the location, a good guess is the Achilles tendon.
Jorge Polanco is “week to week” with both bursitis in his ankle and a bone bruise on his wrist, Stearns said. Devin Williams’ famed changeup is MIA, they have to pray Ronny Mauricio can live up to his potential after almost a year of toying with his development, and they need to unburden themselves of the mental toll exacted by losing 12 straight games.
Their bullpen appears to be constructed by Dr. Frankenstein himself — a mishmash of parts that don’t quite seem to fit. Sean Manaea and David Peterson have already lost their starting roles, and Kodai Senga probably should, except for the fact that the Mets are low on options and Senga doesn’t profile well as a reliever.
“I don’t know if we continue to go this route, if that’s going to be sustainable,” Mendoza said, referring to the number of long men in his bullpen. “That’s the question, right?”
That’s one of the many, many questions, actually. Even the bright spots aren’t all that bright: Juan Soto is back, yes, but the Mets need to be cautious with him, meaning that he’s a designated hitter for now, and he’ll get far more off days than he otherwise would.
By the time June rolls around, it’s probable that Lindor and Soto will have only played together for a single week.
“Injuries are part of this,” Stearns said, “and injuries to good players are part of this. We’re not the only team in baseball that deals with this and we’ve just got to get through it.”
The real concern is how they intend to get through it. While addressing the media during his regular homestand availability Friday, Stearns was asked about when he assesses the true state of the teams he constructs. In times past, he had said that he generally takes about 45 games to get a gauge of where they’re at, and he stuck by that Friday — 12-game losing streak notwithstanding.
“I think we go into a season with an expectation of who we are as a team, understanding we’re not going to perfectly nail who we are as a team but it’s really tough for me to take two weeks, even two weeks where we didn’t win a baseball game and say that’s going to dramatically alter who we think we are,” he said. “I still think we’re a good team. I recognize that we had a stretch where we did not play good baseball and it cost us and it cost us repeatedly but I think we’re a good team and I think we will show that.”
Although that’s generally a sound strategy, it doesn’t perfectly take the other factors into consideration. It’s not just that the Mets played poorly, it’s that there aren’t too many indications that things are about to get better — not with such impactful injuries, and so much inconsistency up and down the lineup, and from their high-leverage arms.
But sure, let them hope for the best. Realistically, though, the Mets might have taken too many uppercuts to the jaw, and lost too much blood, to come back from this one.
Laura Albanese is the Mets beat writer for Newsday. She's been covering MLB since 2014 after starting at Newsday as an intern seven years earlier.
