We are moving up on the All-Star Break now, and still have no idea at this point if either the Mets or the Yankees are deep enough or good enough — or well-constructed enough by their big-ticket general managers — to make it as far into the playoffs as they did last year.
Just off what we’ve seen from them over the past month, both teams having played an awful lot of JV baseball, neither one of our teams looks good enough to win it all, which is supposed to be the object of the game for both of them after they did go as deep as they did last October.
Really, all we know with any kind of clarity at the moment is that the Mets and the Yankees — that means Hal Steinbrenner and Steve Cohen — are paying more than $600 million on teams not good enough to be in first place in their divisions. They also happen to be teams, at least for now, that look to be full of holes.
Which one is better with the break approaching? The Mets are, if not by a lot. Going off the season played so far, their best is still better than the Yankees’ best, if for no other reason than they have Francisco Lindor and Juan Soto and Pete Alonso at the top of their batting order. The Yankees? They have Aaron Judge, once again looking like 99 out of 100 every single time he comes to the plate.
Does Judge have help? Sure. Cody Bellinger has been swell and Jazz Chisholm Jr. seems to be back in his happy place now that he’s back at second base, and now that Hal Steinbrenner — please stop calling this guy cheap — just took a $22 million haircut to unload another bad contract, this one belonging to DJ LeMahieu. And at least one of their top kids, Jasson Dominguez, looks to be coming on even if Anthony Volpe is still going the wrong way far too often.
But even with the Yankees mashing the way they have against the Mariners this week, it was the Mets who showed all of their top-of-the-order possibilities the other night in Baltimore. They were losing 6-2, late. Then Lindor hit a 2-run homer and Alonso did the same and Juan Soto finally produced the game-winning RBI in the 10th.
It didn’t go that way in Game 1 of their doubleheader against the Orioles on Thursday afternoon. If you watched, you know. Mets had second and third, nobody out. Then Soto struck out and Alonso struck out before Jesse Winker (now hurt again) made the third out of the inning. So it was just 1-0 Mets in the 8th when they got Ryan Stanek-ed and lost.
They need pitching. So do the Yankees. They need starting pitching and they need for Stanek not to have as big a role in Carlos Mendoza’s bullpen as he does. But they are about to get back their ace, Kodai Senga. They are getting back Sean Manaea, such a huge piece for them a year ago. David Peterson, the de facto ace in Senga’s absence, was terrific on Thursday afternoon in the first game of the doubleheader before he left with a shutout after 90 pitches and watched the bottom of the 8th explode just enough to cost them what was shaping up to be a pretty sweet win.
“We didn’t execute,” Mendoza said, talking about all the runners they left on base.
“I didn’t execute,” Stanek said, explaining how a slider that he wanted to be down ended up turning into what Reggie Jackson used to call a mattress ball for Gunnar Henderson. “The kind you just lay on,” is the way Reggie described fat pitches like that one.
So for one more afternoon, this one in Baltimore, July looked like the bad parts of June. Now David Stearns has work to do at the Trade Deadline, and even with Senga and Manaea on their way back into the rotation. Could Stearns use another dynamic right-handed bat? Yeah, he could. Mostly he needs pitching if the Mets are going to make a run.
At their best, and looking even reasonably well-armed, the Mets actually look like the kind of dynamic team that could win it all this time. And again: I believe their best is better than the Yankees’ best. Now we are about to see if they can play the kind of ball in August and September the way they did in August and September of ’24, when they really started to look like what they were by October: One of the best teams anywhere. When they did get to October, they had to beat a terrific Brewers team, then the Phillies, before finally running into the best team in the world in the National League Championship Series, which means the Dodgers. All that was playing out for them, of course, while the Yankees got a draw in their league, against the American League Central, that was merely a dream for them.
Now it is the Yankees who seem to need reinforcements coming over the hill even more than the Mets do. They need a third baseman now that Chisholm has moved across the infield to second and LeMahieu is on his way to Hicksville. Not on Long Island. Aaron Hicksville. They need at least one more starter now that Clarke Schmidt is lost for the season. And — stop me if you’ve heard this one before — this is another Trade Deadline when they need bullpen help.
We know how the Yankees and Mets have looked at their best this season. By now we could all teach a master class on what their worst looks like. But take a look at the teams in the Wild Card scrum behind both of them these days. Before you talk about making another deep run in October, you have to make it to October.
