After David Peterson’s pitched his complete game shutout against the Nationals Wednesday night and Juan Soto — look out for him the rest of the way — had hit another home run, the Mets had the best record in baseball. But then they’ve had more wins than anybody in baseball for more than a year.
Oh, sure. Starting from when their 2024 season looked like it was bottoming out two days from the end of May — their record 22-33 at the time — here was the Mets’ regular-season record through Wednesday night:
111-64.
They merely went from 11 games under .500 to 47 games over. The next best record for this same time period is the Dodgers at 103-70. Through Wednesday night the Yankees’ record was 97-74. How good are their numbers for slightly more than a full season? They are nearly 1986 good. All the Mets did that year was finish the regular season at 108-54.
The Dodgers might be the best team again by the end of this season if and when they get healthy. The Yankees might be the second-best team to the Mets right now. And you shouldn’t overlook the Tigers, who got hot last August and have stayed hot. Their record from the end of last May through Wednesday night was 103-72.
After Peterson threw that dazzling shutout against the Nationals, a terrific manager named Carlos Mendoza was talking about how rare a pitching performance that is in the modern game, saying “You don’t take something like that for granted.”
Nor should anybody take Mendoza’s Mets for granted, the way they’re playing, especially the way they’re playing at home. Here is something else Mendoza said the other day, after another Mets comeback: “We’re never out of a game.” They’re not. It doesn’t mean this is finally the year when they do what the ’86ers did, and go all the way. It doesn’t mean they’re going to run away from the Phillies in the NL East. And the National League, where the Dodgers and Cubs have the next best records and the Padres and Giants and Phillies will have their way across the summer, is a tougher league than the American is, for now, anyway.
Still: This is the deepest and most entertaining team in 40 years of Mets baseball. We see Francisco Lindor, one of the best all-around players they’ve ever had and the best leader in the sport, winning games in so many ways from the top of the batting order. We see this kind of renaissance from Pete Alonso, helped mightily by the presence of Soto in front of him in the order. It has a pitching staff better and deeper than anybody could possibly have expected coming out of Port St. Lucie, and a bullpen that has been one of the biggest and best surprises anywhere, led by Edwin Diaz, who is throwing fastballs and sliders past the world again, same as he did it before he hurt his knee.
And they have Soto.
They have Soto the Met, now beginning to bang the ball around the way Soto the Yankee did, and Soto the Padre did before that, and Juan Soto the Washington National did before that. The batting average is slowly beginning to climb, the home run total is beginning to climb, and so is his OPS, which despite his slow start isn’t all that terribly far from what he produced for the Yankees. Is Soto ultimately going to hit as many home runs as he did at Yankee Stadium, with that right-field wall looking as if it belongs in Williamsport, Pa.? Maybe not. But he is going to hit a lot. And is already showing you, with what Lindor is doing and Brandon Nimmo is doing now that he’s coming around — and with the Polar Bear behind him — just how immense his value is at the top of any batting order.
Was there a period of adjustment after signing the biggest free agent contract in the history of the world? Obviously there was. Did he have a very rough weekend at Yankee Stadium in the first Subway Series of the season? We all saw that he did. But now he has come out the other side of that, come out swinging. And where-oh-where is all the conversation now about how he regretted making the move across town?
Sure, he did.
Mendoza describes what he’s seeing and the Mets are seeing and what we’re all seeing from him this way:
“Juan Soto being Juan Soto.”
Mendoza didn’t panic watching Soto’s spring struggles, because Mendoza doesn’t do that. He certainly didn’t do it a year ago when, as a rookie manager, someone whose first managing job was in the big, bad city, he didn’t panic at 22-33 when the sky was falling. Even then he said, “We have a good team and I’m confident we will prove it.” They did. And went through something to become a playoff team good enough to finally go toe-to-toe with the Dodgers all the way to Game 6 of the National League Championship Series; along the way they did something even the Yankees couldn’t do in the World Series, which means push the thing back to Los Angeles after being down three games to one.
Now here they are, with the kind of pop and flair and danger just from Lindor-Soto-Alonso at the top of the order that the Dodgers have with Shohei Ohtani and Mookie Betts and Freddie Freeman. They’re backing up their veterans stars nicely with talented kids like Luisangel Acuna and Brett Baty and Mark Vientos (when healthy) and Ronny Mauricio, who rejoined the party by hitting a home run about 12 miles.
There is a long way to go, of course. But after 68 games their record was 44-24. Last year after 68 games their record was 31-37. The record was 58-36 after that. If these Mets roll the way those Mets did the rest of the way, you know a number they might end up chasing?
1986.
