Uneven Progress as the Mets Try to Escape Their Early-Season Hole (2024)

NEW YORK — On June 2, the Mets’ season was looking grim. At Citi Field, Jake Diekman served up a two-run ninth inning home run to the Diamondbacks’ Ketel Marte, turning a 4-3 lead into a 5-4 deficit. Within a matter of minutes, the Mets fell to 24-35, a season-worst 11 games below .500. After last summer’s deadline sell-off, 2024 wasn’t supposed to be their year, and two months into the season, it seemed clear that was the case. In the two and a half months since, the Mets have reeled off the majors’ fourth-best record (41-26), climbing back into the NL Wild Card race, though an 8-10 record in August has kept them on the outside looking in.

This week has already been full of ups and downs. On Monday night against the Orioles, Francisco Alvarez hit an epic no-look walk-off home run to pull the Mets to within a game and a half of the third NL Wild Card spot. The homer opened what has suddenly become a crucial stretch of the Mets’season — 10 games in a row against contenders, the last seven of them on the road — with a bang. But the momentum did not carry over to Tuesday, when starter Jose Quintana turned in his fourth sour outing in a row. The 35-year-old lefty served up two big homers while plodding through five innings, while the offense was held to just two hits over six innings by starter Dean Kremer. A late-inning comeback not only fell short but produced a groan-worthy LOLMets moment.

Still, the Mets’ season has featured more good days than bad in recent months, and regardless of what happens going forward, Monday’s win was one for the books. The Mets had squandered a 3-1 lead when starter David Peterson overstayed his welcome in what had otherwise been an excellent outing. With two outs in the seventh, he balked in a run, then served up a game-tying homer to Ramón Urías on his 98th pitch of the night. Meanwhile, from the fifth inning on, 11 out of 14 Mets struck out against starter Trevor Rogers and relievers Colin Selby, Keegan Akin, and Seranthony Domínguez before Alvarez stepped in.

Domínguez fell behind 3-0, then threw Alvarez a 98-mph four-seamer up and in — into Gameday Zone 1, an area where the 22-year-old catcher had slugged .818 this year. Alvarez annihilated the pitch, and he and everybody in the ballpark knew it. Rather than follow the trajectory of the 106.5-mph, 421-foot blast, he raised his arms triumphantly and thumped his chest, gesticulating wildly to the roaring crowd and dropping f-bombs as he circled the bases:

Alvarez hit 25 homers as a rookie last year, but Monday’s shot was just his sixth of the season and his first since July 26. Though he’s played a crucial part in the Mets’ turnaround — more on that below — he entered the game having hit just .167/.211/.236 in 76 plate appearances since the All-Star break. Through all of his ups and downs, he’s hitting .251/.317/.405 for a 107 wRC+ on the season, 10 points higher than last year.

“We hope that a swing like the one last night can get him going here finally, right?” said manager Carlos Mendoza before Tuesday’s game. “Because we know what he can do when he’s on. When he gets hot there’s a lot to like, the impact, the homers, obviously, but some good at-bats, some clutch hits — and just the person himself. You know how much it means to him because of how much he wants to contribute to the team.”

Even with Monday’s win, the Mets’ odds of claiming a Wild Card spot were less than half of what they were as of July 26 (59.9%), the day they briefly snuck past the Braves and into second place in the NL East. But the rousing victory offered hope that the Mets could hold their own against the Orioles before heading to San Diego for four games against the Padres and then Arizona for three against the Diamondbacks, followed by a possible respite with three against the downtrodden White Sox in Chicago. The Padres and Diamondbacks have both surged, but the Braves have stumbled, going 48-49 since the start of May to leave the playoff door ajar.

In a season in which Kodai Senga has been limited to one start by shoulder and calf strains, it’s the offense that has helped the Mets regain relevance, aided by some returns to form following slow starts, the progress of a couple of key sophom*ores, and one particularly improbable comeback that has produced a rallying cry.

After playing for six different teams from 2018–22, Jose Iglesias was out of the majors all last year. He spent about six weeks in the Marlins’ organization in the spring, and after being released, he played 28 games for the Padres’ Triple-A El Paso affiliate before being released again. Signed to a minor league deal by the Mets in December, the 34-year-old infielder spent the first two months of the 2024 season at Triple-A Syracuse, hitting a respectable .273/.309/.442. Amid a flurry of transactions on May 31, the team optioned third baseman Brett Baty to Syracuse and called up Iglesias, whom Mendoza slotted into the lineup at second base against lefties in place of the struggling Jeff McNeil. Improbably, the career .281/.322/.386 (89 wRC+) hitter has batted a sizzling .336/.386/.480 in 166 PA with the Mets overall, including a jaw-dropping .393/.443/.518 in 61 PA against lefties. His 146 wRC+ since joining the Mets is second on the team behind only Francisco Lindor, and if his performance seems to have come out of left field, so has his unlikely musical career. “OMG,” a song he recorded under the stage name Candelita, went from the personal walk-up music of a journeyman to a Billboard no. 1 hit single by the time the All-Star break rolled around.

And the hits have kept coming for the Mets. Since Iglesias’ arrival, all 11 of their players with more than 65 PA have hit for at least a 93 wRC+, with 10 of them at 110 or higher:

Lindor had hit for just a 96 wRC+ to the point of Iglesias’ arrival. Since then, he’s played his way into MVP contention yet again, and his 6.0 WAR is tied with Shohei Ohtani for the NL lead, though he still has to be considered a long-shot to bring home the hardware. Expanding upon a note I gave Davy Andrews after his deep dive on the switch-hitting shortstop, Ohtani is the only player of the past 51 seasons to win MVP honors with a batting average under .280 (most are above .300), and he had to bash 46 homers and pitch to a 3.18 ERA in 130.1 innings to do it in 2021.

As I mentioned above, Alvarez has played a pivotal role in the rebound as well. On the heels of a solid rookie season, he was hitting just .236/.288/.364 (87 wRC+) before being sidelined for seven weeks by a left thumb sprain. To the point of his return on June 11, Mets catchers (including the since-released Tomás Nido and Omar Narváez as well as the replacement backup, Luis Torrens) had produced just a 69 wRC+ at the plate. Since then, the Alvarez-Torrens combo has provided much more punch, not to mention better pitch framing; Nido and Torrens have both been roughly average in that department by our metrics, but there’s more than a full win of difference between Narváez (-4.3) and Alvarez (6.2). With the swap of catchers, the pitching staff’s ERA improved by about a quarter of a run, and the Mets have gone 28-16 in Alvarez’s post-injury starts.

Mark Vientos has also been a major driver of the Mets’ upswing. Baty, the more highly regarded of the two prospects coming into last season (when both struggled mightily), started 35 of the team’s first 41 games at third base while Vientos cooled his heels at Syracuse, spending just three games with the big club in late April. In mid-May, he was recalled to fill the short half of a platoon, but by the end of the month, the full-time job was his. Overall, he’s hit .277/.335/.546 for a team-high 147 wRC+. Among players with at least 200 PA both last year and this year, his 78-point improvement is the majors’ largest:

Meanwhile, Vientos’ 19 homers rank third on the team behind Pete Alonso’s 27 and Lindor’s 24, though the 24-year-old third baseman played in 48 fewer games than both. His defense at the hot corner has been nothing to write home about (-5 DRS, -3 FRV, -0.4 UZR), but when you’re hitting like Bryce Harper, that’s hardly a dealbreaker.

On Tuesday, Vientos was one of the few hitters to show any sign of life against Kremer. The 28-year-old righty struck out four of the first six hitters he faced, and seven overall. “The sinker was moving big time today, especially the back door to righties,” said Mendoza afterwards. “The cutter played pretty much like a slider, the split was good… the way he mixed up all of his pitches and kept us off balance and again.”

Kremer did falter in the third by throwing eight balls out of his first nine pitches, walking both Alvarez and McNeil. After notching two more strikeouts, Vientos ripped an RBI double into the left field corner, scoring the Mets’ first run. By that point they trailed 3-1, however. With two outs in the first inning, Quintana walked Gunnar Henderson, then hung a curveball to Anthony Santander, who drilled it 402 feet to left center for his 37th homer of the season and an AL-high 13th since the All-Star break. In the second, Colton Cowser hit a fly ball to left center that Brandon Nimmo initially appeared to bobble but catch after crashing into the wall. Cowser was called out, but replays clearly showed that the ball bounced off the wall before Nimmo gained control:

Two batters later, James McCann brought him home with a sacrifice fly.Cowser sent right fielder Jesse Winker on an adventure with a 106.9-mph double over his head with one out in the fourth. The next batter, Urías, hit a weak chopper up the first base line that Alvarez tried to chase down and barehand but overran before face-planting. Not only was Urías safe at first on what was ruled a single, but Cowser sped all the way home from second:

Three pitches later, Quintana served up a two-run homer to McCann, and suddenly the Mets were down 6-1. They fell behind 7-1 in the fifth on a one-out walk of Henderson and a two-out double by Eloy Jiménez.

Within a rotation that’s had to endure not only the loss of Senga but also injuries to Peterson, Tylor Megill, and Christian Scott, Quintana has suddenly become the weakest link. While he carried a respectable 3.89 ERA and 4.11 FIP into August, he’s been lit for 19 runs in 20.2 innings this month, raising his ERA to 4.57 and his FIP to 5.12. His home run rate has more than doubled relative to last season, from 0.59 per nine to 1.48. “Sometimes, I don’t hit my spots well like I have done before, and when I make the adjustments, I’ve been behind in the count,” he lamented on Tuesday.

“He’s nibbling a little too much, getting behind in counts, but then when he comes in the zone, he’s leaving pitches off, so they’re doing damage,” said Mendoza, who stressed the need for Quintana to keep the ball in the park but reiterated his commitment to keeping him in the rotation. “He’s going to find a way [to rebound], he’ll continue to watch film and work with his mechanics, sequencing, game planning, things like that.”

To their credit, the Mets did not go quietly. Still down 7-1 in the eighth, with a good share of the 34,225 fans in attendance having departed, Lindor — whose fifth-inning double was the only other hit Kremer surrendered besides that of Vientos — hit a one-out hustle double to center field against Burch Smith. Lindor remained parked at second base as Henderson bobbled a Vientos grounder, but he scored on Nimmo’s double into the right field corner, and then J.D. Martinez crushed a middle-middle four-seamer, sending it 419 feet to center field and trimming the lead to 7-5.

Alas, the Mets gave two of those runs back in the ninth on a wild play straight out of Little League nightmares. Following a single by Cedric Mullins and a walk by Ryan Mountcastle, Henderson lofted a fly ball to left field. The ball deflected off Nimmo’s glove as he tried to make a sliding catch, and once he chased it down in foul territory, he threw wide of home plate (an error) as Mullins scored, then pitcher Danny Young, who was backing up the play, threw wide of third (another error), which brought home Mountcastle. Alvarez’s throw to third base was not in time to get Henderson:

Nimmo, who left Sunday’s game with right shoulder discomfort after making a diving catch and then sat out Monday’s game, blamed his tentative approach for the mishap.

“I was trying to figure out how to get to that ball without diving, trying to get on the outside of it, see if maybe I could dive on my butt. The ball kept tailing away to the line and I was like, ‘Alright, I’m gonna try and get down as soft as I can, because I can’t afford trying to roll on this again,'” said the outfielder. “When you’re timid towards things, that’s usually when mistakes happen… baseball finds you.”

The four-run deficit proved too much to surmount, and with the Braves’ victory over the Phillies, the Mets are now two and a half games out of a Wild Card spot, with playoff odds down to 19.5%. Mendoza’s not thinking about the Braves or the chase. “If we’re not winning games, it doesn’t matter, you know, so I was not looking at the scoreboard today.”