It’s good to be a Met fan now

Yeah it is early.
But a 4-0 start is better than most teams. Hell, you can’t ask for better.

At the moment the Mets are better than the Yankees, Red Sox and Phillies.
At the moment the Mets are playing exciting baseball and are fun. At the moment the Mets are getting contributions from Jonathon Niese, Lucas Duda, Daniel Murphy and the immortal Kirk Nieuwenhuis.

And guess what?
There have been years when an unexpected team got off to a good start.
The 2008 Rays, after YEARS of never avoiding a 90 loss season, got off to a winning start.

And EVERYONE on the planet said “Oh that’s nice. But it is early. And they are in a Division with the Yankees and World Champion Red Sox. They won’t last.”

Or the Tigers after YEARS of irrelevance got off to a hot start in 2006. “It won’t last. Besides they are in a Division with the talented Twins and the defending World Champion White Sox.”

Guess what?
Both teams made it all the way to the World Series.

Will the Mets do that?
Probably not.

But these are 4 wins they won’t have to make up for later!
 

I’ve got to give the Mets credit…

I’ve been brutal on the Mets both on my blog and the podcast.

I wondered how a team in New York could be losing money, putting a non contender on the field and be an absolute mess.

And I predicted that they will have a firesale and lose 90 games.

Now I stand by most of those statements.
But I have to give Terry Collins some credit.
He has been handed a crappy hand (and the aftermath of the Omar Minaya years) and has the team over .500.

He doesn’t have David Wright nor Johan Santana at his disposal. And the line up and bullpen has been patch work.

Just last night the Mets had Willie Harris at DH, Lucas Duda at first base, Justin Turner at second base and Josh Thole at catcher. That’s a lineup you’d expect at a split squad spring training game.

And they throttled Detroit to the tune of 14 runs. And that’s not a chump team. That’s a first place team they blew out of the water on the road.

I don’t know how much longer this will last. I still think Reyes and Beltran and Rodriguez are going to be dealt in a month (and why not? They could get three valuable and cheap building blocks for them.)

And it is unlikely that they will leapfrog five teams for a playoff spot.
But if they split the next few games, they will be at the official half way spot with a winning record… and that’s more than I was expecting.

And if I can give the Pirates, Nationals, Diamondbacks, Indians and Mariners all credit for exceeding expectations, then I suppose I should for the Mets as well.

Things could be worse for the Mets. They could be the Dodgers.