CHICAGO — Remember Toonces the Driving Cat?
For some inexplicable reason, in this recurring “Saturday Night Live” sketch, Toonces’ human owners thought it would be a good idea to let the enthusiastic feline take command of an automobile. The gambit typically concluded with Toonces driving the entire family over a cliff. Most important, the hijinks never failed to entertain.
For some inexplicable reason, the Mets’ owners thought it would be a good idea to let Brodie Van Wagenen run their baseball operations. They continued this gambit even after Van Wagenen’s initial decisions took the team over a cliff. And so form held on Wednesday with the passing of the trade deadline putting the Mets in the extremely unlikely position of go-for-it buyers.
Was this the smart play? Of course not. But if you can’t be smart, you might as well be entertaining, right?
“We’re gonna make a run at this thing,” Mets manager Mickey Callaway said Wednesday, before the Mets continued their series with the White Sox at Guaranteed Rate Field (worst ballpark name ever). “I don’t think the belief has ever wavered that we can do something special.”
Thanks to the Mets’ 11-4 run through Tuesday, Callaway gets himself another test, another opportunity to save his job, after managing irrelevant ball games last August and September and watching this year’s high hopes sink quickly. He had best be excited, and the same goes for his players, including Zack Wheeler, the most obvious trade candidate who now should face a free-agency-crushing qualifying offer from the Mets this coming winter as long as he stays healthy the rest of the way.
And fans might as well get excited, too. Look at it this way: Entering Wednesday night’s game, FanGraphs calculated the Mets owned a 16.9 percent chance of qualifying for the postseason. Now, what would you say the chances were that the Mets could have leveraged Wheeler into an important future piece? Higher or lower than 16.9 percent? I’ll bet the under.
In Wheeler, new guy Marcus Stroman, reigning National League Cy Young Award winner Jacob deGrom, available-turned-unavailable Noah Syndergaard and Stroman’s childhood rival/friend Steven Matz, the Mets have their most compelling and high-end starting rotation since 2015, when Matt Harvey and Bartolo Colon occupied the spots of Stroman and the then-injured Wheeler, and you know how that went.
Of course, those Mets stood three games out of the National League East penthouse and two games over .500, not 11 ½ out and four under like these guys, when the deadline struck. And the person running those Mets, the highly respected Sandy Alderson, made a series of acquisitions, highlighted by Yoenis Cespedes, that injected an entirely new vibe into the club.
This time, well, maybe Stroman can spread his high energy far and wide while pitching for his hometown team. While the groundball specialist will have to pull this off with one of baseball’s worst infield defenses and closers behind him, he has overcome plenty, from his size to the torn left ACL that sidelined him for most of 2015.
The Stroman trade, in which the Mets gave up Anthony Kay and Simeon Woods Richardson, hurt the team’s already low stockpile of pitching prospects, and it begged further questions: If the Mets are in it to win it, then why didn’t they add any relievers? And why on Earth did they dump what they could of the surprisingly successful Jason Vargas’ salary to the Phillies, a team in their own division?
“Look, we evaluated the marketplace and felt like that was the best opportunity to make the move,” Van Wagenen said. Well, that clarifies it.
“We’re the underdogs,” Van Wagenen said, repeating a narrative he first offered right after the All-Star break. Underdogs do prevail on occasion. Maybe if Toonces had received enough chances behind the wheel, he could’ve won the Indy 500. And perhaps the Mets actually can defy the odds and pull this off.
Even if they don’t, you’re a little more intrigued by the Mets now than you were a week ago, aren’t you? For these Mets, for whom optics clearly mean more than long-term viability, who might not be capable of constructing long-term viability anyway, that constitutes a victory.
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