You learn pretty quickly when covering this sport not to give too much weight to a game or series, not when there are games left. As far as is known, the Mets will defeat the Braves on Sunday night, reclaim part of first place and earn the tiebreaker in NL East. They would then win the division if they finish with the same record as the Braves, securing a first-round bye and allowing Jacob deGrom and Max Scherzer to rest until the Division Series.
Not unrealistic, right? It’s also not unrealistic to imagine deGrom and Scherzer dominating the postseason given who they are and what they’ve accomplished. Except here’s the problem. The Mets were built for deGrom and Scherzer to, right now, mount the biggest streak of the season against their biggest rival. And neither provided the excellence the Mets needed, falling short against exactly the type of opponents their team will need to defeat in October.
The Mets waited until August 2 for deGrom to make his season debut. They put Scherzer on the injured list from September 7th to 19th to prevent – Scherzer’s word – from “snapping” his left bank again. They aligned everything for October and even rearranged their rotation so that deGrom would begin the opener of that series with the idea of immediately securing the tiebreaker and putting the Braves on the defensive. Instead, they must ask themselves where their season is going and if it will end sooner than they ever imagined.