The Mets' Fast Start Seems Legit

A mediocre team can fool you for a while, but this New York Mets club is for real.

Despite Wednesday afternoon's clunker in St. Louis, the New York Mets are flying pretty high these days. Their total of 14 wins is tops in all of Major League Baseball. More notably, this year, they pass the eye and smell tests as a genuine contender. That's important, because we've seen the Mets tease their fans in previous seasons with fast starts before dropping like tech stocks at the end of the last century.

Do the Mets Have a Playoff-Caliber Bullpen?

Winning is awesome, but the bullpen is still a huge question mark for the Mets.

The New York Mets have enjoyed strong starting pitching early on this season, despite the absence of Jacob deGrom. Running the second-highest payroll in MLB allowed them the luxury of adding Max Scherzer and Chris Bassitt to the rotation, giving them a level of depth they never enjoyed in the years that the Wilpons were signing the checks. Not only have the two additions pitched well, but they've also clearly taken on a role as mentors to young pitchers such as Tylor Megill and David Peterson. It's one thing to sign a bunch of guys to reverse the fortunes of a ball club, but it's every bit as essential to have the right mix of guys in the clubhouse. The early returns are positive in that area.

The 2022 Mets Continue to Impress

Despite adversity, the Mets have enjoyed a very positive start to the 2022 campaign, but bigger tests lay ahead.

First, the New York Mets finished a successful road trip by taking 2 of 3 from the Phillies at Citizens Bank Park. While we, of course, continue to acknowledge that it's still very early, it was still a significant accomplishment for a team that went 30-51 in road games last season. Then the Mets came home to honor Tom Seaver (long overdue) and play the Diamondbacks. While it could have gone a bit better against Arizona, I enjoyed watching their heads-up win on Sunday. It felt like the sort of game they would find a way to lose in previous seasons.

So Far So Good

The Mets' opening series in Washington went as well as we could hope for, but now a real test begins.

The 2022 season got off to a much better start for the New York Mets than 2021 did. If you remember, the Mets were supposed to begin last season with a series against the Nationals, but the entire series was postponed due to a COVID-19 outbreak among the Nats. MLB did their infamous "abundance of caution" thing by canceling all the games, and the Mets wound up sitting around for an extra 4 days before beginning their campaign. I always believed that the delay played a part in the Mets' slow start last year, although I would hardly hang all last year's woes on that one thing.

And So It Begins

Will this be the dawn of a new era where the Mets finally turn the corner as a franchise and leave "LOL Mets" behind?

The New York Mets' 2022 season gets underway tonight in Washington, provided the storm clouds that have taken over the eastern section of the country decide to allow it. The threat of bad weather and some of the recent injury news have combined to dampen the spirits of Mets fans a bit. But optimism always reigns supreme at the start of a new baseball season — and this has the potential to be the year where the Mets finally leave the Wilpon era in the rearview.

Shouldering the Burden

Jacob deGrom's shoulder injury sucks, but I won't let it ruin my optimism for the upcoming season.

As soon as I heard the news that Jacob deGrom was going for an MRI on his shoulder, I was relatively sure that I wouldn't be watching him take the mound for the New York Mets next Thursday in Washington. Sure enough, the news came out that deGrom would be shut down for at least a month with a stress reaction in his right scapula (shoulder blade). As Jeff Passan points out at ESPN.com, pitcher Michael Wacha suffered a stress reaction in his shoulder back in 2014 when he was pitching for the Cardinals. Wacha sustained the injury in mid-June and didn't make it back to a major league mound until September.