Just over a week ago, things appeared to be completely hopeless for the New York Mets. The Mets had just gotten swept by the Los Angeles Dodgers in a four game series to drop to 1-7 in an eight game stretch against two of the best teams in the National League. As a result, the Mets fell 10 games below the .500 mark and fell 14.5 games behind the Colorado Rockies for the second wild card spot. That disaster of a stretch opened the Mets to becoming sellers, but they have gone 4-1 since then against mediocre competition. That ordinarily wouldn’t mean much, but the Rockies have gone into a complete free fall over the past week.
The Rockies have lost eight games in a row and were just swept by the woeful San Francisco Giants, the same team the Mets just pummeled in San Francisco over the weekend. The Mets have managed to gain 4.5 games on the Rockies while Colorado keeps losing, entering play today 10 games out of a wild card spot. The Rockies’ schedule for the rest of the half gets a bit easier after they visit Arizona over the weekend, hosting Cincinnati and the Chicago White Sox to head into the break. Colorado starts the second half in Flushing, when they visit the Mets for three games before hosting them for three games at the beginning of August.
If the Mets can get their act together and pile up some wins, they have a good chance to make up some serious ground on the Rockies. The Mets have been an inconsistent team for most of the season, but the National League has been extremely mediocre this season, giving them ample opportunities to make up ground. Aside from three games with the Washington Nationals next week, the only winning team the Mets face between now and August 3rd is the Rockies. The Mets still have a lot of work to do since five teams separate them from the Rockies, but the top team in that cluster is the Chicago Cubs, who are only 3.5 games ahead of the Mets with a .500 record. That speaks to the poor level of competition in the National League, particularly outside of the Dodgers, Nationals, and Arizona Diamondbacks.
Before the Mets can even begin dreaming of a stunning second half push, they need to get close to .500 first. If the Mets can go 7-3 over their final 10 games of the first half, they hit the All Star Break at 42-45, which isn’t at all terrible considering how they started the season. That would be an impressive finish to the half for the Mets, who will be regularly starting Rafael Montero for a while thanks to the injury woes of their rotation and are still expected to be without a number of key players into August. Several of the Mets’ veterans, notably Curtis Granderson and Asdrubal Cabrera, have torn the cover off the ball over the past few weeks, helping boost their potential trade value and the team’s win total in the process. The odds are still very long that the Mets can fight their way into the wild card picture, but the Colorado Rockies’ sudden slump has opened the door just a crack for them.
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