The Mets had a lot of fun running around the bases and living it up Tuesday night against the last-place Nats, three years and seemingly forever removed from their World Series championship. The division was officially lost, anyway, thanks to a Braves victory over the Marlins, leaving the Mets with a wild card, which is nice but in this case no prize.
While it had to feel good for the Mets to register their 99th and 100th victories Tuesday, and to wrap up the home-field advantage if our two outstanding local teams make it another true Subway World Series, by far the hard part for the Mets will be getting there. Besides maybe the Padres, their first-round opponents, the Mets face the toughest draw of any team entering this postseason derby.
Their talent is solid, their mojo is fine but their bracket looks very bad.
The Mets’ reward for winning their most games since 1988 — and maybe even ’86 depending how the finale goes — is a playoff gauntlet I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy. The first round will be no gimme against the Padres, who remade their roster at the deadline and are finally showing signs of living up to their headlines.
If the Mets can get past Round 1 — no given — two juggernauts await. The National League is a bear. Their NLDS opponent would be the Dodgers, an all-time great team that wrapped up their difficult division by June and have a run differential about equal to that of the Mets and Braves combined. The team that was already the best on paper added Freddie Freeman, who proved to be everything they hoped once he stopped pining for his beloved Atlanta.
Speaking of the Braves, they’d likely be next for the Mets if they got to the NLCS. They just beat the Mets’ aces three straight games to put the team from Queens in this precarious predicament, and they seemingly have owned the Mets since Chipper Jones — aka “LAR-RY!” — came into the league a generation ago. That’s a long time. But that doesn’t mean the dominance will continue.
The Mets do have a lot going for them, of course; you don’t win 100 games by accident. That also includes either great confidence or the guts to say aloud something they can’t prove about the Braves. Not yet anyway.
“I think we’re better than these guys, and I think we’ll prove it if we face them,” Mets reliever Seth Lugo told Mike Puma of The Post after the Braves swept the Mets in their lost weekend.
The Mets may have that chance. But nothing’s going to be easy.
While the Mets’ rotation gives them an advantage in most matchups, that isn’t necessarily the case against the Padres, assuming they hang onto that fifth spot. While Jacob deGrom, Max Scherzer and Chris Bassitt comprise a superb top three, if recent form holds the Padres’ trio of Yu Darvish, Blake Snell and Joe Musgrove might be close to their equal.
And that’s by far the easy part. If they escape the Padres, the Dodgers are next up according to the Mets unsightly bracket. The Dodgers can be beaten of course, though very few teams have done it consistently. The Mets may want to consult the also-ran Pirates, who somehow defeated the Dodgers five out of six games.
Nobody else seems able to do it, and it’s understandable, what with that killer lineup and superior starting pitching no matter who’s out there. There are 110-win teams that don’t finish the job, but not many.
The Mets can’t love their situation. But understandably, they do feel good about themselves.
“We believe in this team,” Brandon Nimmo said before the Mets swept the Nats. “When we’re playing well we can beat anyone.”
One minor break, as a deep thinker or two on the Mets figured out, is that the Mets get the Dodgers in the NLDS, a best of five. The longer the series, the less likely anyone beats them. Of course, you can never assume, not since the 1988 Mets team lost to the Dodgers in the playoffs after beating them 10 of 11 times in the regular season.
That Dodgers team had some kind of magic. This one has talent that doesn’t quit.
“It was going to be hard either way. You can’t dodge anybody,” Adam Ottavino said. “We know the challenge that’s ahead of us.”
Had the Braves lost Tuesday night, that would have triggered an interesting choice for manager Buck Showalter. Would he have pitched deGrom with the division still slightly possible in game No. 162 today? Or would he have saved deGrom for the playoffs? We may never know.
Now at least Showalter will have his playoff pitching lined up nicely, with deGrom followed by Scherzer and Bassitt, the very same trio beaten by the Braves — the lost weekend that’s caused them to have to go through this playoff gauntlet from hell.