00:00Joel Sherman with Three Things. I'm coming from you in a quiet place at Yankee Stadium.
00:05It's a couple of hours till the opening day.
00:09I was going to do this with some ambiance outside, but the leaf blowers are going.
00:14It's a little cold out there this morning, so the old man is covered here.
00:18Do Three Things, and let's do it on the Mets who actually played last night,
00:21and obviously are off to a bad start.
00:25I know the bad start will have Mets fans feeling terrible,
00:30but they should understand better than anyone how long a season is.
00:34At this time last year, and certainly through June, the middle of June,
00:39when the Mets were the best team in the league,
00:40we thought the Mets had kind of shed same old Mets stuff,
00:46that this new ownership, Steve Cohn, and new leadership, David Stearns,
00:51and manager, Carlos Mendoza, that had combined to get them to the NLCS the year before,
00:56things were great.
00:57So a week of bad baseball, and it has been bad, shouldn't be a death knell,
01:04though I'll start here with number one,
01:09is I don't know what there is in the water in Flushing,
01:14but whenever we think well of the Mets, things don't go well.
01:20You know, there wasn't much thought of them in 22, and they won 100-plus games.
01:24There wasn't much thought of them in 24, and they got to the NLCS.
01:28It's the years in between, 23, 25, and then again this year.
01:32And really, they're a history in a lot of ways where we think great,
01:35and it doesn't go well.
01:38And, you know, you want to be kind of a man of science in a metric age of baseball
01:42and not believe in hexes and stuff.
01:45But there is this pall that's over the team,
01:48and I think it was why it was so important they got off to a good start
01:52after how badly things ended last season,
01:54which was about a, you know, a three-month slow-motion car crash to the finish line
02:00where somehow they miss out on the playoffs by a game.
02:03They finished behind the Reds, who shouldn't have been in their league
02:07for a sixth NL playoff spot.
02:11That was really bad.
02:13And so I did think it was important to get off to a good start this year,
02:18and they obviously haven't done that.
02:21In part, their new guys, Luis Robert, he obviously had a walk-off homer on the homestand.
02:27He's been okay.
02:28It hasn't looked as good the last few days.
02:31Freddy Peralta, one, eh, start, one much better start.
02:34But Bichette and Polanco have gotten off terrible so far,
02:40and, you know, the worry was about defense.
02:42First and third, is the worry about defense going to affect their offense
02:47because obviously they're supposed to hit third and fourth in this lineup
02:50behind Lindor and Soto and provide big things.
02:54These are guys, there is history of the big Met free agent position player
03:00not performing well.
03:02Francisco Lindor's worst year was his first year.
03:05He wasn't a free agent.
03:05He was traded, but he was signed a big extension beforehand.
03:08Carlos Beltran, his worst year in a Hall of Fame career,
03:12you could argue, was his first year with the Mets.
03:15You know, players like George Foster, Roberto Alomar, again, a trade, Jason Bay,
03:22the big guy who's come in with the Mets, Mo Vaughn.
03:26It hasn't worked out in year one and in some cases at all.
03:30Lindor and Beltran are the exceptions who really turned into historically good Mets
03:35after bad first years.
03:37I still think Bob Shett's going to hit, but it hasn't been a good beginning.
03:41There's a deadness to the Mets early in a season where they needed to have a little engine
03:46to kind of put last year behind them, and part of the lack of that has been that
03:50there hasn't been these kind of like the new guys kind of like integrating in
03:54and doing big things aside from the Robert home run early.
03:59Number two, you know, I'm wondering with Carson Bench,
04:04is there a little bit of Anthony Volpe in the sense that I remember in 2023,
04:10Volpe was the shiny new toy in Yankee camp.
04:13Everyone was screaming, the Yankees have to take him north.
04:17They're not serious if they're not taking him north.
04:19And then they took him north, and he was fine.
04:22He was, you know, he's been an okay player in most situations who has these incredible lulls,
04:28and then last year was kind of like probably worse than all while he was injured.
04:31And then how quickly people got off of the, he has to be on the team, he has to be
04:35on the team.
04:36You know, early this season, we've seen guys with no major league experience,
04:40like McGonagall in Detroit and De La Torre, who played in the playoffs last year,
04:46but had never played in a regular season game with Cleveland.
04:51Weatherholt, who obviously had a winning hit against the Mets with the Cardinals.
04:54Justin Crawford with the Phillies.
04:56Like some of these young players have broken out strong with no major league experience.
05:00That hasn't happened with Benj.
05:03I do wonder how long the leash is.
05:06I assume it's at least several weeks to see if he gets his act together.
05:10But again, at a time where they needed a little bit of that jolt to get off well this season,
05:16the hope was maybe somebody young who the fans had no bad history with,
05:21and somebody they all badly wanted to see make the team.
05:24If he could have done a couple of big things early, would that have been very, very encouraging for the
05:31team
05:32and a little bit help them win early, when really at this point, aside from Soto to some degree,
05:39who's hitting in the lineup?
05:40They need some length there.
05:43We thought there was going to be length there.
05:45We thought Benj was going to be part of that length, and it hasn't happened.
05:50And between kind of like old and new, nothing's really worked in that lineup to date.
05:58Lastly, this three, and look, I wrote a column that I thought one of the most important things
06:05that happened positively for the Mets in spring training was just how many pitching injuries
06:11the Braves took on in their rotation.
06:14They had major injuries.
06:16guys, Wentz, Waldrip, you know, Schwellenbach, guys who were going to miss a large chunk of all of this season.
06:26They already went in, knowing that A.J. Smith-Schwerver wasn't going to pitch this year.
06:31They had lots of questions about exactly what they had, and guys like Ronaldo Lopez and Grant Holmes,
06:38who finished last year, injured.
06:42And the Braves are out at five and two and looking great, and in some ways, the Braves are the
06:50anti-Mets
06:51in that aside from last year when they completely fell apart and ended, what was it, a six or seven
06:57straight-year playoff run,
07:00they're kind of like addicted to winning.
07:02The culture is winning, and so they took on a lot of pitching injuries, more than probably anyone else in
07:08the sport this spring,
07:10at a time where there was generally some pretty good health around baseball that you don't see with pitching.
07:15Both New York teams didn't take on an extra major league pitching injury coming into the season,
07:21and the Braves have jumped out and suggested that they're going to be a force again in the NL East,
07:29you know, which was another problem last year with the 2025 Mets.
07:33How many years do you expect the Braves to be down on their luck?
07:36The Braves were under .500 last year.
07:38The Mets didn't take advantage of that by making the playoffs,
07:41and here are the Braves showing some indications that maybe they could weather the storm
07:46until guys like Schwellenbeck and Waldrop perhaps get back,
07:50or they can make a trade in June, July to build up the rotation.
07:56The Braves, who kind of needed to get out strongly after a bad season, have gotten out strongly.
08:01The Mets, who needed it, have not.
08:04Again, it's a week, and last year should be the example of just how long a baseball season feels
08:11because this time last year, you know, we just felt good about the Mets.
08:16So there's a lot of time to turn it around, but they had a lot of reasons to get off
08:21well this year,
08:22and they just have it.
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