This Week in Mets: What are the most encouraging aspects of their hot start?

“And it seems to me there’s so much strength in me now that I can overcome everything, all sufferings, only in order to say and tell myself every moment: I am!”
— “The Brothers Karamazov,” Fyodor Dostoevsky

May has not started the way the Mets would like. They’ve lost both series this month and a left-handed reliever for the season. That’s a rough four days.

But New York had about as good an April as a baseball team could have. And despite Sunday’s doubleheader sweep at the hands of the Cardinals, let’s examine the three most encouraging aspects of the first month-plus for the Mets:

The pitching staff’s depth has been better than anticipated.

The story of the Mets’ season has been the performance of their rotation. The Mets have had 33 traditional starts this season, the two games with Huascar Brazobán opening as the exceptions. That’s about as many starts as a healthy individual starting pitcher will make in a full season. Here’s how the Mets as a staff have performed next to recent Cy Young winners.

I mean, you’re probably not picking the 2025 Mets as the Cy Young of Cy Youngs — but they’re in the conversation with that group, which is made all the more remarkable by the prolonged absences of both Sean Manaea and Frankie Montas. The Mets lead the league in wins, ERA, FIP and homers allowed as a rotation, even after a rough day Sunday.

And then there’s the development of April that surprised even David Stearns: the success of the entire bullpen. That relief corps has slowed down of late, but Brazobán and Max Kranick have quickly shown themselves capable of handling more important innings as the season unfolds. Nothing evolves more from Opening Day to October than a bullpen — remember, Edwin Díaz was the only member of the Opening Day pen last year to pitch in the postseason, and Ryne Stanek was pitching mop-up duty to start September — and the Mets have placed more options at their disposal.

Pete Alonso is on another level.

Alonso was justifiably named the National League Player of the Month for April after delivering the finest month of his career. This was a version of Alonso the Mets hadn’t seen at all the last two seasons, and he’s made a hot streak that would feel good for a week last for a full month.

Alonso will slow down at some point (I think), but that April performance meant a lot to some of the other hitters in the lineup who have yet to hit their stride. Alonso’s consistency in coming through meant fewer nights when the spotlight fell on a Juan Soto or Brandon Nimmo or someone deeper in the lineup.

Luisangel Acuña looks like a big-leaguer — and maybe a big-league starter.

As fun as the 2024 season was for the big club, it was kind of a wreck for the Mets’ position players in the farm system. Ronny Mauricio was out for the season, Jett Williams and Drew Gilbert were hurt much of the year, Acuña struggled in Triple A, Brett Baty couldn’t run with the opportunity in the majors, etc. For any fan plotting out how the position player core would shift in 2025 and beyond, it was tough to trust anyone in that group.

Acuña’s late-season cameo, in which he basically performed like Francisco Lindor for a week while filling in for him, restored some confidence in his future. But he’s built off that in a longer stretch this past month, rebounding from a slow start to be an effective major-league hitter for a few weeks. And it’s again come at an important time, with Jeff McNeil initially out, Baty unable to hold his own in the majors and more playing time likely to open with the injury Jesse Winker suffered Sunday. Acuña brings a different dimension to the bottom of the Mets’ lineup with his speed, and this could be a good time to give him a longer run of everyday play.

The exposition

The Mets were swept in Sunday’s doubleheader by the Cardinals to lose the series. It’s the first time this season they’ve dropped consecutive series. They are 22-13, 2 1/2 games up in the National League East.

The Diamondbacks salvaged their series finale in Philadelphia despite blowing a 7-1 lead and requiring extra innings to do it. Arizona is 18-16.

The Cubs couldn’t finish off a sweep in Milwaukee on Sunday, and they lost starter Shōta Imanaga in the process. Chicago’s 21-14 record is still good for first in the National League Central. It hosts the Giants through Wednesday before traveling to New York.

The pitching possibles

at Arizona

RHP Griffin Canning (4-1, 2.61 ERA) v. RHP Ryne Nelson (1-0, 5.82 ERA)
LHP David Peterson (2-1, 3.06) v. RHP Zac Gallen (2-4, 4.93)
RHP Kodai Senga (3-2, 1.38) v. RHP Merrill Kelly (3-1, 4.06)

vs. Chicago

RHP Clay Holmes (4-1, 2.95) v. RHP Jameson Taillon (2-1, 3.86)
RHP Tylor Megill (3-2, 2.50) v. LHP Shōta Imanaga (3-2, 2.82)
RHP Griffin Canning v. LHP Matthew Boyd (2-2, 2.70)

I looked up a stat

When writing about Clay Holmes last week, I mentioned that Holmes had been better the third time through the order than the second, if you measured it by only counting the hitters he faced three times in the same game. This is the way I’ve calculated this stat since 2021, when Rob Mains at Baseball Prospectus made two points about survivorship bias. If you’ll allow me to steal from my own 2021 piece:

1. A starter facing an opposing lineup a third time has pitched well enough to survive that long. He hasn’t been blasted for four runs in the first inning because his stuff didn’t show up that day. Yet those stats above count those very worst outings when a starter goes two and allows five runs. Those days are irrelevant when a manager has to decide whether to allow his starter to see a lineup a third time, so they should be removed from the calculation.
2. Similarly, a starter who sees a lineup a third time seldom sees the whole lineup a third time. Lineups being ordered the way they are, that creates an uneven basis of comparison. If facing a lineup a third time means seeing Alfonzo and Piazza but not Ordoñez, of course the numbers will look worse in comparison.

So what’s the best way around this? Well, to narrow the sample. Instead of looking at every hitter these pitchers face, let’s look at only the hitters they’ve faced three times in the same day. That’s going to make the sample a lot smaller, but it’ll be more representative of the decision a manager faces when deciding how big a factor the third-time-through penalty is for an individual pitcher.

So let’s do this for each Mets starter this season. How’s the third time through the order gone for them?

Canning and Peterson have shown the most distinct penalties the third time through the order, while Senga’s penchant for slow starts means he has a very unusual split. This remains a small sample, but I’ll keep monitoring it.

Following up

So, did Alonso have the best April in team history?

Since I suggested Alonso was on pace for it two weeks ago, he:

• fell three hits shy of Derek Bell’s franchise record for the first month of the season
• set the franchise record for most total bases
• fell three homers shy of his own record
• set the record for most RBIs
• finished fifth in OPS for the first month (among Mets who played at least 20 games)
• set the record for most runs created (by a pretty wide margin)

Yes, of course, all the games the Mets played in March and April helped with a lot of those counting stats. But the 2025 run environment mitigates that, especially in the slash line, where three of the four players ahead of him played in an era with a lot more runs scored.

So I’m sticking to it: Alonso just had the best April for a hitter in Mets history.

Injury updates

Red = 60-day IL
Orange = 15-day IL
Blue = 10-day IL

• Winker left the first game of Sunday’s doubleheader with soreness in his side caused by a throw home from left field. Winker received an MRI on Sunday to determine the severity of the injury. The Mets expect an IL stint, though that’s not yet official.

• Danny Young hit the IL with a left elbow sprain Wednesday, and it was only a matter of time before he ultimately decided to undergo Tommy John surgery. He is out for the rest of the season.

• The Mets signed Brooks Raley and immediately put him on the IL. Coming off his own Tommy John surgery, Raley could be a factor late in the season.

• The Mets also shifted Manaea, A.J. Minter and Montas to the 60-day IL.

• Minter is still undecided on surgery, which would end his season as well. Even if he decides against surgery, he’ll be out until late in the season.

• Montas has passed Manaea in their recoveries from spring injuries. Montas remains on schedule for a return in early June, while the Mets are hopeful but not certain Manaea will be back that month.

Minor-league schedule

Triple A: Syracuse at Jacksonville (Miami)
Double A: Binghamton vs. Reading (Philadelphia)
High A: Brooklyn at Asheville (Houston)
Low A: St. Lucie vs. Clearwater (Philadelphia)

Last week in Mets

A note on the epigraph

And so we reach the end of this stretch to start the season, where I take quotes from my 10 favorite novels. “The Brothers Karamazov,” as I mentioned last year, is my favorite ever. I had initially read it in high school, knowing nothing about it or Dostoevsky, and marveled at all that a novel could be. Then I reread it in 2019 to close off my aforementioned Dostoevsky Project. (Man, I would have finished that endeavor so much quicker if I had just waited until March 2020 to start it.) Whenever I reread something I first came across in high school, I’m a little worried it won’t live up to my memory of it (like “The Catcher in the Rye,” to be honest). But “The Brothers Karamazov” was even better the second time around.

For those keeping track, those top 10 novels ended up as (in no specific order after the top two):

• “The Brothers Karamazov”
• “Infinite Jest”
• “The Recognitions”
• “The Master and Margarita”
• “Catch-22”
• “East of Eden”
• “Petersburg”
• “2666”
• “Crime and Punishment”
• “Middlemarch”

Trivia time

The Mets went 9-19 in May last year and made the postseason anyway. Four times in their history, they’ve gone 19-9 or better in May and missed the postseason. One year, New York went 19-9 in May and still managed to lose more than 90 games. What seemingly cursed season was that?

(I’ll reply to the correct answer in the comments.)

(Photo of Pete Alonso and Juan Soto: Jim McIsaac / Getty Images)