If I were a betting man, and I am, I would bet the over in a heartbeat on an 83 win season. I think the Mets will win 88 games this year and earn a wild card, and wouldn't be surprised if they hit that magic number of 90. It's time to believe again!
Turns out I was a pretty good prognosticator when it came to wins, but way off on the wild card thing. In fact, 88 wins wasn't nearly enough to get a wild card this year as the Pirates and Cubs won 98 and 97 games respectively. So Mets fans should be extremely grateful that the Nationals had such an underwhelming year.
Getting into specifics of my preseason predictions, I was much more on target with how I thought our starting pitching would fare. I was looking for 60 wins from the top 5 starters based on game starts, and I had predicted 12 wins for Colon, 12 for de Grom, 15 for Harvey, 11 for Niese, and 10 for Gee. In the end, our top 5 starters ended up being Colon (31 GS, 14 wins), de Grom (30 GS, 14 wins), Harvey (29 GS, 13 wins), Niese (29 GS, 9 wins), and Syndergaard (24 GS, 9 wins), who combined for 59 wins.
On the offensive side of the ball, I had said we won 79 games with only one key player, Duda, having a career year, and 2 key players, Wright and Granderson, having sub-par years. Well if you look at this year's lineup, no one had a career year (except maybe Flores, but then again, he never really played a full season, so it's hard to say 2015 was a career year for him). Granderson had a very good year, but not a career year. Duda had decent numbers, but not like last year. I thought Cuddyer would be an upgrade in the lineup, and he wasn't. Given another year of maturity and experience, I looked for Lagares to put up better numbers. He didn't. With d'Arnaud being out for large chunks of time, we once again didn't get much from our catchers. And given how little he played, I'm not sure it's even fair to rate the Captain's season, but needless to say, third base didn't produce much for us this year. So for much of 2015, our offense was quite offensive, hitting it's nadir when Campbell and Mayberry, Jr batted 3rd and 4th (or 4th and 5th, I can't recall) while both sporting sub-.200 averages. But then July 31st rolled around, and the Mets made a trade deadline move, after NOT making a deal a few days earlier, that all future Mets trade deadline moves will be compared to, the move that transformed the team from a .500 team treading water to the eventual NL East champs. We got Cespedes, and our anemic offense became a thing of the past. The regulars started hitting, the other pieces we picked up (Johnson, Uribe) contributed big hits, and Conforto showed he belongs in the big leagues. Yes, the lineup did disappear again the last week of the season, and that has to be a major concern heading into the NLDS, but for most of August and September, there were few lineups that could match what the Mets were doing on a daily basis.
I was in Vegas in mid-August and was going to place a bet on the Mets winning the World Series, but my wife said, "Just enjoy the ride." Instead, I placed bets on the Giants and Jets winning the Super Bowl. In the spirit of "enjoying the ride", I'm not going to make a playoff prediction. I will say this. The pitching has been there all year. There's no reason to believe it won't show up in the playoffs. If the Mets are going to go anywhere, they'll need their August to mid-September offense to show up as well.
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