ANAHEIM — Don’t let the optics fool you, the Mets’ upcoming schedule could be more difficult than it looks.
Friday night, the Mets are embarking on a road trip that will take them through three time zones and four states. While the Mike Trout-less Los Angeles Angels and the Colorado Rockies don’t exactly present the same challenge as the Atlanta Braves might, the Mets can’t fall into a trap of playing down to their opponents.
Not when the NL Wild Card race is so close and not when the margin for error in each win is so thin.
The Mets will start a crucial month of play with three games against the Angels, who just learned Thursday that Trout would remain out for the season because of more meniscus damage to his knee. But it’s August in Anaheim so it’s already anticlimactic to begin with. It’s been pretty quiet in the summer in Orange County since about 2014, the last time the Halos made the playoffs.
The Angels are 47-62, 13 games back from an AL Wild Card.
But it’s even more anticlimactic in Denver, where the Mets will head after a makeup game in St. Louis. The Rockies still aren’t trying to win and aren’t even trying to get better, with general manager Bill Schmidt making only minor moves at the trade deadline earlier this week.
The fourth and final stop of the trip will be in Seattle, where the Mets will face a Mariners team that owns the best ERA in baseball. They don’t strike out everyone, but they walk the fewest hitters, they suppress home runs and hard contact, their starters pitch more innings than any other staff in the game and their closer, Andres Munoz, didn’t allow an earned run throughout the entire month of July.
The Mariners are only 3.5 games out of a Wild Card spot and they’re hungry.
That game against the Cardinals looms large as well. The Mets currently hold the tiebreaker in the NL Wild Card, but if they lose, the teams would be even at 3-3. St. Louis starts the weekend 2.0 games behind the Mets in the NL Wild Card standings, and the Mets are 0.5 games behind the Arizona Diamondbacks and San Diego Padres.
The Mets will face the Padres and D-Backs on the road later in the month. That’s when the tough portion of their second-half schedule begins. But if they’re going to fend off the two NL West opponents, they can’t slow-walk this soft portion. The schedule stays soft when they return to New York, when they host the Oakland A’s, Miami Marlins and Baltimore Orioles. The Orioles will be a good test and a good warmup for a Wild Card gauntlet out west, but this is when we find out if the way the Mets can sustain their hot play.
As for how the Mets are viewing the month, they’re only focused on Anaheim. Manager Carlos Mendoza invoked the old cliche of taking things one game at a time. A better cliche might be to say they’re treating every team the same, but regardless, the team feels as though they’re ready for the challenge that this month brings.
“We treat this as a normal day,” Mendoza said Friday at Angel Stadium. “This is part of what we do. Guys will be ready. We had a nice off day yesterday, and now we’re getting ready to play the Angels from three games, and then we’ll take it one day at a time, we’ll take it one series at a time, and then we’ll go from there.”
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