SAN DIEGO — Mark Vientos said it best Friday night after the Mets topped the San Diego Padres to open the most important series thus far in the season: “I feel like when we play great teams like this, we tend to engage and get a little bit more locked in.”
The Mets have been one of the best teams in the league at certain points of the season and one of the worst. They’ve also been everywhere in between. It’s tough to know what this team is truly capable of given that some days their strengths are their weaknesses and on others, their weaknesses are their strengths.
It’s been a wildly inconsistent season for the Amazins’, but the one thing that has remained consistent is their mindset. They approach every game the same. It serves a purpose, however, it prevents any one moment and any one series from becoming too big.
“No one is really thinking about the future, we have to stay in the present,” shortstop and team leader Francisco Lindor told the Daily News. “We’ve got a job to do today, and that’s it. You can’t think about all of what you did yesterday, or what you’re going to do tomorrow.”
It’s part of the beauty of baseball — there is always a task at hand that has to be tackled. With every bad loss comes another chance at redemption because there is always another game.
But the Mets have hit a point in the season where every game seems to carry more weight. The storyline of this road trip has been discussed ad nauseam. The Mets are playing the teams at the top of the NL Wild Card standings back-to-back on the road. Winning these two series means moving from fourth place into one of the top three spots.
They aren’t so far out of it that they’d need help from the Atlanta Braves, who currently sit in third place, but it wouldn’t hurt. However, the Mets are trying to encourage one another not to monitor the scoreboard, at least not yet.
“No one here has talked about it,” Lindor said. “So I don’t think so. I mean, I’m sure probably we all are individually but no one is really talking about it.”
Still, you can’t help but notice the big-game feel this weekend in San Diego. Petco Park has been packed. Jesse Winker has been booed so loudly they could probably hear it over the border in Tijuana. Vientos has never played a big-league postseason game but he said these games feel like playoff games.
You’d still never know, based on how the Mets prepare for each day. It might sound a little too Crash Davis-esque, but they really are taking it one game at a time, if not one inning at a time.
“We understand we’re playing really good teams, and even teams that aren’t competing for playoffs are still good teams — good enough to beat us at any given day,” Lindor said. “We go out and get one out, then another out, then another out.”
The Mets excelled earlier this season when they took the pressure off of themselves and focused on having fun. Now, the pressure is back on but they want to make sure the fun remains. In order to continue winning, they can’t let the moment become too big.
