A Late-Season Stretch A Chance To Establish New Era For Red-Hot Mets

Nobody was better qualified to sum up the first 152 games of the most Mets season of all-time — or to understand what the final 10 games mean for not only his teammates but the franchise as a whole — than Brandon Nimmo, who has replaced David Wright as the Mets’ homegrown cornerstone.

So it felt appropriate that Nimmo was the player who delivered the key hit Thursday, when he hit the two-run third-inning homer that gave the Mets the lead for good as they began a season-defining stretch with a 10-6 win over the Phillies.

“The biggest thing that I’m trying to look at is that we’re in playoff contention,” Nimmo said Wednesday night, when he also homered in a 10-0 win over the Nationals. “If things were to start kind of coming together here at this point, it would all be worth it, because for me, the biggest thing is to play playoff baseball and to win games. So if we were able to do that, whatever happened during the regular season really wouldn’t matter.”

These final nine games — against the division rival Phillies and Braves as well as the NL Central champion Brewers — matter a great deal in the short- and long-term for the Mets, who are knotted for the second wild card in the NL with the Diamondbacks but own the tiebreaker. The Mets and Arizona are two games up on the Braves.

The Mets enter the penultimate weekend of the season despite — and this is not even a Cliffs Notes version of all that’s gone on — a 22-33 start and extended slumps for lineup mainstays Nimmo, Pete Alonso and Francisco Lindor as well as a constant shuffling of relievers in front of Edwin Diaz, whose return from last season’s knee injury has included a brief demotion, a suspension for using sticky stuff and a stint on the injured list.

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“It has been an interesting year,” Nimmo said following Wednesday’s 10-0 rout of the Nationals. “It has been a weird year.”

To be fair, Nimmo was responding to a question about his season — one in which his performance has wildly fluctuated while he’s missed just 11 games despite being hit on the helmet by a pitch, suffering a shoulder injury and fainting in his hotel room.

But well, it has been an interesting and weird year — one that's gotten even more so over the last four days, a span in which the Mets have played without MVP candidate Francisco Lindor as he recovers from a back injury.

The Mets looked vulnerable Monday, when “OMG”-singing Jose Iglesias replaced Lindor and delivered the game-tying hit in the eighth inning of a 2-1, 10-inning win Monday. But since then, the Mets have outscored the Nationals and Phillies 30-7 while scoring 10 runs in a three straight games for the first time in franchise history.

Following Wednesday’s win, Nimmo exhibited his growing comfort as a spokesman type, first by exhorting Mets fans to fill Citi Field this weekend and then by displaying his appreciation of Daniel Murphy in the team’s postseason history.

“It only matters what you do in the playoffs and trying to win games and trying to bring a World Series back to the Mets,” Nimmo said. “I always look at ‘Murph’ as an example. ‘Murph’ had a great career, but when you think of ‘Murph,’ you think of the playoffs and you think of all the home runs that he hit and bringing the Mets to the 2015 World Series. And so that’s the time to shine, that’s the time to have fun.”

The Mets have had plenty of fun while becoming bizarre pop culture sensations with an uncommon amount of resiliency over the last three-plus months — a span in which the duo of David Stearns and Carlos Mendoza beginning to establish themselves as the successful general manager-manager partnership the Mets have lacked since the early days of the Frank Cashen-Davey Johnson tandem.

None of that progress, especially the parts authored by Stearns and Mendoza, will be undone if this becomes another wildly entertaining Mets season that screeches to a halt in agonizing fashion. But if the Mets can make the playoffs and mount a run after navigating a schedule that includes two of their longtime tormentors as well as the franchise with whom they are likely to be compared for the foreseeable future…well, that’ll be the most resounding evidence yet this is really a new era for the Mets.