Mets following the example of MVP candidate Lindor -- there's no quit

The game against the Blue Jays on Wednesday afternoon in Toronto was the Mets' season, in miniature: They were down -- in this case getting no-hit through the first eight innings by Bowden Francis -- and then, improbably, they got back up and rang up the Blue Jays for six runs in the ninth. The rally started when Francisco Lindor, their best player and NL MVP candidate, hit an 0-2 pitch from Francis far and deep into the right-field stands.

So Lindor’s team stayed a game up on the Braves in the fight for the third Wild Card spot in the National League, as they approach the reckoning of the last 16 games of their regular season: seven games with the first-place Phillies sandwiched around three with the Nationals and three left with the Braves in Atlanta. Then the Mets finish with three against another first-place team, the Brewers, in Milwaukee.

Making it to the postseason will just be more of a grind for a team that has been grinding over the past 3 1/2 months. But the Mets head into what they hope will be a Sweet 16 knowing this about themselves:

Since everything seemed to bottom out for them on May 29, a night when they lost 10-3 to the Dodgers and saw their record fall to 22-33, they have been the best team in baseball.

Yup. Since that night, their record is 58-33, one game better than the D-backs have been over this same period, three games better in the loss column than the Astros and Padres:

Dodgers: 51-37
Brewers: 51-39
Phillies: 49-40
Yankees: 46-43

The Mets, lifted by the brilliance and consistency of Lindor -- he went to the leadoff spot on May 18 and has played the best ball of his career since -- have done everything they have done without their ace, Kodai Senga. The righty came back from injury, pitched into the sixth inning of his one and only start, then injured a calf muscle and went straight back to the injured list. Even without him, the Mets have pitched well enough -- starters and relievers -- to have this kind of 81-game stretch.

Here is what Carlos Mendoza, as much of an NL Manager of the Year candidate in his league as Pat Murphy of the Brewers is, told me a couple of months ago:

“My message to our team was that things would get better, because we were too good for them not to get better. In that way, my messaging never changed. I kept telling our players we had to stay consistent, to stay positive. To continue to show up with a good attitude, every day, which is pretty much what I had been telling them from Spring Training on. I kept asking them and asking them to ask each other, ‘How can we push each other? How can we stay true to our process?’ That was my approach and, I have to tell you, it never changed.”

Much has been made of the players' only meeting the Mets had after that loss to the Dodgers on May 29, and how the moment now looks as if it was them sticking a flag in the ground. But even before that, even as the record did fall to 22-33 after the Mets had just gone through a 2-8 stretch, it was Mendoza who held his team together, who showed a kind of poise and confidence in himself and his team that belied the fact that this was his first managerial job after sitting next to Aaron Boone at Yankee Stadium before that.

Mendoza never panicked, even though his team was coming off a 75-87 season. So the Mets had ended 2023 at 12 games under .500 and started 2024 11 games under. “We have evolved,” Lindor said after his team’s 6-2 victory against the Blue Jays.

Lindor started Thursday’s rally with that rousing home run and then Francisco Alvarez, the kid catcher who had spent two months on the IL earlier in the season, ended it with a three-run homer to dead-center. So the Mets didn’t fall back into a Wild Card tie with the Braves going into their weekend series in Philadelphia. They kept a nose in front. In a New York baseball season when there has been so much drama around the Yankees, mostly because of a roller-coaster season for them that started 45-19, the Mets found themselves going into the weekend with a record just four games worse than the Yankees’.

But they are not fighting with the Yankees for a playoff spot. They are fighting with the D-backs, Padres and Braves. Looking for these last 16 games to be a Sweet 16. But the end of the regular season really began with Lindor’s home run, one that broke up a no-hitter and was about to bust up a game -- a game that was the Mets season. Get knocked down, get right back up.

“You keep going,” Mendoza told me when I caught up with him last week.

The Mets keep going. And keep coming.