Hold On, the Mets Are 8-1? (10mets) (10mets)

Every game you win in April is one you don't have to win in September. I've been unable to watch the last five games and the Mets are 5-0. I'm not watching again until they have a loss. "Respect the streak" and all that (hat tip to Kevin Costner as Crash Davis in "Bull Durham").

The season is young, but lights-out runs like these are what make playoff teams. If they can play like a .500 team most of the time (which is not a stretch for this roster), a couple of good 8-2 or 9-1 streaks put them in serious contention for a wild card win, if not a division win. Ya gotta believe!

As for the Yankees. It's still early but early returns point to something being amiss. Baseball General Managers can learn from the 1986 Mets, one of the most talented teams to only win one championship. General Manager Frank Cashen thought he was smarter than the room, and he wound up outsmarting himself by destroying the team chemistry of a championship team. How many times have we watched a Mets broadcast and heard Keith Hernandez and Ron Darling two stalwarts from the 86 team bemoan the fact they traded away Kevin Mitchell and didn't resign Ray Knight, two players they saw as great teammates and the kind of tough , nose in the dirt, want to win every game type of people you need on a championship team. The kind of players that held other players accountable. The Yankees should have kept Todd Frazier who is exactly the same type of player as Knight, as well as affable Starlin Castro, they messed with team chemistry. Also bringing in a guy like Stanton who makes 30 million a year, onto a team where a lot of the player are making the major league minimum has to lead to jealousy, its only human. A locker room with chemistry, where players like each other, it's a hard thing to find, the Yankees had it, they messed with success they had a team that liked each other, and who the fans liked, you didn't hear too many boos last year at Yankee Staduim, they have already begun in 2018, the fans are always the first to let you know when you've swung..and missed.

My family just gave me my belt and shoelaces back. A gloomy spring, national tragedy playing out and then the METS. Hope may not be springing eternal right now but thank you boys for bringing us something to cheer about and bring us all together. The Glider and Rusty must be smiling!

O ye of little faith.

So he said "length", but the NYT feels he meant the opposite, "depth". Nice reporting. Maybe he meant what he said.

The season is young, give it time. The best part is maybe they have a new trainer.

Callaway built an amazing pitching staff in Cleveland. The players respect him, and coming from the Terry Francona school of managing, he understands the nuances of the modern game. That said, there will be rough spots. As the adage goes, every team will win 60 and lose 60. It's what happens in the other 42 games that tells the tale. Of all of this season's new managers, Callaway is the prize. He should be around for a long time in NYC. Great hire, Mets.

Coaching matters, who knew. The fact is most coaches whether it be Baseball, Football, Basketball or the college sports are very mediocre and interchangeable, but every so often a special one comes along, like Terry Francona in baseball or Bill Belichick in football, coaches who just have something the other don't have, maybe its an instinct or a way to get the best out of their players. People, even so called sports pundits believe that coaching at the highest level doesn't matter, but it does, it really does. As for the Mets, you can already see the difference between this coaching staff and its predecessors, you have already seen more hit and runs, runners put in motion, bunts then we saw from Terry Collins station to station offense, but to me the biggest difference is in the pitching, especially how the pitchers are pitching to the batters, the location of the pitches and choice of pitches in specific counts, there is a real game plan now, and also notice that the players are positioned much better than last year, there are going to be much more double plays than last year just from the proper positioning of infielders for each specific batter. In the professional sports the Player make all the money but some coaches are worth their weight in gold, one day the owners we realize how important their choices for head coach and managers truly are, and how important it is to find a good young head coach rather than settle for recycled mediocrity.

Sweeping the Nationals, even with Harper on fire, is a great start to the season. It doesn't mean they'll make it to the playoffs, but it means that, for right now the team is playing well, there aren't a lot of injuries, and I can turn on the game and not expect to go to bed unhappy. Let's Go Mets!

A run like this doesn't predict what the rest of the season will be but it shows what the team can do when its healthy and going good. If they can get to the playoffs and make this type of run, it would be a great season.

I give full credit to the new manager who has a great team and knows how to truly manage all of them.

As a Mets fan since 1963, I too am conditioned for the worst. But, hey, I also lived through 1969! Fellow commenters: just enjoy this instead of focusing on the doom you consider inevitable. There are such things as pleasant surprises, serendipity, even secular miracles. It's spring! If you can't be hopeful now, to paraphrase Samuel Johnson's famous line about London, you're tired of life.

When Casey Stengel was managing the Yankees and asked about his intelligence as a manager, he said that he was smart enough to write the lineup card, 1 Richardson, 2 Kubek, 3 Mantle, 4 Maris, 5 Berra, ...

Yes, everybody is having fun, including me. However, ladies and gentlemen.... A five- or six-game losing streak could send this high-flying act into a disastrous tailspin.

Should have saved this for, “It’s not ALL bad...” later this week. Never mind, they may be 8-4 by then.

The vaunted Yankees management seems to run on the Infinite Monkey Theorem: give enough simians enough typewriters and eventually they will produce the entirety of Hamlet. Their constant need for big-ticket vanity acquisitions (like Stanton, A-Rod, Boggs, we can go on for infinity) without regard for their team's chemistry lead them to get relentlessly booed by their own fans, who are angry if every hit isnt a grand slam, every pitch a perfect 100mph fastball, and every catch a gold-glove nominee. Meanwhile, the Mets play scrappy ball. Young talent like Conforto, Nimmo, Rosario and beasts like Thor, Yo, and Bruce go together like...tzatziki on a gyro. Like peppers in a hot pot. Like guac on a torta. Like the people of Queens, the Mets are diverse and hard-working, selfless and full of pride. The Mets are New York's real baseball team! Lets Go Mets!

Gee? And without Neil Walker, too!

Mets have looked great until after the all star break so many times that it's hard to be optimistic but for some reason I still root for them.

Awesome! They could be 31-1 and still finish 31-131. Go Baseball!

It is still early in the season, it is the time of year when a 260 hitter can hit 350, a middling pitcher looks like Kershaw (and Kershaw at the same time might look like a AAA pitcher), April is a rough month to judge how a team will do. That said, I like what I see so far as a Mets fan of nearly 50 years. I like the new manager and his coaches, they are emphasizing the basic, they are having runners being agressive on the basepath and are playing small ball, rather then the Terry Collins win or lose by the home run. They can hit home runs, but they also can scratch out runs, and I attribute that to Calloway, and having a manager who was a pitching coach may help with the talented but at times troubled pitching staff, plus Dave Eiland is a great pitching coach. There are questions, will Rosario's hitting come around and will his defense that can be shaky improve? The biggest hole is at catcher, and it could be an achilles heel for them, runners know that the pitchers won't pick them off and the catchers are dismal (D'Arnaud's arm reminds me of a rubber band stretched out one too many times, he is aweful, and how they kept D'Arnaud and Plawecki is mystifying, other than Alderson refusing to admit D'Arnaud is a bust). They also seem to have depth at the outfield, and hopefully when injuries start occurring they have the depth to overcome them, and if the pitching holds up, should be a fun season.

The season is barely 5% over; let's all hold off before we anoint the Mets.

I have loved the Mets since I was a very little boy in the early 1970's. Mickey Callaway seems to know what he is doing, unlike most of Met ownership and management for most of the last 50-odd years. I only wish the Mets the best, but the current ownership and the organization have so badly traumatized its fans that some of us have become so emotionally damaged by the Wilponzi schemes that it will be impossible to smile and enjoy baseball until the World Series rings in the bag and the foul stench of Wilponzi is fully fumigated. Let's Go Mets !

Baseball as a whole, is a game where failure ( hitting the ball 3 out of 10 times for a .300 average ) is considered wildly successful. ( if sustained over an entire season ) Within that context, there are innumerable other statistics ( sabermetrics ) that minutely all added up constitute an ''edge''. Throw in constant positive reinforcement and that edge can balloon into a wining streak. Players that are paid wild multiples thereof of the common working folk play '' a little harder ''. It is all so comical ...