Mets’ Early Season Vibe: 2025 is evoking 2015

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I was looking at my Facebook Memories the other day and I came across a post from 2018 that read “9-1? Pretty good start…” Back in those heady days when manager Mickey Callaway’s execrable habits had yet to come to light, before Matt Harvey was exiled to Cincinnati, before Sandy Alderson’s cancer diagnosis, before the season devolved into a 75- win disaster, we fans thought they were headed someplace. This ain’t that.

But this season is looking very familiar, however. If we look slightly further back, we can just about make out some symmetry between this club, and one that was far more successful just four seasons prior. At this writing, the Mets stand 8-4, after being frozen out by the Miami Marlins in the finale of their most recent series. Not as good as 2018, but somehow better. There is a murmur of anticipation, a seeming national focus on this squad that hasn’t been seen since the champagne dried in the Citi Field visitors’ clubhouse lo, these ten years gone. The Mets are the buzzy team, right now, despite the Yankees’ destruction of outfield walls the first week of the season. With that comes all the attendant palaver about “taking back the City,” and “who’s the little brother?” when in conversations concerning that other team in town.

Signing Juan Soto will do that for you.

But so will playing generally crisp, winning baseball. Soto, of course has a lot to do with that. Until that Marlins’ finale, Soto had reached base in every game, and that game was only his second hitless effort, and he has ten runs scored in 12 games. Francisco Lindor, Pete Alonso and Brandon Nimmo have been the bellwethers in this early going, despite Lindor’s customary sluggish start – but he’s on an eight-game hitting streak which has raised his average 244 points. Nimmo has started even slower, but has a propensity for knocking in runs, with ten RBI in these first 12. Alonso is the one making owner Steve Cohen and President of Baseball Operations David Stearns look extra spiffy for bringing him back, as his slash line currently sits at a gaudy .333/.451/.667, good for a 1.118 OPS and a 220 OPS+.

For all those numbers above, I’m going to state something I know is out of fashion in this data-driven era, governed by analytics and shunning that which cannot be quantified, mocking the “eye test:” the 2025 Mets have the look. They have the same confident, goat-shouldered aura last sported by Harvey, Daniel Murphy, Curtis Granderson and even a waning David Wright. They had a supreme belief in themselves that April/May, such that they could lay the foundation for what would come later. They posted an 11-game winning skein in the first weeks that gave them a cushion and provided solace when the June Swoon hit and the season reached its nadir at the beginning of that July. That hot start bought them enough time and street cred for Alderson to make a flurry of deals, culminating in the importing of Yoenis Cespedes, which, of course, pushed the club way over the top. These guys are off to a similar start.

My friend Michael Baron, who runs a rival blog to this one commented the other day that “[t]he Mets are 8-4 and haven’t even clicked yet.” For all the good vibes and the look, there are still a lot of potential trapdoors. The injury bug hit in spring training, claiming the top two-fifths of the pitching staff, the starting second baseman and the starting catcher. Surprisingly, the starting rotation has been able to withstand the absences of Franke Montas and Sean Manaea, but Jeff McNeil and Francisco Alvarez have not been adequately replaced – offensively, anyway. Much has been made this week of Brett Baty’s shortcomings and a further listing of them here seems like cruelly piling on. Luisangel Acuna has been no better. Luis Torrens has done well in Alvarez’s absence, but there is a reason he’s a career backup, and right now, he’s dealing with a sore forearm. Hayden Senger is a really nice story and he’s got a howitzer for a throwing arm, but it’s unlikely he’ll ever hit enough to be more than a nice story. If they can continue to play solid ball until McNeil and Alvarez return, and the back end of the rotation continues to surprise, it might be just enough to give Stearns some room to do some more midseason magic. In any case, fresh off their appearance in the NLCS, in which they took the Dodgers to a Game Six – further than anyone had any right to expect – the Mets might have found themselves at the forefront of the national sporting consciousness whether they had signed Soto, or not. We’ll never know, of course, because Cohen obliterated the record books in inking the 26-year-old right fielder to the most mind-bogglingly large contract in history. They were a lot of fun to watch from August 29 onward, that’s for sure, a run that kept them playing ball until 11 days before Halloween.

If it keeps up like it’s been, they might find themselves playing closer to Thanksgiving.