Streaks are nice, but there’s no sense in settling

THERE is no greater pickme-up than playing well, than pitching well, than stringing together a couple of wins and changing the narrative around your baseball team. That’s what the Mets needed, and that’s what the Mets have gotten. It doesn’t make everything better, doesn’t dissolve all their visible flaws. But it does make them feel better about themselves. And given where they were four days before this four-game winning streak began, that’s a start. “This feels more like where we are supposed to be,” said Asdrubal Cabrera, who had two more hits Monday night, including the ice-breaking RBI double that scored Amed Rosario in the third inning and helped the Mets to a 2-0 win over the woeful Marlins at Citi Field. “This is an odd game, built on streaks,” said Mickey Callaway, whose team has already enjoyed a 10-game winning streak and suffered through a six-game losing streak, who a year ago rode the crest of the Cleveland Indians’ 22-game winning streak, who said even as the Mets were scuffling for a month that he could sense better times coming. “We can be happy with this,” said Jason Vargas, the starter and winner who pitched five shutout innings and saw his ERA dip below 10.00 for the first time all year for his efforts. “But we can’t be satisfied.” It seemed a good time for the Mets to channel that sentiment, because it was exactly 49 years earlier when The Franchise of the franchise, Tom Seaver, had made one of the most impactful, if not his most important, statements in team history. In truth, for all he did to assemble a Hall of Fame career, his finest hour may well have been one that will never be immortalized on a plaque or a statue, one that only comes up when those ’69 Miracle workers congregate and compare memories.

That came on May 21, 1969. Seaver was still relatively early in his career, carrying a lifetime record of 37-27 into Atlanta’s Fulton County Stadium. He was a fine pitcher but not yet The Franchise, and the Mets were a markedly improved team but not nearly the folk heroes they’d become across the next few months.

Seaver was brilliant that night, tossing a three-hit shutout in a 5-0 victory late. A few minutes after the game ended, a noisy crowd of newspapermen and broadcasters gathered outside the visiting clubhouse, eager to properly record a genuine moment of baseball history:

The win gave the Mets an 18-18 record after 36 games. No Mets team in their history had ever been at .500 at such an advanced date in the baseball calendar. This was, surely, going to be a raucous clubhouse. The writers had their pens ready to summon every snapshot.

What they got was something else: No music. No loud talking. A few guys sat at their lockers knocking back postgame beers, eating dinner. And all of them, every one, clearly took their cue from the player around whose locker the media throng now gathered, all of them wondering of Seaver: “How does it feel to make history?”

Seaver wanted none of it. He was still only 24 years old, but he was already a former Marine, with an old- soul aura about him. He didn’t suffer fools. And he wasn’t about to celebrate sea level.

“What’s so good about .500?” Seaver asked his inquisitors. “That’s only mediocre. We didn’t come into this season to play .500. Let Rod Kanehl and Marvelous Marv [Throneberry] laugh about the Mets. We’re out here to win. You know when we’ll have champagne? When we win the pennant.”

That was the first time a Met, any Met, demanded to be graded not on a curve, based on what had happened before, but on how professional ballplayers should be judged. Seaver’s defiance serves as a perennial reminder that good baseball teams are never satisfied, not even when only they themselves believe that they’re a good team.

It’s a helpful message for the Mets, who in recent years have seemed too satisfied with modest progress and small steps, brief winning streaks that keep the torches and pitchforks at bay but don’t make much difference in the standings. The two notable exceptions to that rule were the final two months of 2015 and the final six weeks of 2016, when they played an awful lot of ruthless baseball.

Some might argue that’s asking too much of this team. Fine. But who’s the 2018 version of Seaver who’s going to argue otherwise?