Mets hope top arms can match Atlanta legends

TORONTO — Jacob deGrom grew up a huge Braves fan. Then a long and lanky shortstop, the Florida native idolized Chipper Jones, and is old enough to remember the ’90s and the heyday of the Tomahawk Chop. Even though he was not thinking about pitching back then, deGrom said he took away a valuable lesson from watching the Braves three Hall of Fame pitchers, Greg Maddux, Tom Glavine and John Smoltz, back in the day.

“They were all great at locating,” deGrom said. “I didn’t grow up a pitcher, but watching those guys, I figured out if you want to be a good pitcher you should probably be able to locate your pitches. I saw how they fed off each other and helped each other.

“They were awesome. You want to be like that some day.”

This weekend — against the Braves, fittingly — the Mets hope to see the beginnings of something like that. After years of dreaming about prospects with power arms forming an elite rotation, Mets fans will see it for the first time in a three-game series in Atlanta in which the Mets scheduled starters are deGrom, Noah Syndergaard and Matt Harvey.

It’s a glimpse into what the Mets hope is their future.

“It’s hard not to look ahead sometimes and wonder what we can do,” Syndergaard said Thursday. “This is a young staff, you think about what’s ahead and it’s exciting. I think we all feel that way, we all are challenging each other and pushing each other and we want to see what we can do.”

If this core — along with the expected return of Zack Wheeler from Tommy John surgery next year and the expected arrival of lefty Steven Matz this season — can accomplish anything near what the Braves’ Big Three did, it will be a bright future.

From 1993 to 1999, Maddux, Glavine and Smoltz racked up 340 combined wins. Over seven seasons, they won five Cy Young awards and they also won the 1995 World Series. According to Fangraphs, from 1993 to ’99 there were six pitchers in the majors who had an ERA under 3.25 and Glavine (3.23 in 227 games), Maddux (2.34 in 224 games) and Smoltz (3.24 in 100 games) were three of them.

Simply put, they were dominating.

“When I was with Houston and you were going to face Atlanta if you drew those three, you just hoped one of them would have an off day,” Terry Collins said. “You knew you weren’t going to score many runs against them, you just scraped together what you could get and hoped you got a chance.”

Collins was quick to point out that his young staff has a very long way to go before they can be talked about like the Braves staff.

“If everything goes right, everything goes perfectly, that’s what you hope for, a core of excellent pitchers that can drive the team,” Collins said. “We have three guys right now who are very talented young pitchers. They are very different pitchers, they have different personalities.

“They are doing a great job for what we’ve asked of them.”

DeGrom, who starts the series opener Friday night, said that aside from admiring the pinpoint control of Maddux and Glavine, the thing he liked the most about the three Hall of Famers in Braves uniforms was how they fed off each other, drove one another to get better.

He sees some of that developing with the Mets right now.

“I mean, I think we kind of do the same thing now, we learn from each other, we all approach the game a little different,” deGrom said, “but we all go out and have fun and see what the other guy is doing to get outs then we learn from that.

“You look at (Maddux, Glavine and Smoltz) and how great they were and how they fed off each other,” deGrom continued, “I think that’s what we’re hoping to be.”