With nothing left to lose, the Mets and the Padres are desperate

As the pundits would have predicted before the season started, the Mets and the Padres entered a series against each other to finish the first half of the season as two of the best teams in baseball.

An Arizona sweep propelled the Mets to a fifth straight win, tying their season-high. As the last three days of summer came before Friday’s All-Star break, the Mets’ winning streak tied Cincinnati’s for the top in the majors.

The Padres, after Thursday’s day off, came sprinting into the weekend after dumping the Los Angeles Angels in a three-game sweep. As Yu Darvish lined up against Justin Verlander for an intriguing start to a baseball weekend in San Diego—Friday’s crowd of 42,712 was the Padres’ 37th sellout this season—both teams hurled with abandon and rolled into momentum.

“They’re just another team getting in our way,” Pete Alonso, the Mets’ lone All-Star this season, said coolly Friday as the series began.

And the Padres proved to be just that on the first night of a three-game series, with the Mets winning 7-5 in 10 innings, extending their winning streak to six games. It is now the longest streak in the majors—Cincinnati lost in Milwaukee on Friday—and is the second-longest streak in club history starting the month of July after a 10-0 start in 1991.

In many ways, it felt like the teams picked up where they left off last October, when deafening noise, kaleidoscopic colors and tense suspense were the hallmarks of a memorable three-game wild card series that saw the Padres beat the Mets at Citi field.

The future of both teams seemed limitless at the time.

Well, maybe not so much.

Instead, these star-studded teams with outrageous payrolls and outrageous expectations remain mirror images of each other, okay. But the images are distorted as if by a playful mirror.

Despite their recent hot streaks, the Mets and the Padres have very little to show for more than half a billion in combined payrolls for the 2023 season. The Mets’ total payroll is estimated to be more than $340 million, according to Spotrac, while the Padres being on the hook for over $240 million. For all that money, each team went into the weekend 41-46, which was 6.5 games behind the Philadelphia Phillies for the National League’s third wild card spot.

The Mets’ desperation to improve their season was epitomized by shortstop Francisco Lindor during the Arizona sweep. He was so sick he nearly had to skip Wednesday’s game, and he only recovered after receiving intravenous fluids for dehydration. He then went 5 for 5 with two triples and a homer as the Mets defeated the first-place Diamondbacks 9-0 on Thursday.

Goodbye, virus; hello, optimism?

“We’re going to make something of it”, Lindor promised after the game. “Now the question becomes how deep are we going to go.”

The desperation of the Padres themselves was evident the night before. They had bounced back from a 1-5 run by Pittsburgh and Cincinnati that manager Bob Melvin called a “miserable trip.” With two wins against the Angels, they had a chance to complete their first series sweep of the season. San Diego’s All-Star closer, Josh Hader, had worked Monday and Tuesday and had not pitched for three straight days since 2021. Prone to overuse after his years in Milwaukee, he had turned down a chance to do it in San Francisco last month.

But with the Padres leading 5-3 in the ninth inning on Wednesday, here came Hader.

“He has an idea of ​​where we are as a team,” Melvin explained afterwards. “So he wanted the ball in a safe situation tonight.”

Desperate times.

“It was the right situation and I was able to deliver it,” Hader said on Friday. “It comes down to making sure you are healthy. If I can’t take care of the team in the long run because of an injury, there’s no point.”

Although the Padres’ rotation led the NL with 39 good starts through Thursday, they entered the series with the Mets with a fairly modest goal of extending their modest winning streak to what would be a season-high four straight wins.

Stringing together wins was difficult thanks to their .219 batting average with runners in scoring position, the worst in the majors entering Friday’s game. A team with sluggers like Manny Machado, Juan Soto, Xander Bogaerts and Fernando Tatis Jr. stared up at terrible clubs like Oakland (29th, .229), Kansas City (28th, .233), and Detroit (27th, .236).

The Padres’ .194 batting average in late/close situations – defined by the Baseball Reference as “any batting appearance from the seventh inning onwards in which the batting team is either tied, leading by one run, or has the potential tying run on deck” — was ranked 29th in the majors through Thursday.

Given those numbers, it was not surprising that the Padres trailed 1-36 after seven innings. The Cardiac Kids, they’re not.

Still looking for a combination that clicks, San Diego parted ways with struggling designated hitter Nelson Cruz on Tuesday and designated him for assignment. There was no reason to have him and Matt Carpenter both on the bench as veterans to squeeze, even if one bats to the right and the other to the left.

It wasn’t the kind of move expected from a team that sprinted all the way to the NL Championship Series last October before losing to Philadelphia. And it showed how much the Padres would have to change if they wanted to get back into the fray.

“We have to come out every day and play like it’s our last,” said Bogaerts.

The Mets and the Padres were such enigmas this summer that each team’s owner gave a little State of the Union address within four days of each other.

On June 28 at Citi Field, Steven A. Cohen offered public support for Manager Buck Showalter and General Manager Billy Eppler. He reiterated that he still intended to hire a president of baseball operations. Of course, the game’s worst-kept secret is that David Stearns, the former president of the Brewers, will likely fill that role once his contract with Milwaukee expires.

On July 1, in an interview with The San Diego Union-Tribune, Padres owner Peter Seidler showed his support for AJ Preller, the team’s president of baseball operations, who is under contract until 2026. Like Cohen, Seidler said that he valued “stability.” He added: “I am for excellence. And to me, AJ is excellence.”

Machado, speaking on Friday, like Seidler, opted for the optimistic, long view.

“It makes everything more special when you’re wrestling,” Machado said. “Looking back, I’ve been through all of this and, hell, look how positive things turned out.”

Now, what are arguably the game’s two most underwhelming teams have what could be their last chance to clear the gloom by extending the tiny glimmers of sunlight they caught in the early days of July. The trade deadline is approaching on August 1, and Eppler and Preller will soon have to decide whether to become buyers or sellers.

After going 7-19 in June, the Mets had 17 hits on Thursday night and amassed 32 bases. The Mets played a crisp, well-rounded series against a secretly good team. Manager Buck Showalter said Arizona is as athletic as anyone the Mets have faced this year.

During their six-game winning streak, the Mets starting pitchers have compiled an 1.80 ERA. Carlos Carrasco pitched his best game of the season on Thursday, and Verlander and Max Scherzer are teamed up in the rotation after detours including injuries and, for Scherzer, a 10-game suspension for violating the league’s ban on using of foreign matter on a baseball.

Although Verlander wobbled back and forth through parts of his start in San Diego, surrendering two earned runs and walking three in six innings, he has now worked six or more innings in seven of 12 starts this season.

“Each day is its own entity and we just want to be able to build on solid performance,” said Alonso, who hit batting practice early on his first day in San Diego in preparation for Monday’s Home Run Derby in Seattle. “You can’t think too much about the future. You just want to focus on winning today.”