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New York sports biz report: Mets playing only home games now; Sky Blue sellout
By Howard Megdal 1:06 p.m. | Aug. 28, 2015
"This doesn't even make any sense anymore," someone in Citizens Bank Park press box exclaimed as a Yoenis Cespedes home run cleared the fence at the start of Tuesday night's game.
That's what the Mets have accomplished in the month of August. They'd not only excelled, making use of their new players added in the days leading up to the trade deadline while their incumbents reached new levels of play. They've put up the kind of numbers that sit well beyond the far end of any analysis Sandy Alderson and his baseball ops people factored into the trades they made to improve their postseason chances.
The team's issue as July wore on was simple: a fantastic pitching staff, wasted by an inept offense. The team's offense wasn't merely bad, it was consistent: OPS in each month stood between .647 and .671. For reference, Rey Ordonez's 1999 OPS was .636, so the Mets had an entire offense of players hitting at roughly the rate of a player who only stayed in baseball because of his defense.
This month, entering Thursday night's game, the Mets had an OPS of .839. For reference, Darryl Strawberry's career OPS was .862.
The Mets are doing it up and down their lineup. On Monday night, this idea reached its logical conclusion, when the Mets hit a franchise record 14 extra base hits, including eight home runs. The team's 1-7 hitters in the lineup all homered, with Wilmer Flores, on an absurd tear since his night of tears just before getting "untraded," hitting two of them. No team, to be clear, has ever done this. Not the 1927 Yankees. Not the 1961 Yankees. Not the 1995 Indians. Only the 2015 Mets, who broke the team record for home runs in a month with days to spare.
The Mets hit 18 home runs from August 18-25. The Miami Marlins have hit 19 home runs, total, since the all-star break in early July.
The result is a kind of movable celebration among Mets fans, both here and abroad. It isn't just that the team is drawing massively increased crowds — 41 percent year-over-year of its first ten home games since July 31 — but the Mets crowds are audible on the road as well. In Philadelphia, sure, just down the New Jersey Turnpike, but everywhere — in Colorado this past weekend.
There is something karmic about a team which moved the fences in, twice, just since 2009 in an effort to play better at home now managing to both extend their home record to 42-21 this season, and now win virtually every game in road games that feel like they're playing at home.
Wilmer Flores got asked about his continued ovations Monday night in Philadelphia, more than two week after he garnered national attention for crying on the field after mistakenly believing he'd been traded.
As Flores put it after the Mets rallied from five runs down to win by nine on Monday night, "It's unbelievable. It feels like we're playing at home all the time."
Or as Wright said, standing in front of his locker, after homering in his return to the lineup: "Batting practice, the fans are cheering. Your first at-bat, running out to the field. I had to be careful, almost pulled a Wilmer Flores out there." |
http://www.capitalnewyork.com/article/c ... now-sky-bl
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