CLEVELAND — What a bunch of road hogs.
In a week the Mets have gone from hopeless on the road to greedy, not giving the competition as much as a few table scraps.
OK, now on to the big-boy portion of the road schedule — destination The Bronx and the defending world champions.
Last night’s 6-4 victory for the Mets at Progressive Field completed a three-game sweep of the Indians and at least reinforced the idea manager Jerry Manuel’s crew can overpower the feeble.
Good teams beat up on the weak, exactly what the Mets did in winning six straight road games against the Orioles and Indians, teams that began the night a combined 44 games below .500.
“We’re doing a lot of good things right,” Manuel said after the Mets won for the 11th time in 12 games and remained a half-game behind Atlanta in the NL East. “How long this continues will probably be determined by [tonight’s] starting pitcher on the opposition.”
Jose Reyes went 3-for-5 with an RBI — he’s hitting .371 over his last 23 games — to help R.A. Dickey get a fifth straight victory. And Reyes doesn’t want to hear about the Mets beating up on bad teams.
“Right now we can play with anybody in baseball,” he said.
Dickey gave the Mets a sixth straight solid start by allowing three runs, two earned, over six innings. The righty became the first Mets pitcher to go 5-0 in his first six starts.
“I’m much more interested in how we fare collectively, but it’s nice,” Dickey said, when told of his place in Mets’ history.
Dickey credited pitching coach Dan Warthen for helping him make an adjustment in the fifth inning with his knuckleball. The Indians had runners on second and third with nobody out, when Warthen told Dickey to start throwing a hard knuckler. The Indians scored a run in the inning, but Dickey retired six of the last seven batters he faced.
“I feel tonight was another step in that evolution of being where I want to be,” Dickey said.
Jake Westbrook is among the potential available arms before the trading deadline, but the Mets might want to think twice about the veteran after what they saw last night. The right-hander allowed five runs on 11 hits over seven innings, and barely escaped a first inning in which the Mets sent eight batters to the plate and scored three runs.
It came four days after the Mets battered the Orioles’ Kevin Millwood — another veteran pitcher on the trading block — for eight runs.
The Mets built off a 3-2 lead in the fourth last night on David Wright’s run-scoring fielder’s choice, extending his NL lead in RBIs to 53. Ike Davis’ second RBI single of the game made it 5-2.
Pedro Feliciano replaced Dickey in the seventh and allowed a run after Carlos Santana hit a double to deep center and Angel Pagan dropped the ball while attempting to make the throw. Santana went to third and later scored to make it 5-4.
But Reyes got that run back with an RBI triple in the eighth after Tejada blooped a two-out single against Chris Perez. Francisco Rodriguez pitched a scoreless ninth for his 15th save.
And now, the Yankees.
“I’m not looking for a challenge — I’m looking to keep winning games,” Manuel said. “You go into Yankee Stadium and play the world champs, you’ve got to be playing good baseball. I think we feel like we’re playing good baseball.”