So here’s the plan for the weekend:
When the Mets are leading the Dodgers 9-1 on Saturday night at Citi Field, and when the Los Angeles lineup comes around to Chase Utley after the seventh inning, Terry Collins goes to his bullpen.
For Matt Harvey.
Harvey drills Utley in the ribs, exacting vengeance for Utley’s slide into Ruben Tejada last October. Harvey wins back the Mets fans who have turned on him. Major League Baseball suspends Harvey for five games, giving the free-falling right-hander the break he sorely needs.
The 1986 Mets, on site, charge the field to provide backup, just in case there’s any trouble.
Everyone good with that?
It should be a particularly fun weekend in Flushing, thanks to the 30th-anniversary reunion of the last Mets team to win it all and the rematch of last year’s NLDS that led to the formation of the Utley Rule on slides into second base. Then again, Citi Field has been lively all season long, which leads to this midseason coronation:
These 2016 Mets are the closest resemblance, in 30 years, to their 1986 forefathers when you factor in both talent and excitement.
That doesn’t guarantee a championship. It does, however, guarantee months of must-see baseball.
The Mets feature a quintet of compelling starting pitchers; it just so happens that one of them, Harvey, is compelling for the wrong reasons. While their offense has underwhelmed, their best hitter, Yoenis Cespedes, entered Thursday’s off day with the league lead in home runs (15), RBIs (36) and slugging percentage (.660). Their closer, Jeurys Familia, is dominating his way toward a first All-Star Game appearance.
The Davey Johnson-managed Mets, once they won it all in ’86, lost both charm and steam due to age (Gary Carter and Keith Hernandez) and off-the-field turbulence (Dwight Gooden and Darryl Strawberry) and never returned to the World Series. Bobby Valentine’s Mets in the late 1990s and early 2000s sold myriad copies of The Post thanks to Mike Piazza’s thunder and Bobby V.’s penchant for outrageous quotes and actions. Yet they always seemed to be playing over their heads, and their one shot in the Fall Classic fell short to Joe Torre’s Yankees dynasty.
Omar Minaya’s Mets possessed a wealth of talent, especially in the lineup, from 2005 through 2008, and Jose Reyes fired up Mets fans as much as anyone. The pitching staff lacked quality and depth, though, and the very colorful Pedro Martinez ran out of gas by his second year aboard, 2006, when the Mets memorably lost a seven-game heartbreaker to St. Louis in the NLCS.
And now we have these Mets, trying to return to the World Series and win it this time, enjoying the first full seasons of Cespedes, Michael Conforto, Steven Matz and Noah Syndergaard in a Mets uniform. Playing under the celebratory shadow of their 1986 predecessors. Dealing with dangerous diversions like Harvey’s recent meltdown and Utley’s return to Citi Field, where he should get booed heartily.
(No, the Mets shouldn’t drill Utley, even though the Los Angeles Times reported that the former Phillie expects to get hit this weekend. Let it go. Tejada is gone, Major League Baseball deemed the slide legal under the rules in play at the time and the Mets won the NLDS anyway.)
The ’86 Mets remain the gold standard. They were bold and brash and they possessed elite performers everywhere. No NL team has matched their 108 regular-season wins in the 29 subsequent campaigns, and these 2016 Mets are quite unlikely to do so, although the Cubs are currently on pace to win 112.
But these ’16 Mets clearly have the goods to win it all, and to leave their mark while pursuing the parade. This weekend alignment of past and present should present a nice appetizer for the future that follows.