Mets stories

Matt Harvey’s emergence as perhaps the best pitcher in Major League Baseball took another leap forward Tuesday night during the Mets’ victory over the Chicago White Sox.

The Mets’ young ace was perfect through 6 2-3 innings, retiring the first 20 White Sox batters he faced, before right fielder Alex Rios legged out an infield single with two outs in the top of the seventh inning. Rios’ hit slowly rolled between shortstop Ruben Tejada and third baseman David Wright. Tejada took a few quick steps to his right, gloved the ball on the edge of the infield dirt and delivered a Derek Jeter-like jump throw to first baseman Ike Davis, but Rios beat the throw by an eyelash.

Howard Megdal is the Mets beat writer for The Journal News, serving as the lead writer for the paper’s Mets blog, Mets.LoHudBlogs.com. In addition, Megdal is the author of “Wilpon’s Folly: The Story of A Man, His Fortune and The New York Mets,” in which he chronicles the financial and legal difficulties of the team’s owners.

I recently had the chance to interview Megdal, where he gave his assessment of this year’s team, talked about which Met has the most upside and estimated how many wins this year’s team could have, if all goes well. You can follow Megdal on Twitter @HowardMegdal.

With the exception of Jon Niese and Matt Harvey, the Mets’ rotation has been abysmal through the first two weeks of the season. So calling up Zack Wheeler, the team’s top pitching prospect, would seem like the answer to that problem, right? Not so fast.

On Wednesday, manager Terry Collins told Mike Francesa on WFAN that the team might consider calling Wheeler up to the Major Leagues if the pitching beyond Niese and Harvey continues to struggle. However, Collins backed off those comments on Thursday, saying he was uncertain when Wheeler might be called up.   

Excluding catcher John Buck’s scorching start to the season, Daniel Murphy has been the New York Mets’ top hitter through the team’s first 11 games.

Murphy, who is batting a team-high .381, has hit safely in all but three games. The second baseman has a team-best 16 hits, including eight extra-base hits – five doubles, two home runs and one triple – in 42 at-bats. Last season, he didn’t belt his first two home runs until June 27, when he hit both in consecutive at-bats.

The Mets teams of 1969 and 1986 were especially Amazin’, of course, but what if you could create a club combining the best players from each era? Or from any era? Here are my picks for an all-time Mets dream team, to wrap up my 15-part anniversary tribute to Queens’ hometown heroes. Miss any entries? Just hit the Mets link on qchron.com, and you can catch them all, tracing the team’s history from its genesis in the mind of Bill Shea through the end of last season. Now on to October!

Right-handed pitcher

The first years of the 21st century were not kind to the Mets, but after Willie Randolph took over as manager in 2005, things started to turn around, and the next year the Amazin’s took their first division title in nearly 20 years.

2002

The Mets really revved it up at the end of the ’90s, but kept the fans on an emotional roller coaster as they finished 1998 and 1999 in heartbreaking fashion, falling just short of the postseason in the former and losing the League Championship Series in six in the latter.

1997

After the great comeback World Series win of 1986, the Mets stayed a strong team for years and broke new attendance records, but a dynasty was not to be. Injuries were to blame in 1987 — sound familiar? As the eighties turned into the nineties, some of the team’s biggest stars were traded, and Manager Davey Johnson, who couldn’t get them into the Big Show again, was fired.

1987

Even with such luminaries as Tom Seaver, Jerry Koosman, Dwight Gooden, David Cone and Frank Viola having stood atop the mound in Flushing over the years, the Mets had never seen one of their pitchers throw a no-hitter, one of baseball’s most special accomplishments.

Until last Friday.

• Special Section

What can you say about the Mets between 1979 and 1982? Not much. Maybe that they avoided losing 100 games a year — though the only time they didn’t come close was 1981, when a strike canceled nearly a third of the season. But a couple signs of the future appeared: Fred Wilpon as part owner, in 1980, and Mookie Wilson as a promising rookie, in 1981.

1979

• Special Section

After the miracle of 1969, the Mets stayed strong but were knocked out of playoff contention by untimely slumps in 1970 and ’71, and injuries in 1972. The next year they roared back into the World Series, but lost in seven games to the Oakland A’s.

1970

• Featured

Win or lose, the New York Mets are beloved here in Queens. And lose is what they often did early on, dropping more than 100 games a year but drawing record crowds to Shea Stadium soon after it opened in 1964. Last week in Part I of my series, “Our hometown heroes for 50 years,” I recapped their first year, 1962, along with recalling some of the team’s high and low points throughout the past five decades. This week recaps the 1963 through 1966 seasons.

The Mets by the years: 1963