Mets reveling in midseason turnaround: ‘We’re having a great time’

NEW YORK — Every baseball season contains its share of the inexplicable — the superstar who slumps for months, the cold streak built out of hard contact, the seven shutout innings without your best stuff. Over eight months and 162 games, weird stuff happens, and teams and fans can come together by embracing those undulations.

But this New York Mets campaign? It’s not even mid-July and it feels like a six-season run of a reality series, with an internal lore that requires its own glossary. “Glizzy Iggy was running around with Grimace on Friday night” is a sentence that not only makes perfect sense in Queens but also is celebrated in these parts.

Crossover event of the year!

Glizzy Iggy is back with some Grimace swag 🔥 pic.twitter.com/LjrBDnX460

— SNY (@SNYtv) July 13, 2024

(For the uninitiated, Glizzy Iggy is the Italian greyhound that went viral for eating a hot dog, Grimace is the McDonald’s mascot whose first pitch catalyzed, to whatever degree you decide, the Mets’ turnaround exactly one month ago Friday. The Rally Pimp, April’s unofficial mascot, was presumably in attendance as well. This season needs its own “Know Your Meme” site.)

The Mets’ midsummer about-face continued unabated Friday in a 7-6 win over the Rockies. Like most every New York victory as of late, it started as a beatdown and ended as a white-knuckler, the bullpen yielding three runs in the eighth and putting the tying run in scoring position in the ninth. But a win’s a win, and the Mets are piling them up.

“We’re having a great time right now,” said Sean Manaea, who picked up the win with seven strong innings.

The heroes Friday came from the bottom half of the batting order. For weeks, the Mets have been led by the inspired play of Francisco Lindor and Brandon Nimmo hitting first and second. Friday, the trio of Mark Vientos, José Iglesias and Harrison Bader combined to slug five home runs. Bader hit two homers in a game for the first time since 2019, Iglesias for the first time ever. It was only his 1,124th career game, though.

“This is a deep lineup,” manager Carlos Mendoza said. “It’s one through nine with tough at-bats.”

Bader has more homers than he hit last season. Iglesias has as many homers this month as he had since the start of the 2022 season.

Iglesias, as much as anybody, signifies the change in vibes for the Mets. A veteran signed to a minor-league deal who didn’t even appear in the majors last season, he was called up May 31 with the Mets 10 games under .500. Iglesias entered a clubhouse that was dragging with the perspective of a starry-eyed rookie. New York is 25-12 since then, tied with the Houston Astros for the best mark in the majors.

The infielder has been an unexpectedly integral part of that on-field turnaround — causation more than correlation. He improved his average to .347 and his OPS to .940 with Friday’s fireworks. And he’s contributed the song of the summer in Queens: His recently released single “OMG,” itself a celebration of positivity, blasted after each of New York’s five homers. His own homers were accompanied by the music video on the scoreboard.

“That was pretty cool,” he said. “The fans, it was electric all night long.”

It could be easy to cynically interrogate the sustainability here, to wonder whether the “OMG” signs that reside in the home dugout and dot the stands at Citi Field will one day find their place alongside 2022’s giant green sombrero or 2019’s “The Zoo” T-shirt or 2018’s giant salt-and-pepper shakers.

But the facts of the matter are this: The Mets’ offense has averaged better than six runs per game for more than six weeks; they’ve scored at least five runs in 18 of their last 24 contests. Their rotation has a sub-3.00 ERA this month and a 15-5 record since the start of June.

The bullpen — well, bullpens can be fixed more easily in-season than other spots on the roster. In the flat landscape of the National League wild-card picture, New York is starting to stand out. Maybe instead “OMG” earns a historical place alongside “Ya gotta believe” and “Mojo Rising” and “Let’s Go Mets Go.”

For the time being, the Mets are reveling in the here and now. None of this is inexplicable to them, this being the team they believed they had coming out of spring training.

“It’s just a hungry group,” Bader said. “The name of the game’s repeating it.”

“Every single game means more and more and more to us now,” Iglesias said. “It’s about winning.”

(Photo of Francisco Lindor and Brandon Nimmo: Luke Hales / Getty Images)