Mets' offensive deluge against Yankees reminder of potential despite frustrating season

It’s easy to play the what-if game with the Mets, but after their 12-2 drubbing of Gerrit Cole and the Yankees on Saturday afternoon, it’s hard to ignore what could’ve been for them had the entire team stayed healthy and gotten off to a better start.

It’s not just Saturday’s score that’s impressive – anybody can put up double-digit runs on a given day – it’s the last week and a half of scores that should have the Mets excited about their potential for next year and beyond.

Over their last nine games, the Mets have scored 76 runs (8.44 runs per game) and are 7-2 during that stretch. Since the trade deadline, New York boasts one of the best offenses in the league and is 22-13.

One player that perfectly encapsulates the entire Mets’ season is Francisco Lindor, who was hurt during the majority of the first half but has been on a tear recently, especially in the power department with two home runs against the Yanks on Saturday. He now has 20 home runs in 91 games and seven in his last 15 games.

“It’s been an uphill fight this whole year,” Lindor said. “It sucks that we haven’t played as much together [as a whole group], but when we do play together and we’re all in the lineup things like this could happen you know?

“This is what we should’ve been doing since the beginning, but it’s part of the journey, it’s part of the year and we’ll try and make the most of it.”

Sure, with the pressure of trying to make the postseason off, some of what the Mets are doing should be taken with a grain of salt. However, during this recent surge New York has looked competitive and even won some series against multiple playoff teams.

In fact, if the Mets win Sunday’s rubber game, not only will they have taken the series from the Yanks, they will have won the season’s Subway Series, 4-2.

“If we would have played together from the beginning, there was a lot of injuries and there was a lot of ups and downs – I didn’t play well when I was playing – so if we would’ve, from the beginning, done what we’re doing now it would’ve been a whole different layout,” Lindor said. “But we put ourselves in this position and we can only worry about what we have today. We’ll see what happens next year.”

While the Mets are still not technically eliminated from playoff contention (their tragic number is 3), they are playing the rest of the season out as hard as they can to try and play spoiler as well as playing for the guys in the locker room, both those who will be on the team next year and those who won’t.

“Build on our relationships and try to finish the year as strong as we can,” Lindor said when asked what can be taken from the final two weeks of a season like this one. “Guys would be lying if they [say they] don’t want to have good years, everybody wants to have a good year, whatever a good year means for them. But you try to finish strong, you try to give everything you got and learn each other, continue to build on the relationships.”