After Mike Pelfrey’s last start, we pointed out that the breaking-out right-hander was responsible for two-thirds of the Mets’ wins. Last night, Pelfrey was dominant again, throwing seven shutout innings in a 4–0 win over the Cubs. The guy is cooking up something nice.
The math works out: Pelfrey is now 3–0 (with an 0.86 ERA) and even leads the team in saves, thanks to that twenty-inning horror show/carnival ride against the Cardinals over the weekend. So, of the Mets’ six wins, Big Pelf is personally responsible for four of them. This is not a sustainable business model, but for the guy we deemed the sixth-most important Met coming into the year, it’s a definitively pleasant development.
The real story last night might have been the reemergence of the most important Met: Jose Reyes. After a weekend series in which he looked tired, slow, and generally “not ready,” Reyes busted out last night, going four-for-five, including one of those signature Reyes triples that everyone imagined him hitting tons of when Citi Field opened. He also looked like he was having fun again. That’s what we were waiting for.
Obviously, not all the Mets’ problems have been fixed — the invisible snipers on the roof of Citi Field nailed Ryota Igarashi last night, and Carlos Beltran doesn’t seem much closer to returning from his off-season knee surgery — but a couple of wins, backed by some solid pitching, will make everything feel less frantic in Flushing for a while. The Mets are two games under .500 and only two and a half games out of first. The world is not collapsing (yet).