If the New York Mets and their fans let themselves, they could begin to get very excited right about now. They would be making a mistake, but how often can they get excited?
The mediocre Mets completed a three-game sweep of the San Diego Padres on Thursday. It was probably as perfect a series as the Mets could play. It was only the third time this season that a National League team had won all three games of a series against a first-place team, and the other two times occurred when first place did not mean as much as it does at this stage of the season.
Keeping the feat in perspective, the Padres play in what is probably the league's weakest division. They are the only team in the West with a winning record. All of the teams in the East have winning records, and three teams in the Central have winning records.
But even if the Padres are the best of the worst in the West, there's something to be said for the Mets beating them all three times they played this week, especially Thursday's game, when the Padres' best starter, Jake Peavy, was pitching against the Mets' wildest, Kazuhisa Ishii.
"The pitching matchup that was supposed to be in their favor ended up in our favor," said Tom Glavine, the senior man on the staff, who was the winning pitcher in the middle game of the series.
Think of that for a moment. The Mets won the first game of the series, started by Kris Benson, in extra innings, the second behind Glavine and the third with Ishii. Pedro Martinez did not even make a cameo appearance in the series. The Mets did not need their magic man to pull off the sweep.
They had abundant contributions, on the other hand, from many of their hitters, from Chris Woodward, whose 11th-inning home run won the opener, to Mike Piazza, Carlos Beltran and Cliff Floyd in the second game, to Jose Reyes, Doug Mientkiewicz, David Wright, Mike Cameron and Ramon Castro on Thursday.
The Mets did what they have not always been able to do this season. They had won the first two games of a series six times, but the third game only twice.
"It's like we felt sorry for them after we'd win the first two games of the series; we seem to let up," manager Willie Randolph said after a 12-0 victory in which the Mets showed the Padres no mercy.
Randolph made a point of pointing out that history to his players before the Padres series.
"We meet at the beginning of every series," he said. "We have little skull sessions and talk about the challenges in front of us and what we need to do as a team. We talked briefly about that."
The Mets weren't so bold or brash as to talk about sweeping the Padres, but Randolph said:
"Coming into the series, we felt like it would be a really good time to make a nice little run here. Just play good baseball. Everyone on the team knows we have to make a statement in this division. We can't afford to wait any longer. The Phillies are playing better, the Marlins are a team you can't count out, Atlanta's always going to be tough, the Nationals have come back to us a little bit, and we have to make sure we meet them."
A week before the All-Star Game, the Mets, in fifth place, had fallen 10 games behind the first-place Nationals. Their victory on Thursday moved them into third place, 4 1/2 games behind Atlanta and the Nationals, who lost to Houston on Thursday night.
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