After wild Orioles series, Mets can tackle crucial West Coast road trip with renewed confidence

At the time it felt like the Mets’ Wild Card hopes were being derailed by a bad call. A horrendous call, actually, as umpire Marvin Hudson somehow missed an obvious strike three that was instead ruled ball four and also negated a caught-stealing, setting up the Baltimore Orioles for a potentially big eighth inning.

The Orioles don’t need that type of help. They’re an offensive juggernaut that leads the American League in runs scored and leads the majors in home runs and slugging percentage.

Throw in the fact that Jose Butto was struggling with his command as he worked on one day of rest for the first time since being converted from a starter, and rarely has a bases-loaded, no-out situation felt more like a doomsday moment than it did at Citi Field late Wednesday afternoon.

With the top of the Orioles lineup due up, oh by the way.

But if we know anything about the 2024 Mets by now it is that they’re as feisty as they are flawed, sometimes as inspiring as they can be exasperating.

After all, in June they turned what appeared to be a dead-end season into what has been a wild ride of entertaining baseball, with the extreme peaks and valleys that come with such a streaky offense and a less-than-trustworthy bullpen.

Indeed, if any one moment defines the unpredictable nature of the Mets’ season so far, it is surely the Jake Diekman strikeout of Aaron Judge in the ninth inning of that 3-2 win over the Yankees in the Bronx on July 23.

It still seems hard to believe, especially considering the left-hander was DFA’d a week later when his lack of control became unmanageable. Yet that strikeout will show up on every end-of-season highlight reel should the Mets make it to October.

All of which is a long way of saying we shouldn’t have been surprised that after fumbling an opportunity on this homestand, going 3-3 against the Oakland A’s and Miami Marlins, the Mets somehow avoided that impending doom in the eighth inning Wednesday to win the series against the Orioles in as dramatic a fashion as possible, with two walk-off home runs.

It was Butto "The Bullpen Savior" who gutted his way out of the eighth, allowing only a sacrifice fly, to pave the way for Jesse Winker’s signature moment as a new Met, taking Seranthony Dominguez deep for the walk-off, just as Francisco Alvarez did on Monday night.

And so rather than limping out west for seven games with the two hottest teams in baseball -- the San Diego Padres and then the Arizona Diamondbacks -- the Mets can thump their chests a bit and again believe anything is possible in this nutty season.

In truth, the odds are against them at this point, at least statistically. As of Wednesday, FanGraphs ranked their chances of reaching the postseason at only 25.2 percent, compared to 75.2 percent for the Atlanta Braves.

That seems like a lopsided disparity considering the Mets are only 1.5 games behind after their win over the Orioles and Wednesday's games.

Still, the Braves are playing well again, with six wins in their last nine games, in spite of all their injuries, and it’s hard to argue against their winning culture for that third Wild Card berth.

But who knows, with three games in Atlanta in the final week of the season, perhaps the schedule is set up for the Mets to steal the Wild Card the way the Braves stole the NL East in 2022.

Certainly, you’d have to think those games will be meaningful. The Mets have proven too resilient over the course of this season, bouncing back from that 0-5 start and their low-water mark of 24-35 on June 2, to think they’re going to suddenly fade away now.

They’ve been inconsistent, to be sure, since their six-week stretch of torrid hitting. They’re 11-13 since that Friday night when they defeated the Braves at Citi Field on July 26 to pull ahead of them in the Wild Card race, the same night Kodai Senga’s dominant season debut was cut short by his calf injury, but you can make a case they’re trending upwards again.

The offense may be enigmatic right to the end, but with Mark Vientos blossoming into a legit top-of-the-lineup force, J.D. Martinez showing signs of warming up, and the now-consistent production from Francisco Lindor, there is at least hope the Mets have a team-wide hot stretch ahead of them.

Perhaps more significantly, there is suddenly more reason to believe in the pitching. Certainly the starting rotation, with the glaring exception of Jose Quintana, is riding high at the moment.

Consider: Sean Manaea delivered mostly brilliance on Wednesday, pitching 5.2 perfect innings and going seven innings for the fourth time in five starts, and looks like he’s figured out how to turn his quality stuff into consistent results.

Luis Severino is coming off that shutout last time out, throwing 98 mph right to the end with a force that indicates he still has plenty left in the tank.

David Peterson, the Mets’ most consistent starter, appears to be raising his game as well, coming off a dominant start against the Orioles that saw him go seven innings for the first time this season.

And newcomer Paul Blackburn has been solid to very good in three of his four starts since being acquired from the Oakland A’s at the trade deadline, his only clunker coming against his former teammates last week.

Quintana, meanwhile, is a major concern after four straight iffy-to-terrible starts, to the point where he’d probably be pulled from the rotation if the Mets had a better option than Tylor Megill in Triple-A.

Of course, technically they do have another option in Butto, but he’d need time to be stretched out again as a starter, and, more notably, he’s become far too important to the Mets’ bullpen to even think of taking him out of there at this point.

In fact, he’s pretty much made the full transition, shortening the time between appearances, and working one inning per appearance. As such, who had Butto as the eighth-inning setup guy for Edwin Diaz on their 2024 Mets bingo cards when the season began?

But there he was, throwing a gutsy 3-2 changeup to Orioles star Gunnar Henderson to get a pop out and escape that crucial eighth-inning situation, further stamping Butto as an indispensable piece of the big-picture puzzle right now.

And with Dedniel Nunez, another surprise, due back for the road trip, plus at least some help from their trade deadline acquisitions, this may be the best shape the Mets’ bullpen is in since Brooks Raley went down early in the season.

We’ll know a lot more after this road trip to San Diego and Arizona. But Wednesday was a reminder that sometimes these 2024 Mets seem to do their best work when the odds are against them.