Well, just a couple of days prior to the start of the season, I posted a piece here in which I tried to give an optimistic outlook on the coming season. At that point, many people (spurred on of course by the MSM) believed the Mets would be a garbage team incapable of nearing the .500 mark. I, and many of the respondents to my poll, believed otherwise. I felt that the Mets would boast one of the best lineups in the NL and there was no reason the Mets couldn't play .500 ball. As it turns out, so far I've been proven correct, albeit for the wrong reasons. As you can imagine, I'm thrilled that just 2 games prior to the midway point of the season, we've finally climbed over the .500 plateau. It's been a mighty strange trip though.

Just curious here, but I'm wondering if anybody really would've been nearly as optimistic as I was prior to the season if we had known many of the stuff that would go down up to this date in the season.

Imagine I had told you spring training time, that as of game 79......

1) David Wright had played pretty awful even when healthy and has now been been out for 1.5 months and we're looking at a while more

2) Ike Davis played great when healthy but has likewise missed the last 1.5 months and is likely out for the year

3) Angel Pagan flat out stunk the first few weeks and then got hurt for the next month. In his absence, Jason Pridie (!) was our everyday center fielder

4) Johan Santana still has not pitched

5) Chris Young is out for the year and Jenrry Mejia got Tommy John surgery

6) Justin Turner, Daniel Murphy and Ruben Tejada made up 3/4 of our everyday starting infield

7) Jason Bay missed the first few weeks with injury and that was actually a big improvement over how he's played since coming back

8) Josh Thole underperformed

9) The Brad Emaus experiment was a disaster and he was shipped out after a few weeks

10) Willie Harris and Scott Hairston are still our backup outfielders even though they spent much of the season doing their best impressions of Gary Matthews Jr.

11) The offense had multiple elongated stretches in which they seemed frightened by the idea of hitting a home run

12) The starting pitching was nothing to write home about and Mike Pelfrey and R.A. Dickey (I know this is utter blasphemy) in particular underperformed

13) The bullpen wasnt very good. Bobby Parnell majorly underperformed and KRod went a stretch where he gave up 11 runs in 9 innings (or was it even worse)

If I had mentioned all this, here's likely what the responses would've been:

a) TRAID TEH CORE

b) Are there any Bryce Harpers or Stephen Strasburgs comingout in next years draft?

c) Would Wilpon even be able to sign a Bryce Harper or Stephen Strasburg?

Instead, here we stand at a 40-39, a game over .500. We have the best player in baseball playing for us and continuously wowing us nightly. Carlos Beltran has been a revelation. LIFE IS GOOD.

YA GOTTA BELIEVE!!!!!!!!