How Mets' mentality is keeping them atop NL East

There are other records in baseball better than the one the Mets have, one of them across town with the Yankees and another in Houston and another in Los Angeles, where the All-Star Game will be played on Tuesday night. But by now we know something about the Mets, who have a chance to get to 25 games over .500 on Sunday against the Cubs. We know who they are because they keep showing us exactly who they are.

“Here’s all you have to know about our team, to borrow an expression from horse racing,” Buck Showalter said on Sunday morning. “I’ve never had to go to the crop with them one time.”

This was after the Mets had swept a doubleheader from the Cubs at Wrigley Field on Saturday, their third sweep this season in the six doubleheaders they’ve played. They went to extra innings twice against a Cubs team that isn’t very good right now. But on a day when the Mets pitched really well and didn’t hit much at all, they were in the same place they have been all season:

On the grind again.

The Mets won Game 1 because Pete Alonso knocked in another run -- his 76th of the season -- with a sac fly in the top of the 11th after Showalter had squeezed two innings out of Adam Ottavino. In the process the Mets all got saved when J.D. Davis, almost exclusively a third baseman, made a pretty spectacular stretch-and-scoop in the bottom of the 10th, with the Cubs about to send the winning run home. Finally Edwin Díaz closed things out, even if it meant he was unavailable for Game 2.

“The kind of game that good teams don’t lose,” Showalter said from his office between games. “But now the bullpen is down.”

Then Showalter’s team went out and won another one-run game, in 10 innings this time, even if it did take a lot of help from the Cubs. Alonso got his 77th RBI -- the most any Met has ever had before the All-Star break -- when he got hit by a pitch, before the Mets got another gift run when Cubs reliever Daniel Norris threw a pickup throw in the general direction of the ivy.

Even then, Showalter had to get a second inning out of Yoan López, who had been called up from Triple-A Syracuse for the game. And he did. Barely. The Cubs got the game to 4-3 in the bottom of the 10th, and then they loaded the bases before López managed to get a ground ball that Eduardo Escobar fielded at third base and turned into a crackling 5-3 double play.

The Mets had won their fourth straight, and five out of six going back to the start of their three-game series against the Braves that Max Scherzer started in such a dazzling way, just because Scherzer has been even more dazzling since returning from the oblique injury that put him on the IL for a long stretch in May (Scherzer struck out 11 in Game 2, in 6 1/3 innings). While he was away, it meant that the Mets were without him and without Jacob deGrom, who were supposed to give them the best 1-2 punch of any rotation in baseball this season.

But even when the Braves began to make a big run on them to pick up a ton of ground, the Mets remained in first place. Their mantra, from the start, has been “All 26.” On Saturday, it became “All 27” when they were allowed to add López for the doubleheader against the Cubs. And they kept grinding.

Now the Mets are about to get deGrom back, all 100 mph of him, and put him back at the top of the rotation with Scherzer, where he was always supposed to be. At some point Trevor May, who was supposed to be the primary setup man for the brilliant Díaz, is coming back. So is catcher James McCann, who has only played 30 games so far this season.

The Mets are going to need all 26 in the second half of the season, because they’ve got 12 games left with the Braves as part of what is going to be the best divisional race in baseball between now and the finish line. They’ve got four Subway Series games with the Yankees.

The other day Showalter’s message to his team was a video featuring Kara Lawson, the Duke women’s basketball coach.

In it, Lawson says this at one point:

“Make yourself a person that handles hard well. Not someone who’s waiting for the easy. Because if you have a meaningful pursuit in life, it will never be easy.”

The Mets, tough out, won two more tough games on Saturday and stayed 2 1/2 games ahead of the Braves. The Braves aren’t going away. But neither are Showalter’s Mets. They’ve been really good so far and are about to get better when they get deGrom back. They don’t wait for the easy.