NL East race is just getting started -- 'Buckle up'

It’s basically taken two weeks for the National League East to get as good as we thought it might be this season.

Oh, Buck Showalter’s Mets have been good from the jump, winning series after series in April and May, finally finding themselves 10 1/2 games ahead of the field on June 1. The Braves, defending champs of the whole world, were 24-27 after games of June 1, the Phillies were 22-29 and the Marlins were 20-28.

Nobody, certainly not the manager of the Mets, thought the Amazin's were going to run away with anything. After the Mets played their one and only series with the Braves so far, first week of May, splitting four games, the Braves were 12-15. But Showalter didn’t go by what the standings said, but what he’d just seen. And the Braves had just gotten Ronald Acuña, Jr. back.

“I don’t care what their record says,” Showalter said at the time. “The Braves are still the Braves.”

And now here they come, 13 wins in a row through Tuesday night, having cut the Mets’ lead over them in the East to five games, in what feels like a blink. The Phillies are right behind the Braves, and they looked as if they were about to push their record under new manager Rob Thomson to 10-1 Tuesday night before Corey Knebel coughed up a lead to the Marlins in the 9th.

So it was the Marlins who got a comeback win in the 9th this time. By the way: They’re four games under .500 in the East, in fourth place. But Don Mattingly’s team can really pitch, and it might not yet have played its best ball, though that might not do Miami much good against the teams in front of them.

In a season in which the Yankees have played crazy good baseball, it is the Braves who are suddenly playing even better than that. Just ask the Phillies. They’ve won nine of 11 under Thomson, jump-started their season and still lost two games in the standings against the Braves, even if they did make up plenty of ground on the Mets, who were going 5-5 on a just-ended trip to the West Coast.

We can all see how different the standings in the East look than they did on June 1. Can only imagine what they might look like by the time we get to the middle of July, by which point the Mets might actually have both Jacob deGrom and Max Scherzer back at the top of the rotation. As exciting as Atlanta has been lately, with no signs of slowing down, it has been pretty exciting for Mets fans to watch what their team has done without deGrom throwing a pitch yet, and with Scherzer shut down because of an oblique injury after just eight starts.

But mark down Showalter as being completely unsurprised by this June’s Braves turning into last October’s Braves.

“I mean, you’re all gonna seek your level in a baseball season,” Showalter said before the Mets beat the Brewers at Citi Field on Tuesday night. “Everybody knew they were too good to [not] get there.

So here come the champs. And here come the Phillies, playing the way they’ve played since Dave Dombrowski replaced Joe Girardi with Thomson, a baseball lifer who waited a long time for a chance like this, and richly deserves it, his team sitting right there behind the Braves, managed by another baseball lifer in Brian Snitker.

I asked Dombrowski over the weekend why he thought Thomson was the right man for this moment in Philadelphia.

Dombrowski: “Rob is a tremendous baseball man that is knowledgeable about all aspects of the game. He is a good communicator that gets along with the players, coaches, front office personnel and media. However, he can be tough if he needs to be. Also, he has the respect of all of those people. Along with those attributes, did not think he would be overwhelmed by our situation.”

And just like that, the situation was that the Phillies, who had been one of the major disappointments of the season in April and May now do have a season in June. Does it look as if they have enough to get past the Mets and Braves? It doesn’t, at least for now. But the Trade Deadline isn’t all that far away, and Dombrowski has shown in the past that he’s not afraid to take big swings if he thinks his team has a chance. For now the biggest swing is the managerial change he just made.

The Phillies didn’t get to 32-30, suffered their first tough bullpen loss under Thomson, went back to .500. The Braves? They are a force of nature at this point, having not lost a game since the last day of May, even though they now lose one of their stars, Ozzie Albies, for the next two months at least with a broken foot.

This isn’t the season we had a couple of months ago in the East. It’s the one that started a couple of weeks ago, in what is basically a new 100-game season in the NL East. One more piece of wisdom on the division from the manager of the Mets.

“Buckle up,” Buck said.