QUEENS — Whether or not the hole the Mets have dug themselves with a miserable first half is too deep to climb out of and into a Wild Card spot remains to be seen, but Justin Verlander is going to do everything he can to do just that as long as he’s wearing blue and orange.
“You dig yourself a hole, you have to dig yourself out, claw your way out,” the future Hall-of-Famer, in his first year with the Mets, said. “We haven’t quite done that yet.”
But the 40-year-old right-hander continued one of his team’s most successful spells this season on Wednesday night, spinning an eight-inning, one-run, three-hit gem with seven strikeouts against the Chicago White Sox in a 5-1 victory.
It was Verlander’s best start as a Met after a rocky first half that featured a month-long absence that delayed his debut — and it helped deliver a ninth New York win in its last 13 games. With it has come minute ground gained in the standings.
They’ve picked up two games on the Atlanta Braves, who still sat an insurmountable 16.5 games ahead of the Mets atop the National League East. They drew level with the Chicago Cubs in the Wild Card standings and sat seven games back of the third and final playoff berth with 67 games left to play — a deficit that isn’t so insurmountable.
“We’ve been fighting and climbing and doing everything we can,” Verlander said. “We see the leaderboard, we understand where we’re at, and we need to go on a run. Hopefully, this is the beginning of something special and we can go on a stretch and start playing the baseball that we know we can play.
“We haven’t done it yet. I think you’ve seen flashes of it at times, but we just haven’t really put it together.”
If the Mets have one more swoon in them before the Aug. 1 trade deadline, however, things could change. A series victory against the White Sox has softened the expectation of a complete sell, but series losses to the Boston Red Sox and New York Yankees in the next week could ramp that notion right back up.
Verlander’s name, along with fellow veteran ace Max Scherzer, has been thrown into the trade-rumor mill considering he’s due $43 million this year and next season.
“Everybody knows when the trade deadline is. Nobody has given any indication of what exactly we’re going to do,” Verlander said. “I think we just stay together here in the clubhouse and keep doing what we’ve been doing, which is come in here with optimism every day, doing what we can do individually to win a ballgame, do what we can do as a group to win a ballgame, and see how far that takes us.”
For more on the Mets and Justin Verlander, visit AMNY.com
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