The Mets are off to a great start. They have increased their playoff odds more than other club since Opening Day. The Mets always had significant potential, and downside — considerable error bars in either direction — given both the club’s talent and injury concerns.

Now a couple turns through the rotation, the Mets’ starters have generally pitched well and remain healthy. Michael Conforto, meanwhile, has made a remarkable return from his shoulder injury. The Mets are being rewarded early for electing to bolster this talented, but highly volatile, core with the signings of Jay Bruce, Todd Frazier, and Anthony Swarzak.

But the Mets could also be better.

This week, the club sent down their second-best hitter (217 wRC+) and position player to date (0.3) in Brandon Nimmo, ostensibly because there was no place to put him following the return of Conforto. The Mets have Yoenis Cespedes in left, Bruce in right, and a resurgent Adrian Gonzalez at first base. The Mets also have a quality reserve outfield option in Juan Lagares. Nimmo is blocked. But let’s hope he’s not sequestered in Las Vegas for too long. The Mets have sidelined one of the more intriguing players in the game.

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Below is an analysis of the prospects in the farm system of the New York Mets. Scouting reports are compiled with information provided by industry sources as well as from our own (both Eric Longenhagen’s and Kiley McDaniel’s) observations. For more information on the 20-80 scouting scale by which all of our prospect content is governed you can click here. For further explanation of the merits and drawbacks of Future Value, read this.

Peterson had a great junior year at Oregon in 2017, showing four good pitches and throwing more strikes than is typical for a pitcher his size. He sits 90-92 with heavy sink, will touch 95, and his fastball plays up because of good extension. He made heavy use of a slider that garners mixed reviews depending on if you’re talking to a scout (who consider it a 50/55) or someone looking at a Trackman readout (40/45), but it missed Pac-12 bats and should be fine even if it doesn’t spin a whole lot.

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A celebrity chef and restauranteur, a philanthropist, an icon in two cities, an All-Star in three, and the only player to collect at least 500 hits with four different franchises — Rusty Staub was all that and more. “Le Grand Orange,” who played in the major leagues from 1963 through 1985 and collected 2,716 hits including 292 homers, passed away on Thursday, hours before the start of the 2018 season and three days shy of his 74th birthday. If he wasn’t quite a Hall of Famer as a player, he most certainly was as a humanitarian, raising more than $100 million to combat hunger and to benefit the widows and families of police, firemen, and first responders killed in the line of duty.

“He was a George Plimpton character who didn’t have to be invented,” wrote Faith and Fear in Flushing’s Greg Prince.

A native of New Orleans, Daniel Joseph Staub — the son of a minor-league catcher — gained his first nickname from a nurse at the hospital he was born, for the red fuzz covering his head. Playing alongside older brother Chuck, he helped Jesuit High School to the 1960 American Legion national championship and the 1961 Louisiana State AAA championship. Major-league scouts from 16 teams beat a path to his door, and Staub wound up signing for a bonus of either $90,000 or $100,000 (sources differ) with the expansion Houston Colt .45s in 1961. He put in a big season for the Class-B Durham Bulls in 1962, leading the league with 149 hits and the next year, just eight days past his 19th birthday, was the Colts’ Opening Day right fielder. He went 1-for-3 that day, collecting an RBI single off the Giants’ Jack Sanford for his first hit, but batted a dismal .224/.309/.308 with six homers in 150 games for the 96-loss team, which was in its second year of existence.

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Two people walked into a bar. They settled every debate in the universe. Then they discussed baseball.

“Who is Mr. October?”

“Reggie Jackson. What my elders taught me anyhow. Read it was sarcastic at first, then Reggie grew into the role.”

“Mr. November?”

“Ain’t Jeets that’s for sure? Can’t take a crown because you were first in line when a calendar flips.”

A swig.

“Randy Johnson won Games Six and Seven of the World flippin’ Series. That boy never needed to grow, of course. Just found the right circumstance. We should all be so lucky and talented.”

“Sounds good to me.”

Peace in our time.

“What about Mr. March?”

Oh no.

“All the databases have ‘Mar/Apr’ in their splits. There have been 70 regular-season games played in March. What are we saying here? Beginnings don’t matter? Without a beginning there is no end. An ouroboros. With no March there is no October. There is no November. There’s no Christmas. I like Christmas.”

“Chanukkah is also…”

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In their final team-preview podcast of 2018, Ben Lindbergh and Jeff Sullivan banter about a new podcast-inspired song, the Scott Kingery, Ketel Marte, and Christian Vazquez extensions, Ben’s partially listener-inspired research about catcher offense, a Devil Rays close call, and whether the ball is juiced in MLB The Show, then preview the 2018 Mets (28:47) with MLB.com’s Anthony DiComo, and the 2018 Rays (1:08:35) with CBS Sports’ R.J. Anderson.

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As Opening Day approaches, many team’s rosters have rounded into place. However, there is some slight tinkering to be done. With this in mind, let’s consider the careers of two players, blindly — one of whom is a mainstay for his team and the other who used to be.

Both players converted from shortstop to center field. They’re almost the same age. Player A was once a top-25 prospect, however, while Player B was a relatively unheralded signing out of the Dominican. Now, Player A is his team’s unquestioned starting center fielder, while Player B is on the trading block.

Player A is Billy Hamilton, noted speedster, while Player B is Juan Lagares. Recent reports suggest that the Mets have received interest in Lagares and that the club is motivated to move him.

Now, this could be the case for a variety of reasons. Lagares hasn’t hit particularly well this spring, going just 7 for 36 so far with 13 strikeouts. While spring stats only correlate so well to regular season, Lagares hasn’t made an overwhelming case for an expanded role. Lagares also makes $6.5 million this year and $9 million next year, and the Mets have supposedly been interested in shedding some payroll. Finally, there’s the fact that Lagares — one of the best defensive center fielders in baseball — is buried on the Mets’ outfield depth chart by a bevy of corner outfielders masquerading as center fielders. The fact that he is available should pique the interest of many teams, just as much if Billy Hamilton was available.

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It took Ed Charles a long time to get his chance, but he persisted, and made the most of it. Born into segregation and poverty in Daytona Beach, Florida, in 1933, he was inspired by seeing Jackie Robinson in spring training with the Montreal Royals in 1946, a moment dramatized (with some artistic license) in the 2013 movie 42. Signed by the Boston Braves in 1952, Charles didn’t make the major leagues until a decade later with the Kansas City A’s. He played eight years in the bigs, the last three of them with the Mets, earning the nickname “The Glider” for his fluid, economical defense and providing a steadying veteran presence for an upstart team that won the World Series.

Before Roger Angell and Vin Scully, Charles was also hailed as “The Poet Laureate of Baseball,” having begun crafting verse while toiling in the minors. When he passed away on Thursday at the age of 84, his New York Times obituary called him “the heart and soul of the Miracle Mets of 1969.” That’s a life well lived.

One of nine children in a broken home, Charles could not afford a ticket to see the Dodgers and Royals (their top minor-league affiliate) play at Daytona’s City Island Park, but he watched through a chain-link fence in left field as baseball’s color line begin to crumble. Via Chris Lamb’s Blackout: The Untold Story of Jackie Robinson’s First Spring Training:

We watched him play that day and finally believed what we had read in the papers, that one of us was out there on the ball field. When [spring training] was over, we kids followed Jackie as he walked with his teammates down to the train station, and when the train pulled out, we ran down the tracks listening for the sounds as far as we could. And when we finally couldn’t hear it any longer, we ran some more and finally stopped and put our ears to the tracks so we could feel the vibrations of that train carrying Jackie Robinson. We wanted to be a part of him as long as we could.

In the movie, the young Charles is depicted receiving an autographed ball from Robinson at the train station, but as Bruce Markusen wrote for The Hardball Times in 2013, that particular moment never happened. Nevertheless, Charles, who dropped out of school after eighth grade and finally returned after going to live with his older sister in St. Petersburg, became the captain of the Gibbs High School baseball team and signed a professional contract in 1952. Though they weren’t as innovative or aggressive as the Dodgers, the Braves (along with the Giants) were well ahead of the curve in integrating the majors. Rickey signed such a surplus of black talent that he dealt outfielder Sam Jethroe to Boston in 1949, and the following year, “Jet” won NL Rookie of the Year, the third of six black NL players to win the award in its first seven years.

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Sandy Alderson is a shrewd fellow. He went to, and graduated from, Dartmouth College before attending, and graduating from, Harvard Law School. He invented “Moneyball,” only for his former Oakland A’s deputy Billy Beane to reap all of the glory, envy, and disdain. His tenure as New York Mets general manager has not changed the perception that he is a smarty. When everybody and their deceased relatives knew he was looking to unload Addison Reed last summer, Alderson added another reliever (AJ Ramos) via trade, improving the market for Reed and picking up a division rival’s closer under team control for 2018 in the process.

Seeing Justin Turner and Daniel Murphy in Dodger and National jerseys, respectively, is a reminder he isn’t perfect. Seeing Noah Syndergaard tossing 101 mph fastballs with seemingly no effort is a reminder, however, that Sandy didn’t lose his own fastball in his twilight years. Throw in the caveat that he’s working with a weirdly limited — and allegedly nebulous — budget for a team based in New York and that ownership sometimes rejects trades he makes, and you got yourself an appreciation stew.

So, in that context, let’s now also remember that Sandy Alderson has said he thinks that Tim Tebow will make the major leagues.

I think he will play in the Major Leagues. That’s my guess. That’s my hope. And to some extent now after a year and a half, a modest expectation.

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For more than a decade — longer than Sandy Alderson has been general manager – the Mets’ handling of injuries has led to raised eyebrows, shaken heads, and an endless series of punchlines. Think back to the handling of Ryan Church‘s 2008 concussion, the battles over Carlos Beltran‘s 2010 knee surgery, the “angry bullpen session” that effectively ended Johan Santana’s career in 2013, and last year’s Noah Syndergaard mess, in which the pitcher suffered a season-wrecking strained latissimus dorsi days after refusing to climb into an MRI tube. Any Mets fan can offer you a multitude of additional instances, including a number of stretches where the team played shorthanded while trying to avoid placing a player on the disabled list.

All of that was supposed to change after last season, when the Mets dismissed trainer Ray Ramirez and set about hiring a high-performance director “to oversee players’ health and institute policies throughout the minor league levels.” On January 23, the team announced the hiring of Jim Cavallini with the title of director of performance and sports science; earlier, they promoted assistant trainer Brian Chicklo to replace Ramirez.

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Matt Harvey’s first appearance of the spring quickly became a punchline. Back on February 8, the New York Daily News‘ Peter Botte tweeted a photo of the 28-year-old righty throwing a bullpen alongside Jacob deGrom and looking particularly paunchy thanks to the way the wind blew his t-shirt. Even this scribe couldn’t resist throwing a jab to the midsection. To be fair, Harvey hardly looks like the second coming of Bartolo Colon, and four weeks later, with the Grapefruit League season underway, he at least appears to be a hurler who can help the Mets rather than harm them.

Granted, that sense is based upon all of two early spring outings against sub-.500 teams whose offenses project to rank among the majors’ bottom-third (namely the Braves and Tigers) when at full strength. Thus far, those offenses have been patchworks of established major leaguers and career minor leaguers, with the odd prospect thrown in — all still looking to regain their timing because, you know, it’s March (or actually February 28 in the case of the Braves outing).

Facing the Tigers on Monday at Port St. Lucie, Harvey threw 48 pitches over three scoreless innings, allowing two hits, a sharp double by Derek Norris, and an infield dribbler by Jose Iglesias. He walked Miguel Cabrera in the first inning after getting squeezed on a borderline 96 mph fastball with the count at 1-2. That was his fastest pitch of the day, but he followed it with three straight balls. He struck out one, 28-year-old right fielder Jason Krizan, who’s spent the past three years bouncing between Double- and Triple-A.

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