Over the Edge

Say this about Carlos Beltran. In his first four years in New York, he's had three really good seasons with the Mets.

One of those three seasons, 2006, was truly phenomenal. Beltran popped off for 41 home runs, 116 RBI, a .982 OPS, and collected the first of three straight gold gloves.

Lost amid all the Edge-gate drama of the past several days is the fact that the Mets have a lot of talent on this ball club, and as such, they still have the capacity to do something meaningful this season. Check out the standings. At 11-13, the Mets are only 3 games out of first place.

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I agree to an extent with Omar Minaya that players on this team don't have an edge, but hold on... he's only realizing that now? What part of Jose Reyes', David Wright's, Carlos Beltran's, or Carlos Delgado's (assuming he's referring to one of those four guys) game did he only come to understand in the first 20 games of this season? Seriously, where the hell has Minaya been the past three years?

This group has a lot of talent, and I'm not one of the people who think they don't care, but they do seem to lack a certain run through a wall mentality. Nobody's a better example of that than Beltran, whose incomprehensible non-slide in St. Louis set the Mets on their way to a 3-game (or was it 4-?) losing streak.

The good news, I think, is that this has become a full-on conversation topic. As critical as you can be of Minaya for sticking with this same core group year after year, at least he's made the issue headline material.

Did you watch the post-game show last night? In between "you knows" (somebody get the YouTube, I swear to god he said "you know" in between every three words), John Maine alluded to a "different attitude" in the clubhouse. Reporters questioned him on the topic directly. I'm sure he wasn't the only one to get asked.

This is a good thing. Maybe the Mets will use it as bulletin board material. It wasn't enough for the rest of the league to call them choke artists, but if their own management doing so is enough to send them over the edge and shake off their post-2006 coma, I'm all for it.

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But back to Beltran. Edge or no edge, the guy can play, and through 24 games in 2009, he's making it look a lot like 2006 out there.

Daniel Murphy, for all his struggles in the field, appears to be the real deal at the plate.

A big part of what the Mets are missing right now is solid production from Wright and Reyes. If we're going to fulfill our potential we need those two guys to snap out of it. I mean, they hardly contributed at all in April, so how well can you really expect the team to fare?

The good news is we saw flashes from Wright last night, who went 2-4 with a double and key two-run homer.

The dinger is never going to enter into the "is Wright clutch" debate, but why shouldn't it? The Mets were down a run against a pitcher who had been tough all game, and Wright's blast put them ahead. It wasn't a white knuckle, bases loaded, two-out, bottom of the 9th kind of situation, but it was a clutch hit all the same.

The point is, the offense showed flashes last night. If they can keep it up, maybe -- as they did in 2006 when Beltran was rolling and the sky seemed like the limit -- they can make the pitching woes seem a little less pertinent.

- A.F.O.M.G.