J.D. Martinez, Mets offense stay hot, win opener vs. Cubs

CHICAGO — Over the first two months of this season, the Mets featured an average offense. Ordinary. Pedestrian.

They certainly were not bad, as coaches and team officials tended to point out. But they were not the type of good one might expect from a lineup featuring Francisco Lindor, Pete Alonso, Brandon Nimmo and J.D. Martinez up top. From Opening Day through May 30, the Mets ranked 20th in runs per game, 22nd in OPS and 14th in wRC+, a metric designed to measure overall offensive output.

What exactly happened to change things isn’t entirely clear. The players-only meeting the Mets held during the final week of May might have played a role. Hotter temperatures, especially at home at Citi Field, couldn’t have hurt. But the reality is that no one thing transformed the Mets from average to elite.

The Mets don’t much care how they arrived at this point, only that they did. After hammering National League Rookie of the Year frontrunner Shota Imanaga for a career-high 10 earned runs in an 11-1 throttling of the Cubs on Friday afternoon at Wrigley Field, New York improved to 12-3 over its last 15 games. The team features MLB’s best record over that stretch, in large part because its offense has also been the best.

Once again dating to May 31, the Mets rank first in MLB by a wide margin with 6.6 runs per game, while also leading the league in OPS and wRC+.

They padded those totals Friday against a pitcher who had established himself as one of the league’s feel-good stories in the first-half — a 30-year-old Japanese rookie with a lightweight fastball and an outsized personality. The Mets jumped all over the former on a hot summer day at Wrigley, most notably on homers from Martinez, Nimmo and Francisco Alvarez.