Mets prepared for a wild ride in a 60-game season

The Mets spent the second half of their second preseason camp focusing on one of rookie manager Luis Rojas’ favorite themes: preparedness. He wanted his players to experience a bit of everything they might encounter once the season began.

That meant playing scrimmage and exhibition games during the day, in the evening and at night to get reacclimated with each version of the workday and sleep schedule. Starting pitchers stretched out to their just-about-normal early-season length, and position players built slowly toward playing nine innings in the field. Relievers pitched back-to-back days and multiple innings (but never both). The Mets even practiced one of the quirkier parts of the 2020 rendition of baseball, relievers beginning an inning with a runner on second base, a new rule for extra innings.

“All those things that we’re going to see in-season,” Rojas said, “we’re working on doing it in this stretch.”

Left unsaid by the manager, but universally understood, is that for the Mets or any other club, preparing to play baseball during a global pandemic has a practical limit. The idea that you can’t predict baseball — cliché because it’s true — somehow is significantly truer in a year when nobody is sure that the season will be played to completion in the first place.

This season is going to be strange, and it is hard to tell which aspect of it is going to be the strangest. Players, coaches and other personnel spitting into a plastic tube every other day to make sure they have not contracted the coronavirus? Sixty games representing the entire schedule? Traveling, sometimes to COVID-19 hotspots, during an actual pandemic and skirting local laws in the process?

Maybe it will be something else entirely.

“I keep on thinking I’ve seen it all,” new starting pitcher Michael Wacha said. “But it seems like every single day, it’s going to be something that we haven’t seen.”

Dominic Smith added: “There’s things that we don’t even know are going to happen over the next couple [months] that will happen . . . Whatever it is, we’re going to have fun with it, keep an open mind to it and just try to do our jobs.”

It likewise is impossible to know how pandemic-related changes will affect the Mets — who view themselves as a playoff contender — on the field. The best-laid plans, right? In a 162-game season, players and teams mostly regress or progress toward their true talent level. In a 60-game season, there is a greater likelihood of wacky things happening.

Take the lineup as an example. Opening Day will mark two years and four days since Yoenis Cespedes most recently played in a major-league game. Maybe the short season, plus the extra time to get healthy, will benefit him.

If Cespedes is any semblance of his old self — say, the self that had a .287/.337/.604 slash line and hit 17 homers in 57 games with the Mets in 2015 — he could be a season-tilting sparkplug. That is especially true because the Mets, who have several round offensive pegs wedged into square defensive holes, will get to use a designated hitter this year.

Then look at the rotation. Jacob deGrom, winner of consecutive National League Cy Young Awards, should be a safe bet to dominate. But what if he starts this season the way he started last season, when he had a 4.85 ERA at the end of April? What normally would be a rough start would become a rough half-season.

Steven Matz, maddeningly inconsistent, has had stretches of No. 2 starter-caliber pitching. But the Mets don’t know if they will get two months of the 2019 first-half Matz (4.89 ERA) or second-half Matz (3.52 ERA) or something in between.

Wacha has averaged about 23 starts per year the past four years. The Mets need him for only about 12. If the short season means he misses his annual injury or slump, he should be a solid back-of-the-rotation addition. If he can’t avoid his annual injury or slump, well, the Mets will have to dip into their shallow rotation depth.

“A good start is absolutely imperative,” Rick Porcello said. “It’s kind of interesting because in a 60-game season, you’re not pacing yourself like you would in 162, where you know it’s a marathon. This really is a sprint.”

However it unfolds, it will do so in empty ballparks.

“You’re going to see a lot more intensity early on in the season,” Jake Marisnick said. “Every game matters. Every game is going to have playoff atmosphere — in our minds. Obviously, it’s going to be a little different without fans in the stands.”

Maybe, eventually, the weird stuff will feel less so.

“If it felt normal,” Jed Lowrie said, “I think that would be strange.”