Mets Suddenly Homer-Happy!

It is fitting that in the weekend before the home run derby, the Mets went homer-happy. And at Citi Field, no less, where home runs go to die, especially for the home team.

The Mets hit nine homers in the sweep of the Diamondbacks, topped off by Kirk Nieuwenhuis’s three on Sunday. Incredibly, the Mets scored all of their runs on homers in the series. That’s pretty amazing.

So what is going on? Well, you could argue that Nieuwenhuis’s performance was a fluke. And how often will Ruben Tejada and Matt Harvey, who both homered on Saturday, clear the wall? But hopefully the two home runs by Lucas Duda and the one each by Michael Cuddyer and Daniel Murphy are signs of things to come.

So what’s going on? Well, balls do fly better when the weather gets warmer, and it was pretty warm this weekend. Or maybe the hitters themselves are finally heating up. It’s about time the hitting caught up to the pitching.

The Mets weekend barrage moved them into eighth place in the league in homers with 75, right in the middle of the pack. Before that, they were down around the bottom. The Mets need to keep this up if they want to make a serious run at the post season.

They will not average three home runs per game for the rest of the season, but if they can continue to get timely shots, they have a decent chance to be playing into October.