What a difference a week makes.

After Saturday’s loss to the Braves, the Mets had dropped five in a row, Dillon Gee had gotten pounded, the offense looked inept and there were seemingly questions everywhere with answers that ranged from “not helpful” to “did you really suggest that with a straight face” across the board. But winning cures everything and the Mets embarked on a five-game win streak that put a bounce in nearly everyone’s step.

No one will confuse this year’s offense with the Carter-Hernandez-Strawberry years (they scored eight more runs in the five-game winning streak than they did in the five consecutive losses that proceeded it) so it’s up to the pitching if the Mets are going to play competitive baseball here in 2013. And Mets pitchers have run off five straight Quality Starts.

There’s less resistance to QS now then there was five years ago, when if you brought up the stat, the first thing people did was scoff that a pitcher would get one if he allowed 3 ER in 6 IP. Still, the majority of people do not fully appreciate how good QS are in a group. Take the Mets and their recent winning streak. Sure, Jeremy Hefner had a bare-minimum QS in there but for the five games, the starters combined for 35.1 IP and a 2.04 ERA.

The Mets started the season winning five of their first seven games. In that stretch they received 6 QS and the starters combined for 39 IP and a 1.38 ERA in those six games.

In their two hot streaks, the Mets threw 11 QS in 12 games and went 10-2. Unfortunately, there have been 51 games played this year so far. In the other 39 games, the Mets have gone 12-27 for a .308 winning percentage.

The Mets tossed 15 QS in those middle 39 games, a 38.5 QS%. The NL average this season is above 50% so the Mets were clearly scuffling here. Additionally, New York went just 6-9 when it received a QS in this stretch and the starters posted a 4-5 record. Generally speaking, a starter should receive a decision in roughly 70% of his QS and should have a winning percentage in the neighborhood of 75%.

In 26 QS this year, the Mets are 16-10 and the starters have a 9-7 mark. So, they’ve received a decision in 62% of their QS and have a winning percentage of 56% — both numbers lower than we would expect. When you consider how the Mets bullpen was earlier in the year, along with how poor the offense has been the majority of the season, it’s not a surprise the team is underperforming here.

But the idea is to start stringing a bunch of QS together and sooner or later the numbers should stabilize. And Mets SP are doing just that. They have authored 12 QS in their last 18 games. And as the starters pitch better, we see the majority of the bullpen has done well, too. In those 18 games, Burke, Hawkins, Lyon, Parnell and Rice have posted a combined 3.06 ERA in 47 IP.

So now it’s time for the offense to start pulling its weight.

Several days ago I wrote a piece saying that the Mets’ identity was still unknown here nearly one-third of the way through the schedule. Perhaps that should be amended to say that if the 2013 Mets are to be a good team, it will have to be done primarily through pitching. It remains an open question if the pitching they currently possess is up to the task.

No one has doubts about Matt Harvey but is there another pitcher on the roster that you feel comfortable claiming what he will provide the rest of the year? A majority of those question marks need to be answered favorably if the Mets are going to climb back to .500 and leapfrog the Phillies and Nationals in the standings.

Of course not punting with half of the spots in the lineup would help, along with not removing a pitcher mid-inning who had thrown fewer than 90 pitches and had retired 15 in a row, just because he didn’t have the platoon advantage against 39-year-old Ichiro Suzuki, he of the .626 OPS.

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