The young pitcher Noah Syndergaard has become the photogenic face of a team on a mission to finish the job they started in 2015. Photograph by Jeff Roberson / AP

“I can’t imagine what it’s going to be like this year,” the pitcher Noah Syndergaard told me recently. “I think we’re going to go back to the World Series and win it all.” The twenty-three-year-old had just arrived at the New York Mets spring-training camp, in Port St. Lucie, Florida. Last year, he was called up to the majors for the first time, became nationally known by a superhero-inspired nickname (“Thor”), and won a World Series game. Now he’s the photogenic face of a team on a mission to finish the job they started in 2015. The Mets have one of the more dangerous hitters in baseball, Yoenis Céspedes, who can win games single-handedly and do it with panache. But going into the season, the main engine of the team has four parts: Syndergaard and the three other young power pitchers in the starting rotation. “We’re all pretty competitive with one another, we’re all close friends, which makes it even better,” Syndergaard told me. “That gives us a camaraderie, a little brotherhood. We all push each other and try to learn from each other.”

So what does Syndergaard learn, studying the others?

Jacob deGrom: “Every pitch he throws is with the most conviction you can imagine. Another thing I notice is the amount of confidence. He does have a pretty serious intimidation factor when he’s on the mound. He’s just locked in.”

Steven Matz: “The amount of electric stuff he has. The ball explodes out of his hands, and the next thing you know it’s in the mitt. It’s like a whip, his pitching motion.”

Matt Harvey: “He’s a bulldog out there. Every time he steps between the lines, he has that attitude he’s going to give us nine strong innings.”

Given their youth—twenty-seven (deGrom), twenty-six (Harvey), twenty-four (Matz), and twenty-three (Syndergaard)—the Mets’ Big Four might have trouble maintaining perspective. That, evidently, is where Bartolo Colón comes in. Colón, he of the bowling-ball physique, won a Cy Young Award as a power pitcher; now, at forty-two, he moves his not-fast fastball all over the zone at will. “You can sum him up in one word: fun,” Syndergaard said. “People forget that it’s a game. If you just keep that mindset, it makes it that much easier.”

Syndergaard already seems to be having a fair amount of fun. The day before his World Series start, with his team down two-games-to-none against the Royals, Syndergaard promised that he had a “few tricks up my sleeve” for Kansas City’s leadoff hitter, Alcides Escobar. The boast burned up social media. Then Syndergaard’s first pitch was a ninety-eight-mile-an-hour fastball that sailed over Escobar’s head and flew to the screen. Escobar was stunned. The entire Royals bench was stunned. The sellout crowd was stunned.

It was, of course, a message pitch, Syndergaard’s solution to the problem of how to approach a hitter who had been sitting on first-pitch fastballs. It was also great theatre and announced the presence of an athlete with a knack for commanding the spotlight in the biggest games of the year. Syndergaard subsequently gave up more hits than he would have liked, leaving fastballs out over the plate, but he still managed to pitch the Mets to their only win in the series. Afterward, he spoke with unusual candor about what he was up to on the mound. “If they have a problem with me throwing inside,” Syndergaard said, “then they can meet me sixty feet, six inches away. I’ve got no problem with that.”

For Mets fans, beaten down by years of watching the Yankees dominate New York City and often dominate postseason baseball, it was delicious: the Mets were not just loaded with young talent, coming of age before our eyes, they also had a sense of purpose and a flair for the dramatic. I asked the team’s general manager, Sandy Alderson, whom I wrote a book about, if he was concerned that Syndergaard might be overconfident. His answer: not really. “Is he confident going into this season?” Alderson said. “I hope so, and he should be, based on what he accomplished in 2015 and what he learned about himself along the way.”

Even the Mets manager, Terry Collins, who has learned from experience and from the example of Alderson to be careful in his remarks to reporters, showed up at spring training talking about how he wanted his team to show some “swagger.” “We can’t be egomaniacs about it,” Collins said, “but you’ve got to walk out there with that confidence that we’re going to win.” Having Céspedes helps. “He’s a great clubhouse guy,” Syndergaard said of the power-hitting outfielder. “He’s one of my favorite guys I’ve ever met. He has that confidence and that swagger to him. You watch him play baseball and it’s amazing. He’s got an incredible golf game, too. In Colorado, I heard he’d driven a ball like four hundred yards.”

I asked Alderson what, in his mind, distinguished confidence from cockiness. “I expect they are along a continuum that ultimately ends in hubris,” he said. Alderson is a Harvard Law grad and a decorated Marine officer; he saw combat in Vietnam and is currently undergoing chemotherapy treatments for cancer. (He was diagnosed shortly after the Mets clinched the division title, last September.) “To me,” he added, “there is a difference between the assumption of a potential outcome and a confidence about it borne out of knowing what it will take for a successful outcome and committing oneself to that pursuit.”

It helps to have people around who can keep you grounded. Last October, I ran into Syndergaard in the lobby of the hotel where the Mets were staying during their play-off series against the Dodgers. Syndergaard introduced me to his parents, who had him flanked, walking through the lobby, one on each shoulder. Syndergaard’s agent, Ryan Hamill, was blunt on the phone this week in admitting that he worried a little that going from Triple-A to World Series hero, all in a few months, might lead the young pitcher to get a swelled head. “I was always internally worried about it,” Hamill told me. “But Noah, he comes from a good family. He’s as down to Earth as you can possibly be for a twenty-three-year old coming off a World Series. That was my concern: Is this guy going to sit back on his laurels? Is he going to sit back on ‘I’m Thor!’ and not work this offseason? It was the complete opposite. He went into this offseason with more drive, more determination. He feels there’s unfinished business.” He’s not alone.