Evan wonders if red-hot Mets will be able to handle pressure

As the Mets continue to roll, winners of six in a row and 10 of their last 12, Evan says he still has one lingering concern about the makeup of this team, even as they’ve responded to being 11 games under .500 with a torrid surge back into the Wild Card race.

The concern stems from the message at the players-only meeting that seems to have helped turn the season around.

“J.D. Martinez, who has been amazing…carried them over the course of the last five days,” Evan said. “Props to J.D. Martinez, we needed to add him…he came out of the meeting and said ‘We kind of told ourselves there’s no pressure.’

“‘Let’s go out and have fun. If we win, we win. If we lose, we lose.’”

The message seemed to be to take the pressure off of everybody in the clubhouse, and just play loose, free baseball. It seems to have been a successful sentiment so far, but Evan worries that the pressure will be inescapable if the Mets are in a playoff race late in the summer, and wonders how this team will handle that.

“I got some bad news,” Evan said. “I don’t know if it’s Friday in Chicago or Tuesday at Citi Field, but the pressure is coming. With the Mets being in a playoff race…all of a sudden, the ‘everyone has written us off’ card is gone.

“Is this the kind of team that reacts well to pressure? Because they lost to Atlanta a year and a half ago, lost to San Diego in the playoffs…and they played like horse bleep until ‘the pressure was off.’”