The New York Mets have suddenly become one of the hottest teams in baseball, despite having recently traded players such as closer Francisco Rodriguez and center fielder Carlos Beltran. The Mets have won five in a row including a sweep over the Cincinnati Reds and are quickly closing the gap between them and the NL wild card leaders from the Atlanta Braves. They’ll welcome the Braves to New York next weekend and again for the final weekend in August.

With Beltran gone, Jose Reyes is now the only guy on the Mets with offensive numbers worth bragging about. He leads his team in batting average, hits, triples and stolen bases, and is not far off the pace set by others in on-base percentage, walks and doubles. Meanwhile, not a single Mets player now has a double-digit home run total, which makes them the only team in baseball who can claim that. Beltran accounted for almost 25 percent of the team’s home run total.

The Mets took down the last-place Washington Nationals on Friday night in the first of their weekend series. After that’s done, they’ll return home to host the Florida Marlins, another team below them in the standings. If there’s ever a time in their schedule when they need to rack up the wins, it’s right now. We’re approaching the two-thirds mark of the season, which means soon teams the good teams will get harder to catch in the standings.

The Mets have got better it seems with some addition by subtraction. After starting the season with a massive payroll and a problematic clubhouse, the Mets have got themselves a handful of games over .500 and look like they might be a potential threat to the Braves. They still have a lot of work to do and don’t have any more pieces they can move to get stronger, but that doesn’t mean they’re irrelevant, and a five-game winning streak helps prove that.