If the Cardinals blazed the trail with the homegrown pitching staff that lifted them to a National League pennant in 2013, the Mets paved it two years later with a celebrated, power-packed rotation of young arms that carried them to the World Series. The Mets saw that October as their arrival, the curtain-raiser on a long bask in the lights of the postseason. They had a rotation stocked with early-twentysomethings who all threw in the high nineties, and that group had a grip on the National League. Or not.
As the Cardinals open their 127th season in the National League on Thursday at Citi Field, they do so in Queens against the Mets for the first time since 1996.