If you were wondering after a week of sloppy, uninspired baseball what exactly is the difference between this year’s Mets team and those of the recent past, yesterday’s 6-1 win over the Braves should answer your questions. An ace pitcher and home run power cover an awful lot of flaws, enough so that a borderline Hall of Famer like John Smoltz can throw one of the best games of his career against this team and still lose.

That’s the difference between signing Pedro Martinez, who threw a complete-game two-hitter, and Kevin Appier; the difference between acquiring Carlos Beltran, whose two-run homer in the eighth put the Mets ahead, and Roger Cedeno; the difference between presenting David Wright, who made two great defensive plays and homered, and Ty Wigginton as your newest third baseman of the future.

I’m not a big believer in momentum in baseball, but the Mets needed yesterday’s win badly. Yet well into the game looked as if they would instead become the answer to a trivia question:

Against which team did John Smoltz set the major league record for strikeouts in a nine-inning game?

This is no particular discredit to the Mets; Smoltz is a great pitcher, and his fastball, slider, and splitter were ridiculous yesterday, the sort of pitches at which hitters have to swing because they’re strikes, and which they can’t hit because they’re too hard and move too much. In the seventh inning, Smoltz threw something I’d never seen from him before, a backdoor slider that broke away from Eric Valent and nicked the outside corner while moving at about 88 mph with something like a screwball movement. You usually don’t see pitches like that outside of video games.

What does discredit the Mets, and should worry their supporters, is the loose fundamental baseball they’re playing. This is a talented team, but not one that’s going to overwhelm anyone, and not one that can afford to kick away bases, outs, and runs. That’s just what they did yesterday.

The Cliff Floyd misplay that turned an Andruw Jones single into a triple can be overlooked; Floyd is a DH being played in the field, and the return of Mike Cameron will allow Beltran to cover more of the left-center gap, hiding some of Floyd’s limitations. But the third-inning play that saw Jose Reyes thrown out at third base with the Mets down by a run was just ridiculous.

A Miguel Cairo double into left-center was well-played by Brian Jordan, and his relay throw to Braves shortstop Rafael Furcal came in enough time that Reyes probably would have been out at the plate. The problem is that third-base coach Manny Acta waited until Reyes, hustling from first, had fully rounded the bag on his way home to throw up the stop sign. Reyes was either going to be out at home or at third by that point, and with Smoltz throwing bullets one can’t understand why Acta wouldn’t at least take the chance that an off-line throw or a hard block by Reyes might plate a run.

What’s more important than what went wrong yesterday, though, is what went right, and that starts with Martinez, who was magnificent. The Mets won because on Smoltz’s best day, Pedro was quite a lot better.

As nasty as Smoltz’s pitches were, Martinez’s were nastier. His change-up was practically stopping at the plate to laugh at the hitters before watching them swing over it. His slower breaking ball was unhittable as well; Jones’s triple and Johnny Estrada’s RBI double, the only two hits the Braves made, were two of exactly three balls the team hit solidly. Rather than go for strikeouts and run himself out of the game, Martinez laid in breaking pitches, watched them go for pop flies and grounders, and paced himself to complete a game no one wanted to see turned over to the bullpen.

And while Beltran’s eighth-inning homer off Smoltz might be held up as evidence that the Mets’ new franchise player can come through in the clutch, I was actually more impressed with the Mets’ real franchise player, Wright, who made two sterling defensive plays and capped the five-run eighth inning with a tremendous home run to dead center field.

Not only does Wright have incredible talent – the home run was only his second-most impressive hit of the young season, bettered by a ball he hit off the outfield wall on Opening Day on a pitch that jammed him on the fists – but yesterday he displayed rare maturity. After being made to look like a fool by Smoltz for most of the game, Wright didn’t give in, as many young hitters are prone to do, but smoked his pitch when he got it.

It’s no surprise, of course, that Martinez, Beltran, and Wright would be in the middle of the Mets’ first win of 2005, nor that the game would also show signs of what could be the Mets’ devastating flaws. I think it’s fair to say, though, that yesterday’s game was a lot more like what Mets fans should expect for the rest of the season than what they saw for the first week. A few more games like this, and no one will even remember that week for anything more than what it was: a few bad games played by a good team.