NEW YORK -- When baseball's award winners are revealed in November, the New York Mets officially should become the first team in major league history to face a league's top-three Cy Young vote-getters in the same postseason.
But they continue to demonstrate they have aces, too.
More important, the lesson of this postseason is that the Mets boast the type of starting pitching depth their adversaries don't enjoy. And that very well may be the deciding factor in the Mets winning the pennant.
A day after Matt Harvey had a dominant outing, Noah Syndergaard followed up with a similarly impressive showing as the Mets beat the Chicago Cubs, 4-1, on Sunday night at Citi Field.
The Mets took a 2-0 series lead as the National League Championship Series now shifts to Wrigley Field. Home teams winning the first two games of a best-of-seven series have won that series 78.7 percent of the time (37-10), according to the Elias Sports Bureau.
Aided by right fielder Curtis Granderson reaching over the wall to take away a would-be second-inning homer from Chris Coghlan, Syndergaard took a scoreless effort into the sixth inning. He ultimately gave up one run, three hits and a walk, striking out nine in 5 2/3 innings. Meanwhile, the Mets posted three first-inning runs against ace Jake Arrieta.
"I felt pretty good out there," Syndergaard said. "I wish I could have gotten ahead of hitters a little bit better, but it makes pitching a lot more easy when you go out there and the offense puts a three-spot on one of the best pitchers in the game."
Now is when the Mets' pitching depth really comes into play.
In the division series, the Mets held their own against Clayton Kershaw and Zack Greinke, then beat up on Brett Anderson in a 13-7 win in Game 3.
This round, the Mets now have swept a pair of games against Cubs frontline starters Jon Lester and Arrieta.
Like Harvey versus Anderson in the division series, the Mets again have a decided pitching advantage in Game 3 of the NLCS as ace Jacob deGrom opposes Kyle Hendricks.
The Mets legitimately are six-deep in starting pitching, which means Bartolo Colon and Jonathon Niese working in the bullpen. Colon did not appear in Sunday's win, but Niese did. He struck out Anthony Rizzo to strand Kris Bryant at second base after inheriting the baserunner from Syndergaard.
Niese has now struck out both batters he has faced this postseason.
"That's why we thought if we could get to postseason, we could match up with a lot of teams -- everybody -- because we have depth," manager Terry Collins said. "We all look at Noah and Jake and Matt as the big three, but I'm telling you, Steve Matz is really good, too. And we've got two starters in that bullpen that I wouldn't be afraid to start at any time. So we're very, very lucky that we have the pitching we have."
More encouraging: Addison Reed and Tyler Clippard, who each had been somewhat shaky this month, got back on track Sunday with a scoreless inning apiece. It was their unevenness of late that had prompted Collins to stretch out dominant closer Jeurys Familia to for multi-inning saves. That included six outs in Game 5 of the division series, then four outs in Game 1 of the NLCS.
Familia tossed another scoreless inning Sunday to earn another save. He has appeared in six of the Mets' seven postseason games. Familia's four saves this year already have established the franchise's career postseason record. Armando Benitez, Tug McGraw and Billy Wagner had three postseason saves apiece during their entire tenures as Mets.
"We've beaten some of the best that the game has to offer," captain David Wright said. "I'll argue that we have the Syndergaards, the Harveys, the Matzes and the deGroms, so I like our chances when we can run those guys out there."