Noah Syndergaard and the Very Confident New York Mets

“I can’t imagine what it’s going to be like this year,” the pitcher Noah Syndergaard told me recently. “I think we’re going to go back to the World Series and win it all.” The twenty-three-year-old had just arrived at the New York Mets spring-training camp, in Port St. Lucie, Florida. Last year, he was called up to the majors for the first time, became nationally known by a superhero-inspired nickname (“Thor”), and won a World Series game. Now he’s the photogenic face of a team on a mission to finish the job they started in 2015. The Mets have one of the more dangerous hitters in baseball, Yoenis Céspedes, who can win games single-handedly and do it with panache. But going into the season, the main engine of the team has four parts: Syndergaard and the three other young power pitchers in the starting rotation. “We’re all pretty competitive with one another, we’re all close friends, which makes it even better,” Syndergaard told me. “That gives us a camaraderie, a little brotherhood. We all push each other and try to learn from each other.”