That’s what All-Stars are for, eh? One belts two homers, each with a man or more on, and the other pitches fairly deep if not particularly stylishly — but it’s been established we don’t care about style points when wins are going wanting.
And boy have we been wanting a win for the longest time.
The last time David Wright and R.A. Dickey (and, come to think of it, Terry Collins) had anything to do with a victory, it was in Kansas City for a game that the ensuing week-plus suggested would be free of long-term Met implications. The Mets likely won’t have to concern themselves with home-field advantage for the World Series. They had to concern themselves with not coming home on their shield after losing the first five on this just-finished, still-disastrous road trip, their last six overall.
How long had it been since the Mets won a game? It had been so long that the last guy to win one has since had season-ending surgery. Since Dillon Gee weaved wove his twelve-day-old magic on the Cubs, the Mets bullpen and other culprits performed season-ending surgery on the Mets’ chances…unless you choose to believe that no season is over until it’s over, which is all well and good, particularly if you’ve been charmed by these heretofore never-say-die Mets.
I sure was that night against Philadelphia when David and Daniel and Ruben and Jordany and Ike crafted a ninth inning for the ages [1]. That’s when I pledged to take these 2012 Mets seriously. But seriousness turned comedic/tragic and the charm wore off in the days preceding Thursday afternoon’s do-or-die 9-5 deathgrip win in Washington [2]. The losses were bad. The routes to defeat were generally excruciating, what with the Mets almost always coming back about 95% of the way — or coming back 105% of the way and having their schlemiel relievers deduct a 10% vig. However it happened, the result was loss after loss after loss from Atlanta and D.C., after which there’d be lots of courageous talk [3] about the resilience of this team.
It was talk that rang hollow. Resilience is futile when it’s the stuff of moral victories, of waiting until the very last minute to blow it, or creating an extra inning in which to do the blowing. I’ll take a game like the Washington finale, in which there was plenty of, shall we say, “silience” in the form of a 9-1 lead built on the bat of Wright and the battle of Dickey, and then only half a stack of giveback (Byrdak, Ramirez, Edgin and Parnell would make terrible labor negotiators). Never has a sizable margin felt so terrifyingly tiny, but that’s your Met bullpen for ya.
But it hung on, those knowledgeable Nationals fans [4] figured out it was time to leave and the Mets had their one win in a row. If you wanna believe, you gotta start somewhere. You can start with that.
For a little something more uplifting than Met bullpen shenanigans, read what Samuel Annable has been up to with an Ike Davis glove at Two Blue Dice [5].