This Could Be Fun

The only thing missing from Wednesday night’s game was Keith Hernandez requesting that someone put a tent on the circus.

This is not a blueprint for constructing a satisfying baseball game: a seemingly much reduced Matt Harvey giving up a home run to Zack Cozart on the fourth pitch thrown, followed by Ivan De Jesus smacking the seventh pitch thrown off of Harvey’s derriere, followed a bit later by Lucas Duda dropping a ball in a rundown to force his pitcher to get another out.

That doesn’t sound fun at all, and yet we came to the end of the first inning and found ourselves feeling hopeful. Yes, it was 1-0 Reds. But it was only 1-0 Reds. And despite the fireworks and fumbles, Harvey’s fastball was coming in around 95 and 96, not the 92 or 93 of his dispiriting outings in Cleveland and Atlanta. He’d struck out Joey Votto, Eugenio Suarez and Devin Mesoraco and walked away more nicked than cut.

And then the circus truly got rolling. With two out in the bottom of the first and Alejandro De Aza on second, Lucas Duda hit an arcing drive to left fielder Scott Schebler. It hit Schebler in the glove, which is normally what a fielder wants, but it didn’t stay there, falling to the grass instead for a free run. The Mets then capitalized further, with a Neil Walker single driving home Duda for a 2-1 lead. Schebler, by the way, has the presumably unconscious habit of flipping his mouthguard around nonstop, which was fine until it fell out of his mouth while he was at bat in the sixth. When the SNY cameras returned to Schebler, I hoped the mouthguard would be missing, tucked in a pocket until it could be rinsed off, while pretty much knowing that … yecch. That’s the kind of thing that gets your mother to email you disapprovingly.

Poor Schebler wasn’t alone, at least in terms of non-mouthguard-related miscues. Walker made an error of his own, Asdrubal Cabrera corraled a ball but couldn’t unload it, David Wright was awarded first base on catcher’s interference … MY WORD, to return to The Quotations of Chairman Keith. As the errors mounted all you could do was hang on, with no sense of how this one was going to unfold. Granted, no one ever knows how a game is going to unfold, but a decent amount of time you can guess — unless chaos is erupting everywhere at regular intervals, in which case you just shrug and try to imagine what wacky thing might happen next.

What happened was the undermanned Reds (no Jay Bruce, no Brandon Phillips, a discombobulated Votto) tried to fight back but couldn’t, thanks to three rather delightful Metsian storylines.

The first was Harvey, whose location wasn’t perfect (and whose bunting was very far from it), but who kept his velocity and seemed to gain a better feel for his slider and change-up as the game rolled along. Harvey’s 102nd pitch, to finish the sixth inning and his night, was a 97 MPH fastball — very good news indeed.

Storyline No. 2 to enjoy was the continuing rampage of Neil Walker, whose ninth home run of the still-young season tied Dave Kingman, Carlos Delgado and John Buck for most Met home runs in April. That company doesn’t guarantee anything — Buck, you may recall, followed his nine home runs in a blazing April 2013 with a grand total of six more over the next four months, a display so impressive that the Mets made him a throw-in in the Marlon Byrd trade with the Pirates. But for now, dare to dream: rather than compare Walker with dearly departed Daniel Murphy, let’s measure him against Bryce Harper, his co-leader atop the NL HR leaderboard. (Yeah, I know. We’re daring to dream, remember?)

Our third storyline concerned Michael Conforto, who for the first two hours of Wednesday’s game looked like the overanxious young player he’s never been. Conforto struck out looking in the first with De Aza on second, fouled out meekly in the bottom of the second with the bases loaded, and stranded two more runners with a groundout in the fourth. If you were keeping score at home, that was six seven runners left idle in three un-Conforto-like at-bats. Oh ye of little faith: In the sixth, against Blake Wood, Conforto got two more runners dropped on his ledger and responded by roping a double to left-center to give the Mets a sorely needed cushion. If we can go back to dreaming, a generation spent watching Conforto and Noah Syndergaard in blue and orange sounds pretty swell.

So the Mets won — that’s their sixth straight, their 11th in 13 contests, and the mighty Nationals are just a skinny game north of us in the standings. Jump to conclusions and you set yourself up for a fall, but this could be fun.