The Mets are fun again.
Before we wax rhapsodic about that, let’s be honest in a eye-rolling, way-to-be-a-bringdown way: the Mets are mostly fun again because they’re winning, leading us to attach all sorts of significance to those wins.
But it’s not all fan rationalization. Tonight I found myself thinking something I thought last September, as the Mets kicked aside the crumpled husk of the Nationals and marched to the playoffs: they’re playing with house money. Nobody expected this, so it just gets to be fun.
And last year was fun, right up until they botched three winnable games that just happened to be in the World Series. Ah, so what: even with that record-scratch of an ending, it was still pretty great. Looking back, I find myself smiling about Daniel Murphy [1] scampering to an unguarded third and Noah Syndergaard [2] entering in relief and Yoenis Cespedes [3] hitting a ball to Mars and Sandy Alderson sitting incognito in the Wrigley Field stands; and I shake off images of quick pitches and errors and what might have been and get back to smiling.
Over the last two weeks this seemingly lost season has become a funhouse mirror of last season. No, the Mets aren’t going to storm past the Nats this time — satisfying Sunday wins [4] notwithstanding — or get to fine-tune their rotation for October. They’re going to have to scrap and claw and make stuff up, and they might well come up short.
But I didn’t think they’d get this far. Finding them with something to play for in September feels like house money. Maybe the bills are in smaller denominations than last year, but the feeling’s sure similar.
House money is sending Seth Lugo [5] and Robert Gsellman [6] — call ’em the ReplaceMets, the ReplaceMatts or the ReplaceMatz the way things are going — and having them pitch with poise and aplomb. The baby-faced Lugo looks like a reincarnation of Jason Isringhausen [7] 1.0 when we couldn’t watch his debut because of the stupid Baseball Network, but he’s got a fastball with run and bite and sink and somehow it’s working. Gsellman looks like the middle stage of a morph between Jacob deGrom [8] and the GEICO Caveman imitating Jacob deGrom, but he’s got both good stuff and guts, as he showed when he turned the world’s least fair major-league debut into a win. Can they keep it up? Hell if I know, but then I didn’t think they’d get this far.
House money is a lineup of one-legged guys, reclamation projects paid by other teams, players we wanted to get rid of and are now glad we didn’t, prospects turned suspects and reacquisitions playing a crazy carousel of positions and somehow getting the job done.
House money is guys you might have given up on seeing come through doing exactly that — Curtis Granderson [9] had three RBIs tonight and Jay Bruce [10] had the other two. Suddenly it no longer feels so crazy to think Curtis might regress to the mean and Bruce might relax and those processes might be glorious things.
Hell, let yourself dream a little more — dreaming is free, after all. Lucas Duda [11]‘s back to baseball activities, and Steven Matz [12] is going to throw again, and maybe those multiple starts missed will mean a stronger deGrom. It’s not crazier than the things that have worked over the last two weeks.
It’s house money. May as well bet it all.