The Secret to Surviving a 2018 Mets Game

It’s been a busy couple of days.

On Wednesday I drove up to Massachusetts in a rented Nissan Pathfinder. (Nice vehicle, BTW.) On Thursday I helped my kid clean out his dorm room, a task that would have been more efficiently accomplished with a fire hose and/or flamethrower, and transported the to-be-salvaged/reused stuff to summer storage at his grandmother’s in Connecticut. Friday morning we were up early with the remainder and battling traffic into New York, where I’d no sooner shed the rented Nissan than I got myself fopped up in seersucker and a bow tie to talk at a Book Expo America author’s tea about audiobooks. (As one does, right?)

So the Mets game came as a treat at the end of a busy stretch, and in the beginning it was indeed a nice reward. There was Zack Wheeler, looking sharp and effective in taming the Cubs. There was Brandon Nimmo, socking a two-run homer to give the Mets the lead. There was also Jose Lobaton, inexplicably back from the minors, but you can’t have everything.

Perhaps I let my guard down. Perhaps I was just tired. Whatever the case, my couch posture went from upright to supine and Emily asked if I was going to sleep.

What? No. Of course not. Why, the idea bordered on the offensive.

Narrator: Five seconds later, he was asleep.

When I jerked myself back to full awareness nothing seemed that different. My wife and child were in the same places they’d been. Paul Sewald was now on the mound, but it had looked like Wheeler was just about done, so that was no particular surprise.

Except the Cubs no longer had zero runs. They had three.

I had missed the bad part. The discouraging part. The inevitable part. The part where the Mets’ horror show of a bullpen does what it normally does.

That was really it. Sewald gave up a home run that seemed to make the rest of the game academic. There was a mild Mets uprising that amounted to nothing. Jose Reyes continued to play third and take up a roster spot he has no business having. At one point the Mets had Jose Bautista in left, Michael Conforto in center and Nimmo in right, showing an impressive determination to have all three outfielders in the wrong place simultaneously.

Oh, and the Mets lost, sinking under .500 for the first time all year.

It didn’t hurt as much as it might have, because I missed the part where hope curdled into dismay. I recommend this strategy. But good luck figuring out when to employ it.

* * *

In happier news, yesterday was the anniversary of Johan Santana‘s no-hitter. If you’d like to go down memory lane with us:

• Greg had a hunch about Carlos Beltran as a Cardinal. (Fortunately, he was wrong, though Adrian Johnson’s mistake kept Beltran from Ruining Everything.)
• First reaction from Mr. Prince as your recapper. (Context: There was a beer ad at the time with this as a tagline.)
• The full recap, with historical perspective.
• My What Johan Did art piece disguised as blog post. I’d thought of this idea years before and never thought I’d get to do it.
• My account of listening to and then finally watching a Mets no-hitter unfold from the unlikely vantage point of Orlando, Fla.
• And Greg’s back to put a historical bow on things.

Have fun! Don’t let the 2018 Mets get you down!