A Familiar Nightmare

White Flight Stadium has been a house of horrors for the Mets for some time now, but the home of the Braves outdid itself Tuesday night, first with a rain delay that didn’t actually feature rain — they watered the goddamn infield when guys could have been playing on it — and then with horrible things happening to the Mets, who lost 6-4 in a game that felt more like 60-4 when it was mercifully over.

What went wrong? What didn’t go wrong? Carlos Carrasco pitched well until he didn’t, coming apart in the sixth inning before Drew Smith let the already damaged roof cave in. The Mets had a brief uprising in the fourth with two two-run homers but you could already hear the minor-key chords warning that you were being set up. Those homers were half the hits the Mets collected all night, with no tallies whatsoever after the fourth. The fielding was atrocious, with Jeff McNeil‘s agonies in left sitting front and center but a number of other plays not made. And OK, to be fair, the Braves are pretty goddamn good and came through when they needed to.

However you apportion blame, the Mets are 30-31, and two more nights in Atlanta seem an unlikely recipe for curing whatever’s ailing them. Particularly when what’s ailing them seems to be everything. A budget that would be envy of some nation states has created a tissue-paper juggernaut that’s under .500. The Mets look poorly assembled, a spasmodic Frankenstein machine that’s constantly shedding pieces, leaking oil and freezing up when it isn’t blasting away at its own feet. Yes, there are 101 games left to go, but that’s starting to feel more like a threat than a promise. The Mets should revert to the mean and play to the backs of their own baseball cards, but 61 games are gone and they haven’t done so yet.

Sometimes should turns into should have and is quietly shelved with the other resentments and disappointments. Eventually the guy sitting placidly and waiting for the luck to turn stops looking like a patient sage and starts looking like a sucker. Funny how he’s always the last to know.

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It’s the Texas Rangers’ problem and not ours any more, but Jacob deGrom will have a second surgery on the UCL in his pitching arm, taking him out of action until late 2024 at the earliest … and who knows what he will be when he does return.

Again, not the Mets’ problem — it’s the Rangers’ issue for the next 4+ years and $185 million. But it’s terrible loss for all of us who have fond memories of deGrom, which is to say all of us, just as it’s a terrible loss for baseball, which is so much better with an electric deGrom taking the ball every fifth day. DeGrom at his best did something incredibly hard and made it look not just effortless but like art, and if you were watching on those days you knew how lucky you were, you sensed that were watching something indelible that you’d remember for as long as you’re a baseball fan.

That deGrom went from serially incredible to seriously unreliable isn’t a failing of his, or the Mets, or the Rangers, or anybody else. Rather, it’s a reminder of how hard pitching is and of the toll it takes, and how quickly it can all go awry. A top-flight pitcher at the top of his game is a thing to cherish, because pitchers break. Each and every perfectly executed pitch — a 98 MPH fastball dotting the corner, a 12-6 curve buckling a hitter’s knees, a slider veering away from a bat like magic — bears its own shadow, carrying the possibility that it could be the last one.