Baseball: So Betts, Ohtani and Freeman reached base 12 times in Saturday’s Mets-Dodgers game.
Me: OMG, did we lose by like two touchdowns? What poor position player threw the last two innings?
Baseball: Oh, the Mets won, 6-4.
Me: Huh?
Baseball: [shrugs]— Jason Fry (@jasoncfry.bsky.social) Apr 20, 2024 at 11:46 PM
Like I said, that was Saturday.
On Sunday, the terrifying trio only reached base six times, but the Mets’ Houdini act stopped working. It was 2-0 LA after the third on an Ohtani homer, 10-0 LA after the fifth on everything but the kitchen sink, and if you paid much attention to what happened after that, well, my cap is tipped. Adrian Houser looked off from the get-go and got pounded, after which Grant Hartwig poured lighter fluid on the fire; meanwhile, the Mets did basically nothing against oversized action figure Tyler Glasnow (seriously, what human being not wearing a cape and tights looks like this guy?) and when the Mets did do something the doers of somethings got thrown out by Will Smith.
Oh, Tomas Nido caught Smith stealing, the first time any Met catcher has caught anyone stealing in 2024. Really, that was the highlight.
A decided non-highlight: Brooks Raley, who was superb last year and hadn’t missed a beat this year, has joined Francisco Alvarez on the IL. That’s not ideal.
As the “because we have to” portion of the game rolled along, Ron Darling said something I’d heard before but still found comforting: that fans find being on the wrong end of blowouts tough but players just shrug such games off, and it’s losses that turn on a mistake or two that cause clubhouse consternation.
Still, because I’m a Mets fan, I couldn’t stop myself from looking nervously at 2023’s game log. The Mets struggled to find their footing at the beginning of the year but then played pretty well, including on what looked like a daunting early West Coast trip. They even took two out of three from the Dodgers. Then they went to San Francisco, where they won the first two and dropped the last two for a split. Those last two games looked like an annoying stumble at the time, but they were actually the start of the descent. The Mets bumped along for six weeks or so, with all of us knowing they looked fundamentally flawed but trying to convince ourselves a team assembled with that much talent (and that many dollars) would figure it out. The Mets never did; they fell under .500 in early June and … yeah, we know the rest.
This is a different year, with a fairly different cast of characters. Teams get blown out now and again, and a juggernaut like the Dodgers is capable of making anyone look silly. The wise thing would be not to dwell on it. So let’s try that and see where it gets us.
Houdini, indeed. I’m still not sure how they won the first two games of the series.
I understand what Ron was saying, but from a fan’s point of view, blowouts are disturbing because they sometimes expose team weaknesses. If Houser had been better, it might not have gotten to the blowout stage. Perhaps “it’s gonna happen” is a good blowout attitude, but why did it have to happen TODAY?
Houser is a problem that needs fixing pronto.
Perhaps a sojourn in Syracuse will prove a tonic for this egregious walk-meister.