Seems Like Recent Times

I burrowed inside my television early Sunday afternoon, and there it was: Roku, right where I left it. I hadn’t watched it much since last summer when I installed it so I could take in a desultory Mets-Marlins affair because MLB told me it was the only way I could see it. Streaming a game via Roku reminds me of the Mets (and a few other local sports franchises) getting involved with Wometco Home Theatre in the very late 1970s. Some otherwise untelecast games were on this new thing called SportsChannel, for which you needed cable, and not everybody in the New York Metropolitan Area was sufficiently wired. But if you sprang for the monthly fee of seventeen bucks, you could get a box for Wometco, or WHT, which picked up some of those SportsChannel games along with films that had not long before been in movie houses. You turned on your TV, clicked over to UHF, dialed up to Channel 68 — more familiar as The Uncle Floyd Show’s base of operations — and there, apparently, WHT was. I say “apparently,” because we weren’t spending to unscramble the Channel 68 signal with a box. I liked the idea that the 1979 Mets were hiding somewhere behind an uncooperative vertical hold, but if a game wasn’t on Channel 9, I listened to it on WMCA.

Putting the Met in Wometco.

Unless the Mets decide to give out Lee Mazzilli posters soon, I believe this will be the last time anything about this club in 2025 takes me back to 1979. That was an infamously miserable Met year. This year, except for needing modern-day Wometco to witness every pitch, seems to be the opposite. No infamy orbits these Mets, and you have to take yourself to a truly ultra high frequency to tune in any misery.

A quarter-season in, these Mets strike me as very much their own thing. They don’t remind me all that much of any of their predecessors, certainly not the enormously dreadful ones and not even the mighty successful ones. This team feels built to win without making too much of a daily whoop about it. They’re enjoying the winning they’re doing and they’re not thrown off course when the occasional loss interrupts their victorious train of thought.

Perhaps I’m projecting. I can edge into angst when runners are abandoned on base and sink into a funk after a defeat, but my psychological foundation may be as solid as it’s ever been where the Mets are concerned. I’m on a steady high, overjoyed that they’re this good while not surprised that they’re this good. How good is “this good”? Their record of 26-15 speaks for itself, but I keep coming back to eight of their losses being by one run and four others being by two runs. It’s not inconceivable that a few more big hits sprinkled about their schedule would have this team in the stratosphere rather than just first place. Maybe they’ll regret not driving in those runs when they had the chance. But I don’t think this team is going to come down with a case of the if-onlys or be about regret as it takes on its next three quarters.

Roku is only the latest example of the Mets intermittently hiding inside your television.

On Sunday, on Roku, with Gary Cohen behind one mic and SNY director John DeMarsico calling the literal shots, it felt like our version of 2025 out there. It was closer than we would have liked, because what we really like is a double-digit lead in any inning. We were ahead of the Cubs, 1-0, for quite a while, because Luis Torrens is an RBI triple kind of catcher and because the pitcher he was catching (before Luis took a foul ball where even auteur DeMarsico doesn’t have a camera stationed) is an advertisement for whatever alchemy the Met Pitching Lab is churning out. Griffin Canning was his usual spotless self until Pete Crow-Armstrong launched a solo homer onto Carbonation Ridge in the top of the sixth. You can maintain regret for PC-A not being NYM five years after we drafted him, but not that’s not regret to be aimed at anything our front office has done lately. Mostly, you can raise a sparkling soft drink to a presumed fringe starter yet again giving the Mets what has become a Canning kind of outing over six innings. Crow-Armstrong’s one-run ice cube, on whatever beverage-branded plaza it landed, was all Griffin gave up.

And then we got the run right back in the bottom of the sixth, when the Mets third baseman kept doing what the Mets third baseman had been doing all weekend. Sunday the Mets third baseman was righty-swinging Mark Vientos, looking like the Mark Vientos who we previously judged was the the Mark Vientos. Lefty Brett Baty sat despite the three home runs he socked Friday and Saturday, because Carlos Mendoza deals from a deck of capable players and is determined to get everybody in and going as a given situation suggests. The Cubs threw a lefty, Matthew Boyd. Third baseman Vientos hit him 375 feet to left field.

Chicago evened the score at two in the top of the seventh off Reed Garrett, and that could have been trouble. But it wasn’t. The home eighth gave us Francisco Lindor leading off and breaking the 2-2 tie. No bloop, all blast. Lindor didn’t come through in the ninth on Saturday night. He made it his mission to compensate for that shortfall Sunday afternoon. That’s not a dreamy fan’s fanfic inference. That’s what he said after Sunday’s game. Lindor’s good enough so he can decide something like that and make it happen. The Mets have a few guys you suspect can put their minds to their bats and deliver as desired.

Pete Alonso doubled. Vientos singled him in to give the next reliever some breathing room. Jose Azocar came in to pinch-run, which imminently tickled me, because Azocar’s assignment was as stressless as imaginable once Brandon Nimmo became the third Met to homer on the day, the second to do so in the eighth. My amusement that Azocar was now a pinch-trotter was soon supplanted by a slight chill a flashback to a fairly recent event gave me. The event was from more than seven months ago, but it carries that “it feels like yesterday” quality still.

At Mets 6 Cubs 2 in the eighth on Sunday, Gary didn’t invoke the phrase he sort of used for another two-run Nimmo home run that provided the Mets a seemingly safe eighth-inning advantage, yet I heard myself utter it out loud as Brandon followed Jose around the bases:

“Brandon Nimmo puts the hammer down!”

That co-opted description originated in the top of the eighth last September 30 in Atlanta. Relistening to it a dozen times since, I notice Gary edits himself midcall, from almost saying “the hammer,” to actually saying “a hammer,” as if he knows the 6-3 lead the Mets have taken over the Braves isn’t going to be the final score. As we were about to learn, it wasn’t. The Braves stormed back to plate four off of Edwin Diaz in the bottom of that eighth before Francisco Lindor did his own storming when the Mets were up in the top of the ninth, putting us in front, 8-7, and ultimately pushing us toward the playoffs.

It’s a season later, but if I see Nimmo and Lindor each homering in the late innings like they did that quasi-sudden death Monday, I’m conditioned for confidence. I saw them do it on Sunday, in a game that was merely the 41st of 162, on some channel I forget exists when the Mets aren’t playing within its streaming confines. On May 11, 2025, I was comfortable with the notion that “the” hammer had been put down by Brandon. The 2025 Mets are their own definitive thing, and I usually respond to what they’re doing in the here and now. Yet 2024’s levitated regular-season ending — its in-the-moment conditionality notwithstanding — clearly set me up to instinctively look for the best in this current edition’s personnel. Even in Edwin, even if I reflexively ad-libbed lyrics to the melodic refrain of “Narco” after Gary’s analyst du jour Joe Girardi mentioned amid the trumpets blaring that at 6-2 in the ninth, it wasn’t a save situation.

“just end the game…just end the game…just end the game…just end the ga-a-a-a-ame!”

Diaz must have been listening, because he treated the four-run lead as something that required urgent preservation, and three quick outs later, that 6-2 lead became a 6-2 win, and this year’s particular strain of joy splashed at me and flowed through me and stayed in me. Wherever Rob Manfred insists on stashing the Mets on any given Sunday, I’m glad I can track them down. They’re too good a show to miss.