Savor this.
That’s always the warning when your baseball team is playing taut, crackling ball at a pinch me level. It seems inconceivable, but the good times will end. The hits will stop falling in, balls will start just eluding gloves, relievers will enter jams and emerge scathed. Baseball’s karmic wheel will turn and somehow joy will become dismay.
We never really believe it. Surely this incarnation of the team — these hard-working, plucky, never-say-die boys, all them patriots who wear clean underwear and love their mothers — has found a formula for walking on water, and why would anyone give up a method of transportation so novel, daring and so just plain fun?
And then somehow one goes from the surface of the lake to beneath it, sputtering and thrashing.
The Mets, until recently the stuff of ready smiles and jaunty steps, are now unwatchable. The hitters have two modes: no luck and bad luck. Without an offense, the rest of the machine is either inert or breaking down. Tension has crept into the postgame pressers, with the reassurances taking on a certain Baconesque flavor [1]. Fans like us are muttering and sighing and wondering — once again — how any people can endure such misery.
On Tuesday, the Met bats actually showed some signs of sizzle — impressive exit velos were credited to the likes of Mark Vientos [2], Brett Baty [3], Brandon Nimmo [4], Juan Soto [5] and Pete Alonso [6]. But the trajectories were almost invariably tragic — balls zipping straight into the gloves of Boston Red Sox positioned where you didn’t want them to see them. That was true against Walker Buehler [7] before his early ejection, and true against the six relievers who followed him — four of them relievers the Mets hadn’t been able to touch on Monday night either. It added up to a grand total of zero runs scored, which made a loser [8] out of Clay Holmes [9] for the sin of surrendering a pair of solo shots over the Green Monster. The only moment of the game one wanted to remember — if you don’t count soft-glow Fenway nostalgia — was a seed of a throw by Nimmo to nail Nick Sogard [10] at the plate. Those five seconds? Pretty awesome. The other two hours and change? Not so much.
I know it seems impossible to believe right now, but the Mets will be fine. Their current three-game losing streak is the first time they’ve lost three straight all season, a deal you would have signed on for in a heartbeat if offered it in March. Statistical oddities will even out and ebbs will transform into flows. Balls will find grass and postgame press conferences will come without heavy treads and thousand-mile stares. The wheel will turn again and these days will be either remembered with shrugs and shakes of the head or happily forgotten.
Just don’t ask when. It doesn’t work that way — never has and never will. All we can do is endure.