Thirty Seconds of Mister Smile

The Mets played a strange game against the Greater Denver Daiquiri Machine Operators Local nine, who were sure spiffy in uniforms designed to look like the libations they serve so cheerfully. Oh wait, those were the Colorado Rockies, who inexplicably retired the best City Connects in the program and now look like human slushies. Their sub-.250 record is historically bad but my God, so are those uniforms.

The game was really two games in one: six innings of maddening frustration followed by three innings of madness.

The first six innings saw Kodai Senga give up just a solo homer to Mickey Moniak while trying to figure out which pitches he could make work a mile above sea level, though in the fifth he got an assist from Pete Alonso, who made a nifty throw home to nab Ryan Ritter — or at least he did once Chelsea overruled home-plate ump Chris Conroy’s safe call.

But the game went to the seventh with the Mets down 1-0, as they stubbornly refused to drive in runners in scoring position. The sixth was particularly infuriating: The Mets loaded the bases with nobody out against Antonio Senzatela and then Jake Bird on a pair of walks and a hit by pitch, or perhaps it was a near-HBP sold as one by Tyrone Taylor. But Conroy then added an inch or two to the outside corner, turning Brett Baty‘s AB into a farcical strikeout, and Francisco Alvarez and Ronny Mauricio then struck out against Bird without Conroy putting his thumb on the scale.

Seriously, if you can look at that GameDay snapshot and still not be on Team Robot Umps Now, I don’t know what to tell you. And an ABS system with challenges isn’t the answer — that will just slow games down and add another level of NFL-style bureaucracy to a game that used to be refreshingly free of it. Instead, implement a Hawk-Eye-style system and use it for every pitch, not just a selection of the home-plate ump’s most egregious failures. Every single game has ABs that are turned by umpires getting the strike zone wrong; sometimes that leads to tantrums like the one I’m currently throwing, but most of the time we don’t even notice, because we’ve accepted a certain level of inaccuracy and even sentimentalized it as “the human element.”

Which is nonsense. The human element is indeed a wonderful part of baseball, but it should be discussed when we marvel at clutch hits and heads-up plays and gutsy pitching performances, not when we’re hand-waving away the fact that umpires aren’t good enough at a critical part of their jobs.

Anyway, I was mad. Robot umps now.

Still, let’s not put all this on Conroy. He had nothing to do with Mauricio grounding out in the first or Alonso striking out in the third or Jeff McNeil flying out in the third or Alvarez grounding out in the fourth or Mauricio flying out in the fourth or Alvarez striking out in the sixth or Mauricio striking out in the sixth. The Mets were 2 for 15 with runners in scoring position on the night, that came on the heels of Thursday’s galling failure parade in LA, and it’s wearying to say the least.

But let’s talk about those two successes — and about the madness of the final three innings in Denver.

In the seventh the Mets put runners on first and second with one out, with Alonso digging in against slider specialist Tyler Kinley. Kinley had Alonso pulling off sliders off the outside corner but then missed his location on an 0-2 count, leaving a hanger in the middle of the plate. Alonso didn’t miss it, spanking it up the left-field gap to give the Mets a 2-1 lead.

Huascar Brazoban surrendered a run in the bottom of the seventh to let the Rockies tie it and in the eighth disaster seemed imminent: Ryne Stanek gave up a single to Jordan Beck and a double to Thairo Estrada, with Colorado third-base coach Andy Gonzalez inexplicably throwing up a stop sign as Beck came around third. Stanek then walked Hunter Goodman and had to face Ryan McMahon with the bases loaded and nobody out.

So of course McMahon hit a hard liner down the third-base line, seemingly ticketed for the left-field corner and two RBIs, maybe three. Except it thudded into Baty’s glove at third and he lunged to tag out Beck for an unassisted double play. Stanek then struck out Brenton Doyle and the Mets had somehow escaped the hangman. (A fun moment: a still-amped Stanek hugging Baty in the dugout afterwards.)

In the top of the ninth, Juan Soto singled and Alonso walked with one out against Zach Agnos. With two outs, Carlos Mendoza sent Francisco Lindor to the plate, broken pinkie toe and all. Agnos’s second pitch was a cutter that Lindor served down the right-field line, sending Soto home with Alonso chugging along behind him. Alonso looked like he’d be out by three feet, but pulled an okie-doke on Goodman, switching hands as he reached for the plate and getting in just ahead of the tag. (Conroy got that one right.) Lindor trotted off the field in favor of Luisangel Acuna, to be mobbed by his happy teammates, and Edwin Diaz offered a blissfully drama-free one-two-three inning to secure the win.

A classic? Let’s not overdo it, given the scores of runners left on base and the two-thirds of the game that was grinding and frustrating. But the Mets overcame the Rockies, the home-plate ump and themselves to win, and that’s pretty satisfying.