A Back Seat Win

All wins are created equal in the standings. Some wins are a little less equal emotionally. Some wins take a back seat to other events surrounding a given game. It doesn’t happen often, but it happens.

Mets fire a manager but win as a going-away present to their suddenly erstwhile skipper? The win doesn’t resonate.

Mets raise a white flag by trading a perfectly good player because their sagging record indicates a diminishing need for perfectly good players the rest of the year? The win gets less of your attention than who we got in exchange for the perfectly good player.

Mets blow a seemingly unblowable lead late but get it back after you’re overwhelmed by so much Sturm und Drang you barely notice that everything turned out OK? Depending on the severity of the nonfatal gag job, the win can feel like an undeserved consolation prize — you’ll take it, but you feel a little skeevy about the whole thing.

Mets suffer an injury while in the midst of everything going well, and go on to win while waiting to announce the nature of the injury? You’re absolutely happy to have the win, especially since you lately find yourself addicted to chronic winning, but the injury rather than the victory rides in the front seat of your thoughts.

The Mets on Thursday afternoon at Citi Field notched one of those back seat wins, topping the Nationals, 4-3. No managers were fired; no players were traded; a lead was nearly blown late but never actually got away, so we’ll let that brush with fallibility slide. Thursday, however, was one of those days when a Met — a key Met, at that — had to leave the game less than healthy, and true solace wasn’t readily attainable from the final posted on the scoreboard.

Oh, we’ll take it. We’ll take Jeff McNeil’s three-run homer in the first and Brandon Nimmo’s solo shot in the fifth and Tyrone Taylor’s Tommie Agee impression in the outfield in the sixth. We won’t overlook, either, that Luisangel Acuña made a very heady play in the top of the ninth to make sure a bullpen meltdown soaring toward Level 7 never reached the stage where you’ll want to avoid locally sourced milk for a generation. When it was over, the Mets do what they do when they win. They gathered in a circle and choreographed a celebratory kick. Having won six in a row en route to mounting, the best record in baseball, they’ve become very practiced in victory celebrations.

Winning is always a kick, even if a strain to the hamstring is tantamount to a kick in the head.

We definitely appreciated all the positives that turned the Mets into Rockettes, but we couldn’t and didn’t stop thinking about Kodai Senga, who was humming along with a shutout in the sixth, reducing his microscopic earned run average to a nearly indecipherable dot, when, in the process of covering first base on a grounder to Pete Alonso, had something happen to his right leg. A cramp? A strain? A what? We didn’t know while Senga knelt on the ground nor when he rose and walked off without assistance to exit the field. The last act of his 1.47 ERA season to date was a leap in the air and a step on the bag after hauling in Alonso’s less than ideal toss of CJ Abrams’s relatively routine groundout. Senga said he’d felt something before exerting the extra effort to reel in Pete’s fling. Pete said he felt “awful” about perhaps exacerbating an injury in the making. Carlos Mendoza reported afterward the early diagnosis is hamstring strain. A trip to the IL and the MRI machine, in that order, are prescribed. Everything else is TBD.

It was a 3-1 putout that overshadowed a 4-3 win. The Met rotation with Senga, even as it’s required the insertion of random sixth starters from time to time, is stronger by multitudes than what we deployed 161 of 162 games last year, and last year’s starting pitching was pretty darn good. It would have been better had Kodai been available before and after July 26, his one regular-season outing of 2024, the one that was also going swimmingly, the one that was also interrupted by the covering of first base, the one that also had us wondering what just went wrong. Eleven months ago, it was a left calf strain that negated his comeback from the shoulder injury he endured in Spring. Never mind the DH. Let’s get this man a designated fielder.

The Mets maintain the depth to deal with a starting pitcher missing a thus far indeterminate period of time. Last season’s anchor, Sean Manaea, is rehabbing. One of last winter’s acquisitions, Frankie Montas, is doing the same. Last summer’s insurance policy, Paul Blackburn, is alive and well and on the active roster. Somebody will pitch and, I’m willing to say while we exist in an era of confidence rather than panic, pitch well. Still, the man we’ll be missing is Kodai Senga. We’ve got a lefty ace in David Peterson. We’ve got a stretched-out Clay Holmes proving the Mets were right to see in him someone who belonged at the front rather than the back of a game. We’ve got Griffin Canning emerging successfully from the alchemy of the Met pitching lab. And we’ve got gritty Tylor Megill forever hanging in there. But it was the right arm of Senga that signaled every day in six could be and usually was something extra special. We scrapped for a playoff spot last year. We are cruising as the best team in baseball this year. I’m not gonna say the definitive difference has been having Kodai Senga, but, boy, has it not hurt.

Losing him hurts. Winning without him around at day’s end didn’t feel as good as if he’d kept pitching, kept fielding without incident, kept within kicking distance of the club’s victory huddle. Yet it was still a win. That never hurts. Nor will getting him back.