It’s the top of the sixth at Citizens Bank Park on Friday night. Blade Tidwell [1], a rookie pitcher carrying a parcel of promise along with a name one can picture Carnac the Magnificent working into one of his curses after an audience doesn’t respond as he wishes to one of his prognostications (“may your Blade Tidwell turn Blade Tidrotten”), is no longer in the game. But he has given the Mets about as much as could have been hoped for, considering he wasn’t so much on their immediate depth chart as he was in somebody’s phone’s address book. The kid who was sitting in Syracuse looking forward only to playing video games [2] the night before looked capable for three-and-two-thirds innings, giving up only two runs during his emergency start. Every Met start is an emergency these days [3].
Zack Wheeler was Zack Wheeler in the sense we know him as a Phillie ace and the sense we knew him as a Met comer. He shut down the Mets for five innings but did so with a pitch count that went untamed. Five innings equaled 98 pitches, so he wasn’t around to shut down the Mets when the sixth commenced. Instead, we saw another ex-Met on the mound, Taijuan Walker. Taijuan had his successes as a Met. They were a while ago. His results as a Phillie haven’t haunted us the way Wheeler’s have. We saw why as the sixth got going.
Three pitches in, Pete Alonso [4] hit a ridiculously long home run, and the Mets were on the board. Three pitches after that, Jeff McNeil [5] hit a less long home run, but still a home run. Two runs off Walker meant the Mets had dashed back into business. The game was tied at two, and for one of the rare innings since their losing streak had begun, Met bats had tangibly responded to adversity.
The week before, in the Friday night game against Tampa Bay — if you can remember back that far — the Mets carried a 5-1 lead to the top of the sixth. This was back when the Mets were on a six-game winning streak. They had initially fallen behind, 1-0, but brushed aside the deficit with their usual aplomb. In the sixth, however, they fell behind, 7-5, and haven’t stopped falling. The plunge has been without pause because the Mets have shown next to no resilience within games.
After they fell behind the Rays for the second time last Friday, they never scored again. A losing streak was on and the ability to dispel doubt was slipping from their grasp.
On Saturday versus the Rays, they twice briefly remembered how to bounce back. Down, 1-0, in the bottom of the third, they responded with two runs. Trailing, 7-2, in the bottom of the fifth, they scored twice more. They never scored again.
On Sunday, in the Rays series finale, they didn’t score at all.
On Tuesday, at Atlanta, they jumped out to a 4-0 lead in the second inning. They never scored again, but the Braves did, clear through to the winning run in the tenth.
On Wednesday, in the middle game of the Braves series, they didn’t score at all.
On Thursday, as they ended their interminable three-day stay down south, the Mets scored the game’s first run in the second inning, and then sat back as the Braves scored seven runs across the fifth, sixth, and seventh innings.
To sum, since they fell behind for good in that first Rays game, the Mets had scored while trailing in only two innings total, none since the second Rays game. So when we got to this second Friday night in this skein, a person watching the Mets tie the Phillies in the sixth after they had fallen behind the Phillies earlier was overcome by a dormant sensation, the sensation associated with a comeback.
A comeback?
A Mets comeback?
Where the Mets are behind but not only make an effort to catch up but actually do?
Get to a point where they’re tied rather than behind?
They can do that?
They could and they did and it was bracing. My god, we were back in this game!
[6]Plays like this used to work for us.
That was in the top of the sixth. Taijuan Walker didn’t stick around to see the inning end. Neither did the Mets offense, not really. And in the bottom of the seventh, with the game still tied at two, the tide that had briefly turned against the Phillies tsunamied all over the Mets. There were some softly hit balls that fell in. There were some forcefully hit balls that could have drilled holes. At one point, there were two Phillies sliding into home plate inches apart without Shawn Green, Jose Valentin, and Paul Lo Duca present to nail them as a tandem. Nick Castellanos was safe. J.T. Realmuto was safe. I was surprised Jeff Kent and J.D. Drew weren’t ruled retroactively safe from the 2006 NLDS [7].
The Mets were now behind, 8-2, and things would get only more rotten, if not Tidrotten, from there. On this Friday night, the Mets lost their seventh consecutive game [8], 10-2. For a moment, it seemed we wouldn’t. For a moment, we had picked our selves up, dusted our selves off, and seemed poise to start all over again. The moment didn’t last, and the exhilaration was fleeting, but it was ever so slightly better than nothing.