Losing Streak Going, Going, Gone!

The Mets went only 2-for-7 with runners in scoring position Saturday night in Philadelphia, and their starting pitcher had to be pulled with one on and nobody out in the sixth, suggesting two overly familiar ingredients had been stirred into the pot for an eighth consecutive serving of futility stew. Fortunately, the Mets were experimenting with a different recipe, one that calls for seven home runs, each their own rather than the opposition’s.

Nobody was on base for any of them, but nobody had to be.

Thanks to a lot of slugging — a lot — the Mets broke their seven-game losing streak, thwacking the Phillies. The final score rang a bell, and I don’t mean Liberty, for 11-4 was the score of the very first Mets game ever. That night, April 11, 1962, in St. Louis, the Mets had the four. The comparison would therefore fizzle if not for this game in 2025 also feeling like it was presenting us with the first line on an otherwise clean slate. One game and a lifetime to come then, one game and a whole season of (we hope) renewed promise ahead now.

Goodbye, at last, to the doom and gloom associated with dropping seven in a row. It’s as if those blahs and blues were never here. Hello, once again, to first place in the National League East. Maybe someday we’ll be noting, “by stopping their seven-game losing streak, the Mets moved into a first-place tie,” the way we marvel that the Mets dually accomplished reaching .500 and taking first on the same night in September 1973. Of course that was September. This is June. This is lots of games to go. This is reacting to a one-week downturn in the middle of a season that had been practically nothing but ups until very recently.

Was it overreacting? When you live through (and blog through) seven consecutive losses, there is no overreaction. Losing always sucks. Losing times seven sucks seven times as much. But it sure is nice to have a previously woven cushion to fall back on. That’s what the 45-24 was for; a superb start can withstand a sudden sag. So now we’re 46-31, which looks spectacular, especially if you conveniently overlook the 0-7 it encompasses.

For now, let’s just enjoy 1-0 by way of 11-4. Let’s enjoy the enormity of seven convincingly blasted Met home runs and the oddity that each of them was a solo home run, not to mention three of them having been hit in succession. If you’re not gonna produce consistently with runners on base, then make every bases-empty hit count. Hit every bases-empty ball out of the park. How do you win if all your home runs are solo jobs?

Volume! Volume! Volume!

Juan Soto twice. Brandon Nimmo twice. Jared Young and Francisco Alvarez once each. And, perhaps most comforting, Francisco Lindor once. Lindor, he who continues to play through a broken toe, had been slumping more than any Met, which is an achievement unto itself. But our de facto captain got going on Saturday, not only with a homer — when Lindor homers, the Mets win — but a double that nearly went out of Citizens Bank, struck far enough away from home plate that it scored the two runners on base. Come to think of it, as awesome as Soto’s shots to the seats were, his two-run icing-on-the-cake single in the eighth, capping his 4-for-5 night, may have been most gratifying. This was Juan being the Juan we didn’t have to dream of when he was signed last December, because Juan’s reality was enough. The Juan of most nights in 2025, even the Juan who’d gotten himself untracked, hadn’t been otherworldly. This fella doin’ his thing in Philadelphia was the Juan we signed, the Juan who makes pitchers pay for running deep counts and/or letting runners on base ahead of him, whether he proceeds to plant their pitches on distant planets or simply where fielders ain’t. Seven other runs were driven in by four other Mets, but Juan being Juan was what we’d been waiting for.

Soto’s first hit was off a changeup, the seventh pitch of the at-bat.
Soto’s second hit was off a four-seamer, the seventh pitch of the at-bat.
Soto’s third hit was off a curveball, the seventh pitch of the at-bat.
Soto’s fourth hit was off a splitter, the sixth pitch of the at-bat.

On Saturday afternoon, as something of a break between turning down the sound on Apple TV+ Friday night and turning down the sound on Fox Saturday night (and ESPN2 tonight, no doubt), I saw a matinee performance of Real Women Have Curves. I enjoyed my Broadway detour a great deal, almost as much as I enjoyed seeing, via Soto’s swings, that real sluggers hit curves and everything else.

Hey, he’s really here!

The seven Met home runs were breathtaking, especially when Lindor, Nimmo, and Soto back-to-back-to-backed a trio in the third. The additional runs via non-homers were reassuring. The jolt of resilience, missing throughout the losing streak, was a reminder that a good team is never out of a game in which it is behind, and that the Mets are a good team. They were actually down, 3-1, after two innings. The top of our order mashing those three consecutive dingers was resilient as hell.

Griffin Canning was adequate enough for the task at hand. He was supported by what amounted to an oodle of runs, thus the four he allowed through five (plus the leadoff single he gave up in the sixth), didn’t cause inordinate stress. Two essential Met relievers, Huascar Brazoban and Ryne Stanek, returned to form, no letting the lead they were charged with protecting get reduced. And one of the Syracuse shuttlers did fine for himself. I’m just sorry it wasn’t the Syracuse shuttler I wanted to see.

Nothing against Chris Devenski, who pitched a scoreless ninth. Devenski deserves something beyond frequent flyer mileage for the way he spaces out his major league appearances. He’s pitched three times for the Mets this year: on April 30; on May 31; and June 21. But the space I had reserved in my heart once I learned who else was recalled Saturday (as Blade Tidwell and Justin Garza were thanked for their service with a demotion to Triple-A) went unfilled.

The Mets have brought up Tyler Zuber! Other than Tyler Zuber’s family, I don’t know if anybody else is bringing an exclamation point to bear over this news, but it’s big news to me. Once Zuber gets in a game, he becomes, as detailed here last summer, the alphabetical last Met in franchise history, bumping Don Zimmer to next-to-last. This has been a development more than 63 years in the making. It literally goes back to that first game, on April 11, 1962, when Casey Stengel wrote “Zimmer” on his lineup card, and no manager after him could go any deeper in the alphabet. The opportunity was there Saturday night for Carlos Mendoza to not only move his team back into first, but to move one of his players into last…which I’m sure Zuber is used to from teachers taking attendance. Alas, we settled for Chris Devenski meeting his monthly quota. And the Mets moving back into first place.

We’ll settle for such resolution to a lengthy losing streak any day, no matter what channel it’s on.