And I Came Back for This?

Ebbs and flows, flows and ebbs. A baseball season is filled with them — stretches in which a band of players watch everything they touch turn into Ws and others in which their incompetence is so bafflingly chronic that you half-believe it’s deliberate. Those who have played the game will always have a leg up in understanding that these ebbs and flows just happen and all one can do is endure them, probably because the wins and losses are part of the larger, unchanging routines that surround them. The players are riding the bus from the team hotel and taking infield and BP and going over enemy hitters and they see every day that everything is much the same, except for the glorious or tragic outcomes that emerge. And of course their pre- and postgame assessments are 80% cliches about one day at a time and not getting too high or low — the alternative would be staring into an existential abyss.

Which I suppose is why the baseball gods created bloggers.

If one must experience a long, maddening baseball ebb, I do highly recommend spending it sylphing around Umbria and Lisbon, with 95% of the horrors happening offstage while one sleeps off another night of rich meals and too much wine. The clock limited my encounters with the Mets to the occasional late-night glance at Gameday, followed by early-morning dismay and seeing what Greg had to say about the latest sad event. (Thanks partner — you definitely got a lot more/lot less than bargained for, depending how once sees these things.) Wait what, you’ve got to be kidding me, lather rinse repeat. The end of the losing streak was particularly welcome not just for the obvious reasons but also because for once I didn’t sleep through a fusillade of narrative-flipping enemy runs.

Emily and I landed at JFK at the end of the first inning Sunday, and our various travel snafus coincided with various disasters down in Philadelphia, witnessed via MLB Audio. David Peterson imploded while our plane was trundling around distant runways waiting for our gate to clear; just the sound of the contact made by Edmundo Sosa was enough to send my chin plummeting onto my breastbone. Nothing much good happened while Emily and I were waiting in a concourse-long line to reach Passport Control and be welcomed back to our native shores. Before our Lyft cleared JFK’s galaxy of access roads, the Mets had lost.

That’s a lot of waiting around unaccompanied by anything resembling good news. The game was drab and bad, with just a few things of note:

Francisco Alvarez has finally been sent down, which struck me as merciful. It’s been a season-long parade of horrors for Alvarez, with a broken hamate bone seeming to derail his efforts to refine his approach as a hitter, which leaked into his defense, and even the happy tidings of parenthood feeling like another ball to be juggled while in an increasingly cold sweat. Let’s wish Alvarez well and remember that he’s still just 23, with plenty of time.

Tyler Zuber made his debut, elbowing past the legendary Don Zimmer to occupy the coveted spot reserved for Mets All-Time Roster caboose and paving the way for the publication of the tome From Aardsma to Zuber: Middle Relievers Who Don’t Remember You Either. I’ve had an old Topps Heritage Zuber in waiting since Zuber’s acquisition at last summer’s trade deadline and just got a 2025 Syracuse Mets card for him, so at least in The Holy Books everything’s coming up Zuber.

Keith Raad did a good job as a solo radio act, a la Vin Scully: He was bright, engaged and cheerful even amid dolorous Mets-related doings. If only he’d been given events we’d want chronicled, let alone revisited.

Francisco Lindor homered but the Mets didn’t win, putting an end to a quirky 28-game streak that was one shy of the big-league record held by Carl Furillo and the 1951-53 Brooklyn Dodgers. Lindor homering is certainly still a good idea, regardless of its accuracy as a portent, and I suggest he keep doing that. Maybe I’ll even be here for the next few!