Good Hang with Frankie Montas

I was hanging out with Frankie Montas Tuesday night, though not as soon I’d planned. Thank the Long Island Rail Road and its “signal problems” and “scattered delays” for making sure I wouldn’t see the veteran’s first pitches as a Met. If I didn’t see his first pitches, I wondered if I’d see any, based on the dismal numbers associated with Montas’s rehab tuneups. The stats suggested his engine wasn’t quite revving. What would happen first: my series of trains depositing me at Citi Field or Frankie making his way to the showers, and not because of the allure a nice, cool shower held on a hot evening like this?

Frankie Montas’s first inning as a Met I heard through the one working earbud of my trusty pocket radio while on the 7 from Woodside. He got out of it.

Frankie Montas’s second inning as a Met I heard on the Mets Plaza loudspeakers. I wasn’t focused on whatever he had gotten into, but he got out of that, too.

Frankie Montas’s third inning I saw on the large monitor that keeps Promenade food courters apprised of the game inside. The starting pitcher emerged unscathed, or at least unscored upon.

Me and my seat got together for the fourth and fifth. Frankie was still on the mound and still getting Braves out. Frankie Montas wound up pitching five innings, and by the time he was no longer pitching, the Mets had scored three off Spencer Strider. They appeared clutch on his behalf, like the team we remember before they were overtaken by their current skid. Montas, the man I was late and, to be honest, hesitant to see, was suddenly the best starting pitcher the Mets had, based on recent results, his own and those of his rotationmates.

I was hanging out with Dicky Lovelady Tuesday night, though not after things with some other Met relievers had gone awry. Dicky Lovelady is a Met reliever, by the way. So are Huascar Brazoban, Jose Castillo, and Reed Garrett. They shared the sixth inning, the inning after Montas fired his eightieth and final pitch. I wished my trains had moved faster. I wished our starter had lasted longer. None among Brazoban, Castillo, or Garrett is what you’d have called Montasian on Tuesday night. They combined to give up five runs to Atlanta in the top of the sixth. It was a long half-inning. It was still light out when Brazoban came on. It was dark when Garrett finally ended it. Very dark.

Darkness descends on Citi Field. A lot of it.

But then we had Dicky Lovelady, and if you can’t enjoy the first Met outing of Dicky Lovelady, you probably shouldn’t be sitting in 94-degree heat watching him. Dicky, a journeyman lefty who officially goes by Richard but prefers you call him Dicky, cooled off the Braves in the seventh, setting them down 1-2-3. More Dicky Lovelady was the only thing I wanted in the eighth. The Mets were still losing, 5-3, and by the time Dicky was pulled in favor of Dedniel Nuñez — the first Dedniel-for-Dicky exchange in franchise history — the Mets were losing, 6-3. By the time Dedniel finished Dicky’s second inning, the Mets were losing, 7-3. The night air wasn’t substantially cooler, and the front office remained dissatisfied enough with its relief pitching that it was planning to call up another new arm, that belonging to righty Jonathan Pintaro, whose 2025 experience to date has topped out at Double-A. Everybody comes. Everybody goes. The bullpen is neither stable nor reliable. I don’t know who goes down to make room for Jonathan Pintaro.

In case it’s Dicky Lovelady, at least I got to see Dicky Lovelady pitch for the New York Mets. If the bullpen has done anything well of late, it’s make the all-time Met roster read interesting.

Mr. Lovelady, your warmup music is waiting.

I was hanging out with my friend Kevin Tuesday night. Under optimal circumstances, the hanging would have commenced an hour or more before first pitch, but optimal circumstances on the part of the LIRR and me were hard to come by, so we met on the plaza with Montas taking care of the second inning; went through security (which didn’t search my bag for the sealed 20-ounce bottle of diet cola I didn’t bring after my last staredown with them); and hustled up to Promenade. The hustle took several detours until we decided, ah, let’s get some of those messy steak frites from Pat LaFrieda and eat them at one of those picnic tables while we keep an eye on the action on the large food court monitor. I hadn’t done that in the middle of a game for a long time. I hadn’t been this late for a game in a long time.

The hanging out was on. It’s always the highlight of Kevin’s and my annual Mets-Braves game, because our Mets-Braves games tend to be short on highlights from a Mets perspective. This one at least had Frankie Montas surprising everybody with his effectiveness, Dicky Lovelady gratifying us with his presence, and one of those “maybe they’ll pull it out in the ninth” rallies that I egg on with roughly a quarter sincerity. The other three-quarters of me is thinking about what train I’ll be able to get at Woodside, provided signal problems and scattered delays have been solved. Win or lose, I could hang out with Kevin all night. But catching a train is catching a train.

The rally held promise. It even produced a run, driven in by Ronny Mauricio, who might as well make himself useful between strikeouts. The tying run came to the plate in the person of Francisco Lindor. That’s the person you’d ask to tie the game. We would have settled for Lindor simply continuing the rally and the game, given that there were two out. Get on and let Brandon Nimmo win it. Or Nimmo can keep things going after Lindor and we can have Juan Soto win it. Soto scored our first run. Jeff McNeil drove him in with a sac fly. Brett Baty drove in the other two way back in the fourth. Those were heady times. By the ninth, we’d forgotten the Mets were capable of scoring three runs in a single inning, at least until they got baserunners on and Lindor up with their deficit trimmed to three.

Lindor grounded out. The Mets lost, 7-4. It was their hundredth loss in their last 101 games, or felt like it. But I watched it with Kevin, which is always a treat. Every game we go to encompasses every season the Mets have played, essentially. We make a lot of detours while in our seats. But we couldn’t make the Mets win.

After parting ways with Kevin on the 7 at Woodside, I found myself hanging out with Tom. Tom was as much a stranger to me Tuesday night as Dicky Lovelady had been. At least I’d heard of Dicky Lovelady. Tom was a guy waiting on the LIRR platform at Woodside for the Babylon line train, same train I was waiting for. He noticed my game bag, the one with the Shea Stadium Final Season logo and told me he went to Shea as a kid. Well, yeah, I thought, we all went to Shea as a kid. Kids today go to Citi Field. I rode in on the slow trains with bunches of kids — teens, technically — who know Shea only as history if they’re aware of it at all. Kevin and I take time at every one of our game to romanticize Shea. We agreed at this game we’ll never feel that kind of romantic about Citi Field, but that’s OK. The kids on my train (when they’re not loudly consumed by picking parlays on FanDuel) will have that privilege when they are older.

Before I could join Tom in a Shea reverie, he changed the subject to a player he remembered as a kid playing there: Rey Ordoñez. Tom had been a shortstop as a kid. Played it in school, all the way up to college. He’s 40, still rather athletic. Said he “used to” really follow the Mets, but it seemed to me he knew his contemporary stuff. I asked him if he thought we were gonna pull out of this tailspin. Athlete that he is, he said, yeah, there’s 162 games, everybody overreacts. I know that deep down, but I also reach places deeper down where “it’s a long season” logic encounters signal problems.

But we didn’t really stay on the contemporary Mets. We stayed on shortstops. I said Rey was the greatest I ever saw in the field. “Couldn’t hit,” but boy could he field. Tom brought up Ozzie Smith, though he admitted he didn’t see that much of him. Was also really impressed by Rafael Furcal, particularly his arm. I threw in Omar Vizquel as another defender who took grounders and breath away. I got the sense that Tom walks around with a lot of baseball in his subconscious and doesn’t necessarily get to share it with those he comes across in his daily life. One night, some guy is carrying a bag that has a logo from a long-ago ballpark, and Tom is off to the memory races.

We talked shortstops. We talked greatest hitters we’ve ever seen. I’m older, so I’ve seen more of them. Tom relates to their skills, so he understands better than I do what it took for Barry Bonds, “steroids or no steroids,” to lay off any pitch he didn’t like. I threw out some names. Tom threw out some names. Eventually we were onto pitchers. Our train had come. Discovering that our eastbound stops were a town apart, we sat together and kept the conversation going, better than the Mets kept their ninth-inning rally going. Some tangent led him to tell me he once golfed with Tim Teufel. He produced a picture on his phone of the two of them together. Outstanding human being, Tom said of Tim.

Tom’s stop preceded mine. Before he departed, we shook hands and, for the first time, exchanged names. “Tom.” “Greg.” Our names, rather than those of major league legends Seaver and Maddux. A brief hang between erstwhile strangers, but one bulging with baseball, a subject that will familiarize people on the way home from a game in a hurry. You could do worse in the wake of yet another loss to Atlanta.