McNeil Above the Marquee

Friday’s late-afternoon sun bathed Jeff McNeil’s chin in enough of a glow to make the touch of gray in his beard quite noticeable to me. Live long enough, and that kid who had torn up Binghamton and Las Vegas so much that he forced a callup and a trade of the veteran in front of him becomes kind of an old player.

Of course McNeil wasn’t exactly a kid when he first crossed the general Mets fan radar in 2018. At 26, he’d never been hailed as a comer the way the various erstwhile Baby Mets we’ve been waiting patiently to emerge into full-blown stardom were. At 33, he’s had his brushes with above-the-marquee prominence, but few have been the enticements to come out to see Jeff McNeil and the Mets. When healthy, he’s usually in the “and the Mets” part of the package, positioned as needed, transcending Super Joe-type utility, if not ever completely releasing his inner Zobrist. Slumps and snits and injuries sometimes get the best of him. There’s a reason “Happy Jeff” arose as a meme. Happy Jeff isn’t always visible. Jeff McNeil as an idea is usually one step shy of Jeff McNeil the ideal.

On Friday, however, good ol’ Jeff McNeil was the first Met you thought of when you considered how the Mets topped the Yankees, 6-5, at Citi Field. The Fourth of July game featured several heartening performances, but it was our very own Squirrel putting us the hell ahead and keeping us the hell there. You always brace for Jeff McNeil to raise a little hell on the baseball field. He’s a carrier.

McNeil at the bat launched a no-doubter of a home run to right in the seventh inning, no doubts detected as long as its flight path remained fair. It did. The Mets were down, 5-4, before Jeff swung. The New Yorks flipped on the scoreboard as soon as he touched home plate, where he was embraced by the runner who’d been on base when he batted, Pete Alonso. Pete Alonso has sat above the marquee ever since he arrived in Flushing, temporally a little behind McNeil. They were having a great run in Triple-A together seven years ago. You tend to forget they’ve been together all this time.

Mets 6 Yankees 5 was hard earned. Yankees 2 Mets 0 was immediate. Our starter, Justin Hagenman, gave up back-to-back homers to Jasson Dominguez and Aaron Judge to commence the very first inning. You don’t want to extrapolate what the “at this pace” will work out to from there, but Hagenman, who had the ball because there was essentially nobody else to give it to, changed the calculation. Making his first start in the majors, Justin adjusted and stopped giving up home runs to Yankees. That’s our idea of stepping up. Soon after, a former Mets starter, Marcus Stroman, gave up a two-run homer to a former Yankees star, Juan Soto, and we had a clean slate as of the bottom of the first.

We haven’t missed Stroman since his departure following 2021. That was another Mets era. But Jeff McNeil was here then. Jeff McNeil has played with a lot of Mets we haven’t missed as well as a few we remember fondly. The veteran who McNeil bumped from second base in 2018 was Asdrubal Cabrera. Cabrera we remember primarily for one bat-flipping, arms-raising home run amid the crescendo of 2016’s Wild Card surge. Cabrera will be back for the Alumni Classic. Jeff and Asdrubal overlapped a little. Hell, Jeff and David Wright overlapped for approximately a minute. Those touching images of Wright waving goodbye at the end of his final September, when David manned his signature base for a few precious innings, steps away from his baseball brother Jose Reyes? It was Wright at third, Reyes at short, and Jeff McNeil on second that night. The rookie was making his bid to join the 2006 division winners.

Reyes will be at that Alumni Classic on September 13, and at Wright’s number retirement ceremony and team Hall of Fame induction on July 19. David and Jose were two above-the-marquee Mets in their day. Their day was long, and stands as eternal, but their apogee was ages ago. Yet they were teammates of Jeff McNeil in the first of Jeff’s thus far eight Met seasons. That will happen around guys who’ve been here forever. In Metsopotamia, eight seasons qualifies as forever.

Some guys you want to be here forever. Someday we’ll say Juan Soto has been here forever, assuming contracts hold and catastrophes hold off. We are in the part of Soto’s extended stay when we are delighted that he’s on the books to be a Met into eternity. The National League’s Player of the Month for June put an early stamp on July with that tying homer in the first, then an authoritative double in the third, which set up the first go-ahead Met run of the day, when Alonso singled to make it Mets 3 Yankees 2. Juan as baserunner read the situation perfectly and slid home ahead of a throw that might have nabbed a less cognizant pair of legs. Juan Soto in July isn’t Juan Soto from May, when the Subway Series all but crashed on his head. Juan Soto is head and shoulders above the crowd these days.

I know, we were talking about Jeff McNeil, but Jeff wasn’t alone in taking down the Yankees the day after the Toronto Blue Jays took the Yankees down from first place in the AL East. We’re not supposed to care too much about what the Yankees are down to, but since they were up next on our schedule, I felt it was due diligence to observe they’d been swept four in Canada. They’re still the Yankees, whatever that means, and these games against them are still what they are, whatever that means. In practical terms, it means Aaron Judge comes to bat once every nine men. We don’t have to ruminate on what that can mean.

Hagenman struck out Judge to end the third, right before Soto and Alonso teamed up to create a Met lead. Hagenman also gave up the home run to Cody Bellinger that retied matters in the fourth, but in light of many a Mets fan likely thinking “Justin Whogenman?” when the game began, he did all right for himself by going four-and-a-third and leaving it at 3-3. Unfortunately, his final baserunner, DJ LeMahieu, trotted in on Dominguez’s second homer of the day, surrendered by Austin Warren. If you’re lining up your pitching for the Subway Series, your plan isn’t Hagenman until the fifth, then Warren, but you don’t make pitching plans if you’re the Mets. You just ask for volunteers.

Warren didn’t give up anything else of substance. Neither did Stroman, though there was another Soto single on his ledger in the fifth. If you were optimistic, it appeared the day would be all about what Juan Soto did next. If you were pessimistic, Aaron Judge’s name would be in that spot. Above-the-marquee names elbow their way into your consciousness during a spotlight series.

With thoughts floating from Soto to Judge and back, here came Ian Hamilton to pitch the bottom of the sixth, and here came Brett Baty, one of those erstwhile Baby Mets, growing up a little more and homering to tie the game at four. The Mets of Hagenman and Warren would arrive in the seventh even. The Mets of the relievers you know better would take over. Those Mets are their own challenge.

Son of a gun, though, Huascar Brazoban returned to the land of the viable in the seventh by pitching a scoreless inning that included a strikeout of Judge. And in the bottom of the inning, we had McNeil performing that aforementioned heroic deed of his, homering off Luke Weaver with Alonso on first.

A most heroic deed, indeed,, but not the most heroic deed the old gray Squirrel would come up with. In support of Reed Garrett — himself struggling to emerge from a Brazobanian zone of purgatory — we’d take notice of McNeil at second. That’s where he was playing on Friday. Sometimes he plays center. We’ve seen him in left and right over the years. Third, too, though lately, what with all the erstwhile Baby Mets learning to crawl as major leaguers with the Hot Corner as their playpen, venerable Jeff prowls other environs. McNeil was a second baseman when we first made his acquaintance. McNeil will be a second baseman when we rush to embrace him when Friday is over, à la Alonso’s greeting for Jeff after that seventh-inning homer. But we’ll get to that.

First, Reed Garrett, huh? On Thursday night, Carlos Mendoza required the services of Ryne Stanek and Edwin Diaz to quell the Brewers. That was an important game to win, just as Mendy needed Ryne and Edwin for Brewer-quelling on Wednesday night. Oh, that was an important game, too. When you’ve very recently been a team losing fourteen of seventeen, every win in your grasp is important. Every grasp at a win figures to merit your two main relievers. But the Mets, so rarely within win-grasping range over the previous three weeks, somehow retained the institutional memory to remember you can’t run out to the mound every single day high-leverage relievers who each give it their all every appearance, necessity notwithstanding.

So no Stanek, no Diaz. Instead, two innings of Reed Garrett, a righty who had less hype when he arrived in our midst in 2023 than Jeff McNeil did in 2018. We reflexively dismissed Garrett as another arm that had fallen off the churn-it truck. Garrett persevered to make a back-end staple out of himself, a circle-of-trustee, if you will. A little off and on, a little up and down, the way almost all relievers are, yet in bullpen parlance a Mets fan considers the highest praise available, he never totally sucked so much that you automatically groaned at the first sight of him warming up.

Though, lately, he has come close to totally sucking. But this was the Fourth of July. This was the opener to the Subway Series. This was a time to believe in our guys. This was a time for our guys to deliver. This was a time for Reed Garrett to face four Yankees in the eighth inning, retire three of them, and allow no runs. It took him fourteen pitches, all of them pressure-packed. But he did the job of a setup man, setting up somebody to protect a lead in the ninth.

What he did was set himself up, because there was no way Reed Garrett was coming out of the ballgame. The bullpen depth chart was in tatters. Go be a closer, Reed. That one-run lead is still a one-run lead in the ninth. Make like Randy Bachman and Fred Turner and take care of business.

Oh, and if you don’t mind, kick it into overdrive and face only three batters in this inning because the fourth Yankee up will be Aaron Judge. Nothing personal, but we don’t want you to face him. We don’t want any Met to face him. He’s Aaron Judge. You understand, don’t you, Reed?

Assignment clear, Reed lined out 2022 NLWCS nemesis Trent Grisham to Brandon Nimmo in left for the first out. Then he teased something of a bouncer out of former batting champion LeMahieu. Oh, it was something, all right. DJ, himself an almost-37-year-old second baseman who’s made himself useful at other postings around the diamond, earned a crown in each league when he was quite a bit younger. Jeff the Queens Army Knife earned his own Champion of Batting title in the senior circuit three years ago. Maybe these two understand one another intrinsically. Maybe it’s why LeMahieu directed his full-count bouncer in the vicinity of McNeil. Maybe it’s why McNeil recognized the bouncer as anything but simple.

The ball, didn’t take its one solitary bounce until it was on the edge of the right field grass. Shifts having been outlawed, Jeff was stationed on the infield dirt, where a second baseman is supposed to be. Unfortunately, the ball was headed well to his left. Fortunately, Jeff recognized its trajectory as it remained in the air. A diagonal dive toward right and an informed lunge smothered the would-be liner after its blessedly brief bounce. Then Jeff was the one doing the bouncing, to his feet, as he grabbed the ball from his glove and fired it to Alonso to cut down LeMahieu.

Two out. If Garrett gets the next batter, Hammerin’ Yank Aaron’s last swing of the day is in the on-deck circle. On Reed’s 29th pitch, Dominguez grounded out simply to McNeil to make it so. The game was over. Mets 6 Yankees 5, see Judge tomorrow.

The old gray Squirrel, he is what he used to be.

See McNeil and appreciate a lifelong Met. We expended so much anxiety on Alonso’s decision to stay a Met last winter (and might resume contemplation of his destination again this winter, opt-out pending), that it probably didn’t cross our minds that Jeff McNeil was going on his eighth season as one of us, one of ours. He signed an extension a few years ago. Our 2B-CF of the moment is under contract through 2026, with a club option for 2027. He’ll have ten seasons as a Met by then should nothing derail his presence among us. He encounters approximately one significant ding per year, so his statlines tend to get interrupted by trips to places he assumed he outgrew by his mid-twenties. Fans in St. Lucie, Brooklyn, Binghamton, and Syracuse have all grabbed glimpses of the rehabbing Squirrel. He received a special dispensation to get up to speed in the Arizona Fall League last October because he had been hurt prior to the playoffs, and the Mets wanted him back for the NLCS. He drove in a few runs against L.A., but wasn’t really himself.

Jeff McNeil was himself and then some on Friday. Jeff McNeil hit the lead-taking homer, made the lead-preserving play, and earned himself a piece of above-the-marquee Subway Series history. You know The Dave Mlicki Game. You know The Matt Franco Game. You know The Mister Koo Game. You’ve just met The Jeff McNeil Game. It’s not like you haven’t met Jeff McNeil before, but it’s always nice to remind ourselves who he can be.