Two Prizefighters

The Mets and Yankees spent Saturday afternoon wailing away at each other like concussed prizefighters, as balls were flying out of Citi Field and pitchers took the mound looking like they were bracing for impact.

The Mets struck first, with Brandon Nimmo connecting for a grand slam off Carlos Rodon in the bottom of the first. (After Juan Soto had bunted, which there’s no earthly reason for him to be doing.) Establishing a pattern, the Yankees punched back, though their top of the second only netted them a single run. It wasn’t until the ninth that the pattern broke down: The Mets scored in five separate innings and the Yankees answered back in four.

It wasn’t exactly a game for fans of nuance and small ball: The teams scored 18 runs total, 12 of them via home run — with each team hitting three. The difference was all three Yankees round-trippers were solo shots (Jazz Chisholm Jr., Austin Wells, Anthony Volpe), while the Mets’ homers were a grand slam (Nimmo), a two-run shot (Pete Alonso) and a three-run shot (Alonso again, off luckless major-league debutee Jayvien Sandridge).

The good news, beyond the final score being tilted in the direction of righteousness, was that the Mets finally looked like they’ve shaken off whatever malady wrecked the second half of June. They hit, they played crisp defense, they pitched … well, they pitched better than the other guys.

More on that in a minute; first, though, I have to brag about my predictive powers. Before the bottom of the seventh, I suggested the Mets might make the bullpen’s job easier by scoring, say, four runs. They immediately did so. I also suggested Alonso look for Sandridge’s first pitch and wail on it if he liked it; he did and did. (Rest assured the ~900 times I’m dead wrong before the next winning prediction will go unchronicled.)

Back to the pitching: Frankie Montas pitched better than his final line — he was removed in the sixth after getting nicked by an infield single and a pair of bloops, yet another reminder that baseball is fundamentally unfair. Before that he was both aggressive and effective, washing away the bad taste of the debacle in Pittsburgh. And after Montas’s departure, the Mets survived. Richard Lovelady got nicked for a homer but also advanced the Mets three outs closer to a win; Ryne Stanek and Edwin Diaz then finished up, with Stanek allowing a run but Diaz only contending with a single.

The presence of Stanek and Diaz stuck in my craw, though the braintrust did have an reason, which we’ll get to. Given how hard Stanek’s been worked recently, it was galling to see him come in with the Mets up six; and indeed Stanek’s stuff looked less than crisp and he wound up struggling through a 37-pitch inning, which almost certainly will leave him unavailable on Sunday. (The Mets’ plan for Sunday is to open with Chris Devenski, hand the ball to Brandon Waddell after that, and hope for the best.)

Nor, in isolation, did it make sense for Diaz to defend another six-run lead in the ninth, which might take him out of consideration for Sunday.

But “in isolation” is doing a lot of work here. Both complaints ignore when pitchers started warming. Stanek started throwing with the Mets up just two and searching for six outs; yes, they stretched the lead to six — but by then Stanek was already warm. The same Catch-22 then ensnared the Mets with Diaz, who started warming with Stanek leaking oil and the Yankees a long ball away from cutting the lead back to a perilous two.

So OK, the Mets had their reasons, and fell into a bit of bad luck. But we had our reasons for nervousness too. If it feels like the the Mets are looking no further than the game at hand, it’s probably because that’s exactly what they’re doing, frantically mixing and matching relievers and tapping anyone who can start and saving worries about tomorrow for tomorrow. The good news is that both reinforcements and a reset aren’t too far away: Kodai Senga and Sean Manaea may start before the All-Star break, and the break will let everyone in the beleaguered bullpen rest and reset.

Granted, that break is seven games away. Until those games are in the books, well, scoring 12 runs a game would paper over a lot of problems. It generally does.