Emily and I spent Saturday getting to the summer house in Maine and starting to return it to a vague state of habitability, so the Mets and their adventures were less the centerpiece of Saturday’s doings and more of an accent, followed in spurts and snatches as other things transpired.
Those brief looks, however, revealed the Mets to be as confounding as they’ve been all season. They were ahead, they were not ahead but also not behind, they were behind, they were ahead, they were way ahead. It was relaxing near the end, when their way aheadness reached a level [1] where only, say, a recent vintage Pirates fan needed to worry [2]. Before that, though? Brows were furrowed, as threatens to be their default brow position.
Kodai Senga [3] was not great, and hasn’t been great since returning from the IL. Senga, for all his talent, is something of a Ferrari: sublime when running in tip-top shape, but all too often in the shop or in need of a mechanic’s attention.
As for the Mets’ Big Four, those occasionally roaring but also occasionally sputtering engines of offense, they did their jobs for the afternoon: Brandon Nimmo [4], Francisco Lindor [5], Pete Alonso [6] and Juan Soto [7] went 9 for 17 on the day, racking up 10 of the Mets’ 11 RBIs. Alonso was front and center, connecting for his 250th homer in the first off the Giants’ Kai-Wei Teng [8], who was making his first big league start.
Alonso is now three homers from passing Darryl Strawberry [9] and claiming the franchise mark for his own; he also has 86 RBIs with two months of baseball to play. For all that, it’s been a strange year: The Polar Bear started off looking like a strike-zone light switch had gone on, with bait sliders and pitches best addressed with an oar no longer swung at, but that mental strike zone had ballooned of late, with a corresponding lack of success.
And he’s far from alone: Lindor keeps having a day or two where you think he’s out of the woods and returning to MVP form, only to plunge back into dark hitless forests; Nimmo has blown hot and cold as an offensive force; and Soto has been bizarrely ineffective in clutch situations and currently ineffective in any situation, which is little short of stunning for a player who’s been billed, not sardonically, as the “modern Ted Williams [10].”
For a day the offensive blueprint worked — aided, it should be said, by some slapstick Giants defense that culminated with poor Tristan Beck [11] left out there to take a beating while his teammates averted their eyes from his plight. Tyler Rogers [12], the last of the Mets’ deadline acquisitions to suit up, made his debut against his old team; Rogers combined with Reed Garrett [13], Gregory Soto [14], Brooks Raley [15] and Rico Garcia [16] to build on the not much that Senga had given the Mets, with only Garcia scored upon and that coming in a situation when he was just trying to get the game over with.
David Stearns’ deadline strategy has been an interesting one, and to my eyes a logical one: The Mets simply aren’t going to get the consistent length from their starters that they’d hoped for, and weren’t willing to pay the prospect cost for fixing this problem on the trade market, so they opted to rent top-flight relief arms for the sixth and seventh innings. The river’s not getting narrower, so let’s build a big honking bridge, more or less.
It’s not a crazy strategy — we saw the Dodgers employ it against us, after all — and the prospect cost was mostly back of the pantry stuff. I’ll be curious, in a dispassionate baseball sense, to see if it works; I’ll be highly invested, in an insane Mets fan sense, to see if it works.
For a day it did; the Mets ended the day back in first place, having leapfrogged the Phillies yet again. Those two teams have seven left to play, and if you listen closely you can hear the war drums getting closer. Will the outcome, for us, be confounding? Amazing? Here’s betting on guaranteed portions of both.