Perhaps the only good thing about Wednesday night’s belated loss to the Braves was that I found it hard to take it personally.
I imagine it isn’t fun to watch from the root cellar as a tornado reduces the house to kindling. But I also imagine one doesn’t feel singled out to be in the path of something so huge; rather, I’d think, you’d feel a small, dismayed awe at witnessing something vast and impersonal cut a pitiless swath down the middle what you thought of as reality.
What does this have to do with baseball? Well, one moment the Mets were cruising along behind David Peterson [1], AKA Our Only Reliable Starting Pitcher. Francisco Lindor [2] had jump-started the offense in a way we hadn’t seen in weeks, Juan Soto [3] had homered, and the Mets were pouring it on against Old Friend Carlos Carrasco [4], who soldiered on gallantly despite having no respite in sight. It felt like the worm had turned, like the Mets might actually be OK from now on despite their long summer swoon.
And then … the sky went black, the siren wailed, and BLAMMO.
Before you could blink Peterson had lost the strike zone, surrendered 5/6 of the lead and departed in the fourth inning, a depressingly familiar sight for a Mets starter but a shocking one for him. Before you could blink again Reed Garrett [5] had served up a grand slam and the Mets were down by three.
Nine Atlanta runs in a half-hour from Hell. Citi Field sounded more … well actually it didn’t sound like anything at all. Shock is largely communicated via silence.
Go back a night to Tuesday, with the benefit of hindsight, and some patterns we didn’t want to acknowledge given polar bear-related celebrations [6] are all too visible. There, we also had a starter cough up what felt like a comfortable lead and depart with unseemly haste. That’s been one leg of the three-legged stool of suck for this team since June — unreliable starters not going deep, putting too much strain on overtaxed relievers, and the lineup too anemic to provide a counterweight. On Tuesday all that was masked as the lineup came through for once, letting the Mets outhit their mistakes. (And Justin Hagenman [7] stepped up in relief, for which his reward was of course a ticket back to Syracuse.)
Wednesday night? Same script, only this time the Braves’ outburst was too much to overcome. The writing was on the wall in the aftermath, when Starling Marte [8] singled with two outs and runners on first and second — all of us had watched enough baseball to know that Pete Alonso [9] would score from second, cutting the Atlanta lead to two runs, and we felt hope stir that maybe the Mets would rise up in indignation again.
Except Alonso … well, a day later I’m still not sure what happened to him. I turned away for a moment, looked back in shock when I realized there was a play at the plate, and was briefly baffled. Had Jeff McNeil [10] tried to score from first? But nope, that wasn’t it. Alonso had gotten a slow start off second, or blundered into quicksand rounding third, or been held back by an invisible rubber band, or something.
He was out, the Mets were still three runs down, and when Paul Blackburn [11] served up a homer to the loathsome Marcell Ozuna [12] I decided that I could sort through the wreckage [13] of the house in the morning.
But hey, at least I didn’t take it personally.