At the Center of the Circus

On the day Jonah Tong was born — Thursday, June 19, 2003 — the Mets lost 5-1 to the Marlins at Soilmaster Stadium. Mike Bacsik gave up an early three-run homer to Mike Lowell, things got worse in the fifth, and a dreary game eventually expired. I’m sure I was watching and also glad I don’t remember wasting that particular two and a half hours of my life.

The win let the Marlins leap-frog the Mets, leaving them last in the NL East. The Marlins would keep leap-frogging, finish with 91 wins and a wild-card slot, and eventually defeat the Yankees in the World Series, for which I’m grudgingly grateful. I still have a Yankees’ 2003 World Series champs shirt, intercepted between some warehouse and a no doubt now-shuttered foreign-aid program, and wear it proudly when invited to Yankee Stadium.

The 2003 Mets? Yeesh. That was the club of Roberto Alomar, of Vance Wilson and Jason Phillips and the Mets’ A/V staff assembling their highlights to “Hold On” by Wilson Phillips (getit?), of getting swept by the Yankees in humiliating fashion, of nepo baby brother Mike Glavine getting his first and last big-league hit the day the season mercifully came to an end. Faith and Fear in Flushing didn’t exist yet and that’s for the best, because I’m not sure we would have made it through chronicling 2003.

Tong grew up in Ontario, learned his craft under the tutelage of his father — complete with mechanics that look Xeroxed from Tim Lincecum‘s — and was drafted by the Mets in 2022. In 2023 he struck out seemingly half the world in the low minors but walked the other half of the world. But things improved in 2024 after he added a Tyler Glasnow-esque slider to his repertoire, and accelerated this year thanks to a much-refined changeup. That brought Tong from Binghamton to a toe touch with Syracuse and then on Friday night to Citi Field.

After we watched Nolan McLean decimate the Phillies on Wednesday, Jordan realized Tong’s debut was imminent and reasonably inexpensive seats were available on StubHub … hey, why not? (By the way, my kid is somehow eight months older than Jonah Tong … how the hell do these things happen?) So we abandoned a trio of Brooklyn Cyclones tickets to see a recent-vintage Brooklyn Cyclone instead.

What we got was a circus, and — if you looked closely — a promising MLB debut at the center of all the nutty stuff spinning around it.

As is often the case when you’ve attended a game in-person, I can’t tell you anything about Tong’s stuff, mechanics, or location that you couldn’t describe far better if you were watching on TV: He was a little figure in black from our vantage point down the left-field line deep in the 100s. What I can tell you is that the crowd was a friendly force behind him, greeting his arrival rapturously, exploding for his first strikeout, and standing in delight when he navigated a fifth inning made harder by his own stone-gloved teammates. (What is up with that, and could it please stop?)

The crowd knew Tong was only going five, they knew his escalating pitch count was putting even that goal in jeopardy despite the score, and they became a many-voiced rugby scrum fighting to keep Carlos Mendoza in the dugout and push Tong through the last few pitches he needed. It was Mets fandom at its informed, passionate bordering on mildly crazy best, and it was fun to be a part of it.

The circus part? That was more than mildly crazy.

The Mets jumped Eury Perez — a pretty capable young pitcher in his own right — for five in the first, courtesy of homers from Juan Soto and Brandon Nimmo. The outburst, while welcome, meant Tong sat in the dugout for nearly half an hour, not easy given any pitcher making his debut already has to contend with the sag in adrenaline after a first frame. The Mets then mauled recent-vintage teammate Tyler Zuber for seven in the second, another welcome explosion of run support that was necessarily paired with another half-hour of idleness for Tong. Somewhere Mike Pelfrey was smiling, while Jacob deGrom perhaps frowned and allowed himself a brief shake of the head. Asked about the up-downs later, a Gatorade-drenched Tong showed a precocious knack for postgame-interview diplomacy over candor, saying with a smile that he’ll never complain about run support.

(A personal aside: An oddity of my recent Mets viewing has been that I’d never seen Pete Alonso go deep. That came with an asterisk, however; Greg — who’d know — says he was with me when the Polar Bear homered, though he allowed that said round-tripper required replay review. It was nice to finally witness an unambiguous Alonso homer, complete with Marlins right fielder Joey Wiemer caroming off the Cadillac Club’s chain-link fence for some reason.)

With Tong departed and the Mets up 12-4, the game got truly weird.

I got an in-person look at Ryan Helsley‘s “Hells Bells” intro, an orgy of high camp that would be tut-tutted at as too on the nose if it were part of an Eastbound & Down bit. How has it not occurred to someone with the Mets — starting with Helsley — that the A/V team might want to cool it for the foreseeable future? Helsley put up a clean inning, but don’t be fooled: He left too many pitches in the middle of the plate and was bailed out by Marlins missing pitches and some solid defense.

Come the eighth inning and things got truly ridiculous: The Marlins sent second baseman Javier Sanoja to the mound to get hammered, with Luis Torrens‘ three-run drive just inside the left-field pole giving every member of the starting lineup a hit. The Mets countered by sending Torrens out there for the ninth with a 19-5 lead; after Torrens gave up back-to-back homers, a single and an RBI triple, Mendoza popped out of the dugout, perhaps wiping some egg off his face, to summon Ryne Stanek.

(Would you like to be the reliever called upon after a position player? No, you would not.)

At this point, we all had the equivalent of an ice-cream headache: The game had gone on far too long and degenerated from joyous to mildly diverting to embarrassing. Because baseball is endlessly perverse, Stanek looked better than he had in weeks, needing just eight pitches to fan Eric Wagaman and Wiemer and send the Mets into the dugout with a 19-9 win while baseball brains (led by Greg, whom I emailed as soon as I got to the subway) pored over the first-times and assorted oddities.

Such as the most runs the Mets had ever scored in a home game. Such as a unicorn score — the Mets had never won by a 19-9 margin. (The 17-3 final line for Pelfrey’s debut was also a unicorn score, BTW.) Such as Torrens becoming the first Mets position player to toe the rubber in a win.

Years from now, it’ll be interesting to see what we remember from Tong’s debut. Maybe it will be that ungodly curve and riding fastball, now familiar qualities that we were then seeing for the first time.  Maybe it will be the weird cameos from guys we think of as wearing other uniforms. (“Oof, Ryan Helsley — boy did that not work out.”) Maybe it will be the zaniness of everything else that transpired on a lovely summer night at Citi Field.

For now, though, I think it will be a bit of a relief to see what David Peterson and Edward Cabrera get up to in a few hours. Let’s play a normal one, OK fellas?