For a little while Wednesday night the Mets played non-embarrassing baseball. Which isn’t to say they were leading — they weren’t — but that they weren’t being beaten as badly as seemed likely at first.
Clay Holmes [1] pitched OK-adjacent, giving up two runs in the first but escaping far worse harm, and hung in there until the fifth, when he gave up a single and a run-scoring double, departing with the Mets down 3-1.
Enter Gregory Soto [2], who simultaneously has been quietly terrible and in the top half of the Mets’ trade-deadline acquisitions in terms of performance, which tells you all you need to know about how the trade deadline has turned out. Soto immediately allowed the inherited runner to score, escaped the fifth without further harm, and then fell apart in the sixth, putting the game out of reach.
To dwell further on the nightly failures of this increasingly woebegotten team would verge on sadism: The Mets are now 31-46 since June 13, the fourth-worst team in the majors, and the real story of this year increasingly is about the nearly three months in which we’ve tried to convince ourselves that they somehow aren’t the team we’ve been watching fall flat all summer. It’s pointless to scoreboard-watch and worry about a specific team on their heels in the wild-card hunt; as the SNY crew noted, if they don’t start winning games, someone is going to catch them.
A couple of miscellaneous notes before we put a merciful bow on this one [3]:
One culprit noted in the Mets’ summer swoon was their apparent passivity on fastballs. For a while the Mets seemed to have flipped the script on that, hunting fastballs and rejuvenating their offense (the pitching failed at the same time, alas). But now they look befuddled by fastballs again. To be fair, Ranger Suarez [4] and Cristopher Sanchez have pitched two beautiful games and would have been tough opponents against anybody. But the Mets were particularly hapless Wednesday night against Sanchez’s sinker. How did this lesson get unlearned?
Tuesday night saw Sean Manaea [5] display some bad body language coming off the mound, followed by Carlos Mendoza [6] hustling him into the tunnel for what seems to have been a firm talking-to. Which led to a long conversation in the booth Wednesday night about confidence and fight and a lot of other baseball stuff — a conversation I found deeply annoying.
Look, Manaea’s body language really was terrible, Mendoza really did haul him off by his ear, and he really did pitch better after that. But do you honestly believe Manaea’s nightmare of a year is due to a lack of confidence or fight? Or is it more likely that his struggles are because he has a loose body in his elbow? Isn’t it far more likely, in fact, that the injury is most of the problem?
Write this down: During some dull homestand next June or July, Manaea will quietly admit to Anthony DiComo or one of the Athletic beat guys that he couldn’t finish his pitches properly because of the elbow in 2025 but thought he could fight through it, or some variation of that.
Which is so much more interesting than this Just So story about confidence and fight: If you’re an injured player, what is your responsibility to your club? Where’s the line between gutting through it because you’re a gamer and admitting you’re too compromised to help your team win? That’s an old story for athletes — the most honest take [7] on it I can recall is from Bobby Ojeda — and it’s one that Keith Hernandez [8] and Ron Darling [9] know perfectly well. That’s the story I would have liked to hear and could have learned from, instead of an empty one I’ve heard innumerable times that’s never taught me anything.