Did any fanbase need a laugher more than we did?
OK, maybe Tuesday night wasn’t exactly a laugher — call it a chuckler, perhaps — but a five-run first and a pair of homers in the second took away a lot of the tension, allowing us to monitor the “piggyback” experiment that saw Sean Manaea [1] take over for Clay Holmes [2] with relative dispassion. (And it went pretty well!)
Facing Michael King [3] — like Holmes a Yankee reliever turned starter for someone else — in the bottom of the first, the Mets singled four straight times to take a 1-0 lead. Mark Vientos [4] (who hit in buzzard’s luck all night) then spanked a ball right back to King, kicking off a 1-2-3 double play that seemed like it might scuttle hopes for a big inning. But not so fast: Jeff McNeil [5] doubled in two and Brett Baty [6] crashed a homer into Carbonation Ridge for a 5-0 lead. An inning later, Francisco Lindor [7] homered off King and Pete Alonso [8] absolutely annihilated a baseball, sending it into the rarely explored second deck above the Great Wall of Flushing.
The Padres poked at the Mets with a pair of solo shots off Holmes and another one off Manaea, but the game never felt particularly in doubt [9], and after three months of pretty much nothing but doubt, that felt pretty good.
* * *
Emily and I briefly interrupted cheering on the Mets to switch over to Milb.tv, where the Brooklyn Cyclones were playing for the South Atlantic League title in Spartanburg, S.C., against the rather amazingly monikered Hub City Spartanburgers. The Cyclones won, 2-1, and are league champs.
It was an odd year for the Cyclones: They crushed the Sally League’s northern division in the first half with a 46-20 record, then went 26-39 in the second half. That first half was largely engineered by guys who moved on to Binghamton (which also has its eyes on a title), but it gave their successors a playoff berth, and they played beautifully when it mattered [10], going on a 4-0 run against Greensboro and Hub City for a title. Flags fly forever; here’s to seeing a new one fluttering over Coney Island next year.