Here’s a sign of progress: The Mets lost, and I wasn’t mad at them.
Last week? I was incensed to an unhealthy degree by everything they did wrong, waiting with teeth bared for them to shoot themselves in the foot again. But Wednesday night? Yes, David Peterson [1] gave up a grand slam to turn a 2-2 tie into a 6-2 Padres lead that would prove insurmountable, and no, Peterson shouldn’t do things like that. But he gave it up to Manny Machado [2], who’s an awfully good player and an even better one with the bases loaded.
Even down by four, the Mets kept scratching and clawing, working good at-bats against a parade of San Diego relievers — and coming within a whisker or two of pulling out an unlikely victory.
Whatever else you say about it, that was a deeply weird baseball game.
Dom Hamel [3] escaped the first-ever run put on his big-league ledger when Luis Arraez [4] got thrown out at second a moment before Elias Diaz [5]‘s foot touched home plate — and Diaz had broken it down because Machado, who thinks everything is best done cool and casual, indicated he should ease up. (Congratulations to Hamel on escaping ectoplasm as a Mets ghost — and for becoming the Mets’ MLB-record 46th pitcher used this year. I’ll contain my excitement about the record, though, because cycling arms on and off the roster is the new normal and you can bet someone will use 47 pitchers next year.)
Francisco Alvarez [6] got the Mets within two runs by driving a ball off the very top of the orange padding in right-center, a ball that bounced straight up before coming back, Dave Augustine-style, to Fernando Tatis Jr. [7] The umps conferred and ruled it a home run, for reasons best left unexplored if you’re a Met fan, because I still have no idea what it hit that wasn’t orange padding or how the umpires determined that.
Then there was Juan Soto [8], who came up as the tying run in the seventh against Mason Miller [9], who really probably could throw a ball through a wall if he chose to. Miller got ahead of Soto 1-2 on a trio of fastballs all north of 100 MPH, changed Soto’s eye line with a slider below the zone, and then went back to the gas. That’s a time-honored way of getting anybody out, but Soto isn’t anybody: He whistled the ball down the left-field line, two or three inches on the wrong side of the foul pole. (Miller, undeterred, came back with a perfectly placed slider on the outside of the zone to fan Soto, then got Pete Alonso [10] on an all-slider diet. Dude is good.)
And oh that ninth inning: Brett Baty [11] turned in a very solid AB against Padres closer Robert Suarez [12], rapping a leadoff single on the seventh pitch. Alvarez, who looked compromised by his various busted fingers, made an out, as did Mark Vientos [13], pinch-hitting for Cedric Mullins [14]. (A bit of an odd decision: Vientos couldn’t tie the game and is much slower than Mullins.) Francisco Lindor [15] worked a walk to give Soto another chance to tie the game, and Soto turned Suarez’s fifth pitch into a bullet up the middle — one that, alas, Suarez corralled with some combination of glove, hand and midsection.
That’s a loss [16] — an unfortunate one, to be sure, but not one where the Mets let the roof cave in on them or seemed to sleepwalk through the proceedings. They pushed and pushed in a game that felt like it gave us everything — well, everything except the W.