Defiance isn’t really in our wheelhouse as Mets fans.
Hope? Sure. The sunny version sometimes, though generally that’s only seen in the abstract. Stubborn, scared, trampled but still inexhaustible hope? Now we’re talking — whenever Tug McGraw‘s famous YA GOTTA BELIEVE is invoked, I hear not just the hope but also the desperation — the burden being carried by GOTTA. (To say nothing of the snark — McGraw was totally mocking the highly mockable M. Donald Grant, and despite later mythmaking, at the beginning that’s all he was doing.)
But hey, we contain multitudes. Sometimes defiance gets its day.
In the top of the third Monday night against the Nats, the Mets turned in the kind of inning that contributed to their long post-June swoon. Brandon Sproat started off taking aim at his own foot, walking Paul DeJong and throwing away a little swinging bunt by Jorge Alfaro, with DeJong scoring after Juan Soto didn’t show particular interest in backing up the play. That tied the game, but just wait: CJ Abrams doubled to bring home Alfaro; Josh Bell hit a drive to left-center that hit Jose Siri in the glove and popped out, scoring Abrams; and someone named Daylen Lile hit a single to center that Siri approached with the kind of route generally taken by foraging rodents or bees. That scored Bell, and everything Siri did from that point on was generously doused in boos by the Citi Field faithful.
(Poor Siri. I mean, he’ll now almost certainly lose his half-job to Tyrone Taylor, just spotted rehabbing at Syracuse, and that’s not unjust. But up until now he was the Met whom fans would probably forget on a Sporcle quiz, and by the middle innings he’d thoroughly failed to do the only things he was on the roster to do and being forgotten would have felt like bliss. Also: It’s not good when something happens in center field that makes you pine for Cedric Mullins.)
4-1 Nats, and on Bluesky I offered a digital boooo but added this: “Fuck them, we’re still gonna win.”
Not as t-shirt worthy as YA GOTTA BELIEVE, but you roll with what the dice give you.
Part of my defiance was the Mets have been hitting and the Nats’ pitching has been execrable. Part of it was that the Nats were also having a burn-the-tape game on defense, with poor Dylan Crews playing every ball in his vicinity like it was a live grenade. And part of it, I suppose, was that the season’s down to a week and change, so why not spit in the eye of fate?
The Mets took a run off the Nats’ lead in the bottom of the third, aided by some more shaky defense, then unleashed hell in the fourth, with the culmination a three-run homer from Soto to dead center. I’m closing up the house in Maine, so I bounded around the living room hollering FUCK YOU! over and over again, with no neighbors to bother except possibly a querulous chipmunk or two. (Squeaky little voice emerges from a burrow: “It’s sleepy time … actually fuck you!”)
A shaky Huascar Brazoban outing aside, that fourth inning killed the Nats, a young team whose tank looks like it’s on E despite innings left to travel. Brooks Raley cleaned up for Brazoban, Ryne Stanek looked good, Tyler Rogers looked great, and Ryan Helsley had an honest-to-goodness solid inning, a 1-2-3 inning with no asterisk needed for line drives or other red flags. Chris Devenski had some trouble finishing up, but by then I’d obeyed the chipmunks and was out cold on the couch, so all was well from my perspective.
The Reds won, reshuffling the deck of wild-card pursuers to move ahead of the Diamondbacks (who lost), the fading Giants (ditto) and the at this point mostly theoretical Cardinals (who won). We’ll keep an eye on all that of course, but if the Mets keep winning — or just win enough — all should be well, or well enough to move on to the next existential fan crisis.
Eh, that sounded a little mealy-mouthed. Will work on getting back to defiance before the afternoon game.
My Game Summary:
B 1st, Nats, “Here’s a game Mets, take it.”
T 3rd, Mets, “Y’know we thought about it but we’ve just won 3 of 4 while you’ve just been swept so no thanks, you take it.”
B 3rd, Nats, “We were serious, take the game.”
B 4th Nats, “No, really, just take the damn game already.”
T 5th Mets, “We really want you to have this game. Sproat was just finding his groove so we did the only logical thing and took him out at around 70 pitches because, well, it’s what we do. Just look at who we have pitching now!”
7th-8th Nats, “Hey we appreciate the charity but it won’t work. We’re like Avis, no matter how hard you want to give us the game we’ll try harder.”
Seriously, WTF was going on with taking Sproat out after a 10-pitch (11?) 4th and 71 pitches. Does Mendy think he has a good, deep bullpen? Why didn’t he pull Siri instead for Mullins?
Helsley actually looked like a respectable Major League pitcher. I wish I thought he could do that on a regular basis.
Don’t feel bad for Siri. I’m sure he’ll catch on with some team with a need for an .065 hitting outfielder who can’t catch fly balls.
I always loved Tug’s snarky remarks, and although I’m sure that the GOTTA was definitely that, the fans took it up and it’s over 50 years and it still is rallying cry(as “Let’s Go Mets” was defiance at its finest – Roger Angell’s early writings about the Mets noted that it originated when the 1962 team was hopelessly behind, and served as a recognition that [t]here is more Met than Yankee in every one of us”).Many of the “things” the Mets organization does for merely promotion or to boost attendance – Grimace, OMG, Mr. Met, Mrs. Met, Banner Day, etc. ) have been taken up by the fans and have become rallying cries and beloved symbols and have taken on a different meaning as the team responds. Thus “Ya Gotta Believe” moved almost immediately to one of the things that is the essence of the Mets, even after half a century(no such luck for Mettle the Mule). As long as there are Mets and Mets fans, Belief will always be there, because Hey, Ya Gotta.
And speaking of “Ya Gotta Believe,” today is the 52nd anniversary of “The Ball on the Wall Play.” David Augustine’s name will live forever!
Ya Gotta give the other side of this, where Kranepool and McGraw said he was not mocking Grant:
He thought McGraw was mocking him, but roommate Ed Kranepool knew better.
“Mr. Grant wasn’t used to people interrupting a meeting and his speech, and he looked at Tug kind of strange,” Kranepool said. “I thought this was not a good ending, because Grant walked off annoyed. I went over to Tug and said, ‘Tug, I think you better apologize to Grant. He is not used to people screaming uncharacteristically.’ McGraw said, ‘No, no, I’m just rallying the players. I meant nothing by it.’ So I said, ‘Let’s go over and let him know that, because I don’t want the team to trade my roommate.'”
Print the legend.
My best friend was illustrator for the epic Tug McGraw 1970s comic strip, “Scroogie” (also collected in book form). Probably would sell you an original.