April! Baseball’s back! Hope is dewy and seemingly inexhaustible! The calendar makes sense again!
All true, and thank goodness for that. But April isn’t just opportunity — it’s also necessity. Including relearning some hard baseball lessons.
On Thursday night the Mets took a 1-0 lead to the seventh behind Nolan McLean. That lone skinny run came courtesy of a first-inning bomb off Eduardo Rodriguez (McLean’s WBC mound opponent) by Luis Robert Jr. Would it actually be enough of a margin to support McLean and hold off the Diamondbacks?
Well … yes, until it wasn’t.
McLean might have been the best I’ve seen him, with his sweeper an expression of pure cruelty toward hitters. The Diamondbacks ran out of challenges, basically because they couldn’t believe what McLean’s pitches were doing. I wouldn’t be stunned to hear former Met James McCann woke up in a cold sweat reliving one or both of the breaking pitches that ended his two ABs, and his three-pitch dismissal of Ildemaro Vargas to end the sixth was museum-worthy.
Alas, it’s April. McLean came out for the seventh a little less crisp than he’d been; a walk and a single brought him to 100 pitches and sent him from the mound with one out, the tying run on second and the fall-behind run on first. (I know, I know: Jerry Koosman threw 5,312 pitches in a 972-inning no-decision while also storming an enemy-held beach during a lightning storm. Tell the guy in the row ahead of you next game.)
That was one problem; another was that Rodriguez had been very nearly as good, dotting pitches at the bottom of the strike zone and keeping the Mets looking as befuddled as their Arizona counterparts. (Though better attired: When I’m dictator, there will be an immediate ban on the use of gradients in athletic uniforms. Seriously, it would make everything so much less awful.)
In came Luke Weaver, mostly reliable so far, and out went the air from the balloon. Weaver didn’t pitch that badly, to my eyes: The Diamondbacks squared up some pitches on the edges of the strike zone, which brings us to one of those hard baseball lessons to be relearned, namely that the other guys are trying too. Believe it or not, every loss isn’t the product of profound character flaws in the guys we root for … just most of them.
The Mets were also undone by their defense, which I figured was going to happen one of these nights. A better right fielder might have caught Gabriel Moreno‘s drive, the one that wound up over Brett Baty‘s head, became a double, and tied the game. Heck, another month or two might turn Baty himself into that better right fielder. But this isn’t that month.
The same goes for the Alek Thomas roller to first that followed the double: Mark Vientos snatched it off the ground but shot-putted the throw, with Luis Torrens‘ spear, whirl and tag too late to stop the Diamondbacks from taking the lead. Vientos has been better than I’d feared at first, which isn’t to say he’s been good; at least he’s mostly outhit his defense so far. But as with Baty’s progression, the perspective wasn’t much comfort last night.
The Mets were behind and wound up further behind after Luis Garcia got treated like a pinata, making you wonder if the Luis Garcia Era is nearing its end, as he isn’t doing anything that the much-diminished Sean Manaea could do. (I like Sean Manaea; it’s painful to type that.)
The game finally came to a merciful conclusion, with Weaver admirably stoic in answering postgame questions that were basically variations of, “Is it painful to know that your failures let down your teammates, the children of the tri-state area, and our brave astronauts out there circling the moon?” Weaver’s stood in a nearby clubhouse enduring this delightful New York ritual, so at least it can’t have come as a shock to him.
Nor should any of what happened come as a shock to us, unpalatable outcome though it was. Six-plus innings of good work not enough to lock down a win? Bad luck and lousy pitching enough to see one slip away? The ball finds guys still learning new positions? Things go wrong when you put exactly one good swing on a ball all night? The other guys are trying too?
Hard baseball lessons. Here again, as we should have known they would be.
I wasn’t really expecting to hold a 1-0 lead, frustratingly passing up those scoring opportunities as they did. But as you say, it’s the season of hope.