A hazard of the recapping trade is you spend the game field-testing narratives in your head while the bedrock story is still unfolding, trying on summations variously grand, tragic or farcical.
After Kodai Senga [1]‘s disconsolate departure, this was my first draft for this entire recap, channeling Dean Wormer’s caustic advice to Flounder in Animal House:
Bad at pitching, bad at defense and bad at hitting is no way to go through life, son.
And that would have sufficed. Senga had pitched horribly; the Mets’ defense had done him no favors, with yet another mental mistake from Francisco Lindor [2] more worrying than the physical gaffes; and the hitting had remained largely somnambulant. Plus Jeff McNeil [3] continued to terrorize his old mates, with auxiliary getting even from once-upon-a-time Brooklyn Cyclone Carlos Cortes [4].
But after Senga departed the Mets seemed to rouse themselves. They got competent relief, they chipped away at the Athletics’ lead with home runs, which still counted even if they went over fences by inches or were actually helped over by West Sacramento defenders, and no Met wearing a glove stepped on a landmine or managed to garrote himself with his own sanitary socks, which counted as progress.
The Mets, in fact, drew within 7-6 with six outs left to play with, and you could feel Citi Field stirring, thinking there might actually be a reward for having endured the last few days of lousiness. I didn’t have a new narrative ready to trot out — the Mets’ recent play has made me more than a little wary of assumptions — but I was superstitious enough to stick to what I’d been doing, which was reading a novel on my couch and pretending not to watch the game.
And then, well, it turned out Luke Weaver [5] decided to have some of whatever Senga had been having. Tyler Soderstrom [6] had hit his second home run of the day, just like that the Mets were down five, and the remainder of the accounting [7] was best left to masochists.
After the game, I watched Carlos Mendoza [8] be oddly candid by Carlos Mendoza standards when asked about Lindor’s recent run of inattention: “It’s weird … it’s hard to explain.”
It is. Is it lingering effects from hamate surgery? Is it discombobulation at lining up with a new double-play partner? Is it something personal that shouldn’t be our business … except it’s showing up on the field, so it kinda is?
I’m sure wondering about that will be a cottage industry until Lindor looks a lot more like Lindor, which is only fair. As for what the Mets look like, well, last year taught me not to assume an ill-shaped team will magically take on a more pleasing form. And Saturday’s game taught me not to trust any evolving narrative.
In the end, I settled for this on Bluesky: a bit plaintive, a bit angry, more than a bit despairing. At least for now, I think it sums things up all too well:
[9]