The games themselves lack intrigue, so I stick around for the autopsies that follow the games. They’re deadly, too, but I figure maybe I can learn a little more about what just went wrong.
On Sunday in Phoenix what went wrong was obvious enough. The Mets didn’t make a couple of plays and they got only a couple of hits. Call off the coroner, we know the cause of death, a.k.a. the 5-1 loss to the Diamondbacks. If you wish to refer to the nine-game road trip they just completed as successful, the math won’t dispute you, as the wins (5) outnumbered the losses (4). If you watched this team against the one opponent among the three faced that wasn’t as dreggy as the Mets, you wouldn’t claim much momentum.
The Mets won two of three from Los Angeles of the American League, then two of three from Colorado, then withstood a drowse-off until the tenth inning of their opener versus Arizona. That 5-2 stretch, even in those pockets bereft of clutch hitting, indicated something of a revival might be underway. At the very least, the Angels and the Rockies seemed worse than the Mets. After the weekend in the desert was complete, nobody in either league was worse than the Mets. There are standings to prove it.
Sunday you could trust your eyes as you saw the Mets total four hits over nine innings, which made for one more Met hit than the sum of Met errors. Andy Ibañez [1], the 193rd third baseman in New York Mets history, committed two of them. Andy Ibañez’s shortcomings as third baseman were a surprise, given that we’d seen him only try the outfield to date. But the man did play third (and second) on a going basis for Texas, Detroit and West Sacramento, so why not try him at the hot corner?
Maybe because there were at least two better options on the roster? But then you’d have to play another Met or two who weren’t considered likely to produce offensively versus a lefty, in this case Eduardo Rodriguez, who used Sunday afternoon (8.1 IP, 1 ER) to elevate his Cy Young candidacy. Isn’t that what most starting pitchers opposing the Mets do?
If Ibañez wasn’t in there for his glove, he wasn’t in there for his bat, either. To be fair, the only Met who used one of the latter effectively and repeatedly was Backup Catcher For Life Luis Torrens [2], in there for his general adeptness. Torrens drove in Carson Benge with the Mets’ only run of the day, in the sixth, and produced another hit besides. All that action was at the bottom of the order. The top featured Juan Soto [3] and Bo Bichette [4] each going 0-for-3 and Austin Slater [5] going 0-for-4. That’s three-hole hitter Austin Slater, occupying space previously filled on Met lineup cards by the likes of Keith Hernandez and John Olerud. Hernandez and Olerud came to the Mets with reputations as RBI men and enhanced them further once here. Lineups today apparently emerge from a digital hat.
The game itself was a lengthy 2:16. It went on and on despite not taking that much actual time. The Mets fell behind in the second, fell behind by more in the sixth, and never hinted they’d catch up. The mish-mash of pitching — two openers succeeded by yeoman bulk guy David Peterson [6] — could have been adequate on a team displaying airtight fielding and any hitting. That would have had to been another team. The Mets of the moment, 15-25 after roughly a quarter of a season (and 8-9 since their presumably anomalous twelve-game losing streak), are not a team flashing multiple adequacies.
So I stay tuned for the autopsy, and listen not to just the analyst detail to the host how this particular inadequacy led to that particular inflection point, but the players speak for themselves. On Sunday, the two players who stood in front of reporters and attempted to answer questions were Soto and Ibañez. Soto is the Mets’ marquee star. Ibañez is a journeyman. Soto’s slump and Ibañez’s misfires brought them to the spotlight. They were each asked, in so many words, what the bleep was wrong today? It’s not an easy question for anybody coming off an unsatisfying day of work, but it is a reasonable one within the context of a 5-1 loss [7].
Each Met included some version of “that’s baseball” as part of his personal analysis. I’ve heard Mets say that or something very close to it quite a bit over the past days and weeks. I don’t think it’s a John Sterling tribute [8]. I didn’t get a hit? That’s baseball. I didn’t make the throw? That’s baseball. To those who are professionals, one episode inside one game inside a year full of them isn’t telling. You take swings in the cage. You take ground balls on the field. You concentrate. You develop a routine. You rise to the highest level there is, competing against others who have done the same. Then you don’t come through as runs are scored against you or not for you.
“That’s baseball,” is as reasonable an answer as it is a question. Of course sometimes your throw will go wide. Of course sometimes a pitcher will get the best of you. Of course you can prepare yourself to a tee and still be left looking like you have no idea what you’re doing. Everybody in the box score, by dint of making it into a major league box score, is in the same vicinity of basic ability as you. There are going to be days when they prevail instead of you. There are going to be weeks when the whole bunch of them prevails over the whole bunch of you.
That may be baseball and a sound explanation of it from the inside — and it may speak to the steadiness (not too high, not too low) that everybody around the game traditionally preaches — but it also seems to indicate a certain helplessness. We try, they try, somebody’s gonna be disappointed. Tomorrow’s a new day and another game. A fan would love to hear something about determination or grabbing the figurative bull by the horns, even if it is in lieu of literal grabbing. When you watch the autopsy, you are left to believe this unfortunate result couldn’t be avoided. It was going to happen to one team or another. It happened to our team, just like it so often does. Maybe it won’t the next time.
Then they air a commercial to urge you to bet that it will.