Eric Wagaman was fun, mostly because my friend Ken and I, sitting out in right field, decided in advance of Eric’s pinch-hit home run Thursday night to think of the most random of 2026 Mets as The Waga-Man. After bemoaning that so much of the Met roster has been defined by randomness, we were willing to hitch our wagon to The Waga-Man if it meant getting back into this game. The Cubs were up, 3-0, before The Waga-Man got involved in the bottom of the sixth. Son of a gun, The Waga-Man connected, and the Mets had pulled to within 3-2.
Jared Young was fun, mostly because Ken and I had concurred earlier, while Jared was sitting on the bench, that something’s wrong if a team that planted Pete Alonso at first base for seven seasons and never had to give the position a second thought has to make do there most nights with perfectly nice yet utterly unremarkable Jared Young. Thursday night, Young was a substitute. It said so on the scoreboard as he batted in the seventh, specifically that he had a real high OPS as a “substitute”. What strange phrasing, we agreed. Then the substitute — in this case a substitute left fielder — whacked a game-tying homer. Jared Young is not the kind of substitute who just shows a movie to the class.
The guy who materialized in Ken’s and my midst about two-thirds of the way into Thursday night’s game was fun, I guess. He was apparently a buddy of two chill dudes in the row in front of us who had an empty seat next to them. Hey, sit with us. He did and he performed. The two chill dudes were his audience. We caught the overspill. The performance was kinda loud, but it was hard to not admire his enthusiasm. A lot of “LET’S GO METS!” without public address provocation. A lot of punctuating his pronouncements with “ALRIGHT ALRIGHT ALRIGHT!” He urged every Met pitcher to “knock” every Cub batter “off his feet”. He wanted his pals to know he knew stuff, and I have to say as someone who considers himself a stuff-knower, he did. I wish he could have played rather than cheered. The Mets could have used the spark he was trying to bring them.
Beyond the pleasantness of a temperate Thursday evening with a truly great guy like Ken; and a commute that threatened to go off the rails yet didn’t (the 7 was ineffective shuttling passengers to Woodside, but the LIRR’s Port Washington line threw an inning of relief worthy of Luke Weaver); and a surprise giveaway Juan Soto bobblehead, surprising because I didn’t line up early for it, yet stacks remained available at 6:30; and the undefeated joys of a Hebrew National frank plus potato knish purchased from the kosher foods stand upstairs…beyond those foundations of a pleasant evening at Citi Field, you have to appreciate the little things, like the scrubs/subs going deep and the uncontained ardor of a true believer who’s a little over the top on behalf of a team that’s usually under the bottom. That is if you’re going to go to a Mets game and be a Mets fan in a season like this.
Everything else about Thursday night’s sixth consecutive Met loss — their fourth of four to the Cubs this week and their seventh of seven to the Cubs overall — was as lame as I assume it looked on TV or sounded on the radio. All those things that have made the Mets the Mets this year were omnipresent as this year reached its halfway point. It even had an extra inning of the Mets being these Mets in case you weren’t convinced their record of 34-47 didn’t accurately reflect their performance.
The starting pitching, while not abysmal, fell short of adequate. The fielding was selective at best. The batting, besides that of Wagaman and Young once apiece, resisted opportunism. There was no spark to this team. There was limited spark to this game. The Cubs, despite earning their few too many interloper followers the right to crow “GO CUBS GO!” on the way out, didn’t come off as worldbeaters. They were Metbeaters. How hard is that to be these days?
In the end, the Mets absorbed a 4-3 defeat in ten innings. They did not enough of what was needed. They were beset by too much of what wasn’t. Another half-season to go. May you now and then find your version of fun therein.
