Welcome Back to Garbage Time

Freddy Peralta, Huascar Brazoban and Brooks Raley have followed A.J Minter to greener pastures, with the likes of Luke Weaver and Tyrone Taylor still wondering if they will have new employers come Tuesday when the Mets and Guardians renew their (checks notes) utterly nonexistent rivalry.

I’ll spare you highly amateur scouting: I know no more than you do about Émilien Pitre, John Spikerman, Luke Gabrysh or the other newcomers to the system, beyond observing that the Mets are at least restocking their roster of interestingly monikered prospects. We’ll know them better in time, or forget all about them, or most likely it will be a mix of the two.

And I don’t particularly care, to be honest — I would have happily shed Peralta for a bag of street-fair tube socks*, and while I applauded our two former relievers’ work for the Mets, in a lost season most any return would have been fine for a free agent to be and a 36-year-old reliever at the likely peak of his value. Weaver’s fate remains the most intriguing trade-deadline question; given relievers’ innate unpredictability season to season, I’m not opposed to seeing him move, but it better be for a genuinely decent return.

The Mets at least took some of the sting out of this trade deadline by showing us by May that we could make other October plans, turning Departure Day into a when, not an if. But I’m still flashing back to the 2023 selloff, the last time the Mets hosed out the stables.

There’s a certain relief to definitively and authoritatively turning the page, but that doesn’t last: Pretty soon it dawns on you that the next seven weeks will be spent watching a jackass-carpentry roster, many of whose pieces will be discarded as square pegs by the time spring training rolls around. Remember Adam Kolarek, Jonathan Arauz or Sam Coonrod? Me neither.**

That won’t be fun, to say the least. On the other hand, the bleak trudge of Garbage Time 2023 was followed a year later by a wonderfully unexpected spring revival and a march nearly all the way to the World Series. The Mets will likely look very different come 2027,*** but they’ll probably have a corps of intriguing young starters and a not bad (at least on paper) offensive nucleus. You can dream on less, and goodness if you’re a Mets fan you already have.

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Sunday’s actual game is best dispensed with quickly, as the Mets reminded us why this year has been so hopeless by getting zilch from a bases-loaded, no-out situation when they were poised to tie the Marlins or even take the lead.

The one exception was the unexpected sight of Robert Stock, whom Emily and I just saw on the mound up in Syracuse, and who made two starts for the Mets back in 2021.

Stock is an interesting guy with an intriguing bio, having plugged away in indy ball and overseas among stints with eight different MLB organizations; he was impressive this spring before being felled by thoracic outlet syndrome. He’s an engineer’s kid who’d built websites as a teenager, so last offseason he used Claude to create Stockyard Baseball, an open-source pitch model. (Meanwhile, I was drinking bourbon and buying shit I didn’t need.)

Stock made all of one bad pitch Sunday; he’ll turn 37 shortly after the World Series, so don’t expect him to be part of the long- or even medium-term answer. But he’s someone to root for before the curtain falls, and we’ll need all of that we can get.

* We’ll undoubtedly face him in Tampa Bay and I’m sure he’ll hit us with seven scoreless innings. I am already bitter.

** The only player to emerge from 2023’s Garbage Time scrum? Reed Garrett.

*** Let’s not discuss the looming labor war. It’s too depressing right now.