The good part of Wednesday night’s game? It was Faith and Fear reunited for the first time since the 2024 postseason, sitting together waaaaay up in the seats where you duck your head to avoid the bellies of planes. We had a grand time taking stock of Andy Green [1], the Mets’ future prospects, retired numbers, City Connects and all the topics that unspool during the ebb and flow of a baseball game.
The bad part? Everything else [2]. Robert Stock [3] didn’t give up a lot of loud contact but lordy was there a lot of inside-voice contact, which meant a lot of Brewers runs. I like Stock and have been rooting for him to pick up a first win as a Met, but he seems to be unlucky all the time, and it’s probably time for the Mets to move on to some other answer, whether it’s Jonah Tong [4] or Jack Wenninger [5] or some entity who isn’t Robert Stock. Milwaukee’s Dustin May [6] got hurt on the very first pitch of the game, just after I’d remarked that I can’t stand him, which was true but I swear wasn’t an attempt to invoke injury.
And a poor luckless squirrel got loose on the field, scampering about in an escalating panic before darting up the protective screen and hunkering down atop the cable holding it in place. He was still up there at the end of the game, while various groundskeepers peered up at him unhappily, and I’m curious how they decided to get the poor creature down. Hopefully not by having A.J. Ewing [7] tattoo him with line drives, though that had been effective in engineering departures.
It did occur to me that our visitor had to make an exceptionally large number of poor squirrel decisions to wind up where he was — that’s a long way from the nearest tree, and it’s not like Citi Field has an enviable acorn concession. On the other hand, there I was in nosebleed seats watching a last-place team get its brains beat in by a first-place team, so who am I to tell any creature about life choices?