The Mets, who’d looked so plucky since the trade deadline, seem to have settled back into their extended sag.
On Thursday night nothing went right [1]: Sean Manaea [2] was horrid, getting tattooed by the Brewers and adding insult to his own injury by alligator-arming a throw to first, giving Jackson Chourio [3] an extra out which he turned into a two-run homer. (Chourio was a menace all night: 4 for 5, two homers, four RBIs.) Meanwhile, Jacob Misiorowski [4] wasn’t at his best, working with reduced velocity and fussing about the condition of the mound. But that just meant Misiorowski was pitching in the ionosphere instead of in his usual otherworldly realm. His C-level game was plenty good enough to beat the Mets, who didn’t scratch until a fifth-inning double from Jared Young [5].
Watching Misiorowski at work, I found myself sad in a very modern baseball way. It’s possible Misiorowski was born with golden ligaments or a remarkable capacity for healing, a la connective-tissue unicorns like Nolan Ryan [6] and Tom Seaver [7]. And let’s hope that’s the case! But it’s vastly more likely that he’ll break [8], as nearly all power pitchers do. A pitch will go awry, Misiorowski will grimace and shake his arm, there will be opinions and second opinions, and then we’ll get an inevitable year to a year and a half of inactivity, followed by a big question mark.
In some ways this lament is about framing: Before Frank Jobe met Tommy John [9], pitchers also blew out their elbows with distressing regularity, but instead of spending a season on the shelf and returning to starting rotations they became mop-up guys — or milkmen, farmers or truck drivers. From that perspective, today’s progression is a far better outcome. But it’s still a drag, particularly the foreshadowing that weighs down every extraordinary pitch.
(If you’re interested in this topic — and if you’re here, you probably are — I highly recommend Jeff Passan’s The Arm [10]. It’s one of my favorite baseball books, approaching a complicated subject with both curiosity and rigor, and refusing to endorse easy answers or one-size-fits-all takeaways.)
As for the again-saggy Mets, well, are we really surprised? The Brewers are literally the best team in baseball, so the Mets were probably lucky to steal a lone game from them. Uncle Andy’s Baseball Camp [11] remains more fun than I would have guessed, even with the campers currently moping in their cabins hoping it stops raining. And there are certainly reasons to be hopeful: emerging rookies, some not bad complementary players, an OK record despite Juan Soto [12] being nowhere near the proceedings.
But when one is watching Brewers amble around the bases without particular opposition, positivity is hard to maintain. The other thing that made me grumpy Thursday night was watching Francisco Alvarez [13] flail at the plate and wondering how it is that he, Brett Baty [14] and Mark Vientos [15] have all been downgraded from prospect to suspect.
I like Alvarez, but every season seems to follow the same pattern, like a sigh-worthy game of Chutes and Ladders: He looks better for a couple of weeks at the plate but then falls back into bad habits, with his renewed offensive shortcomings bleeding into his defense. Vientos has fallen off a cliff both at bat and in the field — when’s the last time you even thought of him? And Baty looks like he’s bumped into a depressingly low ceiling, trundling along as an OK-ish utility guy. Not so long ago, it wasn’t crazy for the Mets to hope they might get solid contributions from all three of those guys; now, it wouldn’t be shocking to see them all become other clubs’ fix-it projects.
If so, just don’t let their renaissances come as Brewers. Because we’ve had enough of that.