Pitchin' Ain't Easy

So you want to be a big-league pitcher?

Baltimore’s Brandon Young entered the game sporting an ERA north of seven — hmm, come to think of it that’s less “sporting” than “lugging” or “enduring.” But there’s a reason they actually play the games: Young looked terrific against the Mets, allowing just a pair of hits in the first four innings and posting an immaculate inning in the fifth — nine pitches, three strikeouts, no fuss.

So of course Young came out in the sixth and gave up a Ronny Mauricio home run, a Brett Baty double and a Brandon Nimmo double, which is pretty much the opposite of an immaculate inning. Before Young had quite figured out what had happened, he’d been undone over the course of seven pitches and was out of the game on the short side of a 2-1 score.

That 2-1 score was also on the ledger of Clay Holmes, who’d looked solid through five though pitch counts in the 80s are still relatively new terrain for him. Holmes’s sixth wasn’t exactly immaculate either: hit batsman, single, single, two-run double, two-run single. He departed the game having turned a one-run lead into a three-run deficit, with the dreaded line “pitched to 5 batters in the 6th” appended to the box score.

The air looked like it had come out of the Mets’ balloon, with newcomer Alex Carrillo surrendering a Jackson Holliday lead that made the gap a little wider. Carrillo’s journey is a bizarre one, particularly in today’s digital- and scout-heavy game: Before this season, his experience in organized baseball consisted of 4 1/3 innings of rookie ball in the Rangers’ organization back in 2019. After sitting out the Covid year, Carrillo sandwiched stints in indy ball around two seasons in the Mexican League. None of those tours of duty were particularly successful, but he worked with a pitching lab and got in shape, and was throwing triple digits in Venezuelan winter ball when someone tipped off the Mets. They signed him, like what they saw in Binghamton and during a toe touch at Syracuse, and now here he is.

(For those of you worried about which baseball card represents Carrillo in The Holy Books … well, I’d like to put your mind at ease, but it turns out Carrillo has never had one.)

Carrillo got a little scorched in his big-league debut, but Bryan Baker got burned. Facing the Mets in the eighth, he gave up a single to Nimmo, a two-run homer to Francisco Lindor, a single to Juan Soto and a game-tying two-run homer to Pete Alonso — the most impressive showing from the Mets’ Big Four this season, and a reminder of the damage this lineup was constructed to do.

With the game tied, Reed Garrett escaped a heavily trafficked inning with help from a nifty double play started by Mauricio. Edwin Diaz navigated the ninth on just 10 pitches and the Mets immediately cashed in Lindor as the Manfred man, as Soto hit Yennier Cano‘s first pitch through the infield to bring him home. Alonso singled and Travis Jankowski (pinch-hitting for Mark Vientos, hmmm) bunted the runners over to second and third, but the Mets stubbornly refused to add to their one-run lead — and Carlos Mendoza then opted not to send Diaz back out, instead opting for Huascar Brazoban with the speedy Holliday as Baltimore’s ghost runner and the middle of the Orioles’ order coming up — pretty much the same setup Cano had inherited.

Hmm, I said from my seat next to my mom in her apartment. Hmm, you probably said from wherever you were sitting — or perhaps it was a more emphatic expression of doubt. After all, Brazoban has elite stuff but replacement-level confidence in that stuff, and a whole parade of the night’s pitchers were on hand to remind him of the perils faced from the mound.

So of course, baseball being baseball, Brazoban fanned Jordan Westburg on a mean changeup, coaxed a foul pop from Gunnar Henderson, and got Ryan O’Hearn to hit a room-service grounder to Jeff McNeil at second. Holliday only moved from his post near second to trot disconsolately into the dugout with the game over while the Mets did their circle kick line and grinned and took pride in a solid night’s work. Pitchin’ ain’t easy; it ain’t predictable either.