Bo Bichette knows baseball pretty well, having played a lot of it — and seeing a bunch more before he did that professionally, what with being the child of a fairly renowned big leaguer. So he knows perfectly well that baseball is unpredictable, maddening and shot through with ironies big and small.
Like my blog partner, I was bothered by the Mets’ muffed finale against the Pirates more than seemed reasonable given a series win, the inevitability of losses, the season being a marathon and not a sprint, and all the other perfectly obvious reasons not to get irked about a frustrating though relatively humdrum loss. But Bichette’s candor after the game was refreshing — down to the “too” with which he adorned “I think my at-bats have been terrible too.” And that was even more refreshing when contrasted with Carlos Mendoza‘s omerta about Tim Leiper’s bad send.
(No need to make a federal case out of that last part. Mendy knows it was a bad send and so — one hopes — does Leiper. I’m sure there was a conversation to that effect on the flight to St. Louis or at some other away-from-the-cameras moment. At least for now, let’s move on.)
Baseball being baseball, there was Bichette in the middle of everything against the Cardinals as the Mets began a road trip on which they’ll start accumulating a startling number of frequent flyer miles. (Seriously, every time we blink in 2026 it will be to find the Mets oddly far out west.)
There Bichette was in the first, trying to bring in Francisco Lindor from third after Juan Soto couldn’t do so. He smacked a grounder to hotshot rookie JJ Wetherholt at second and Lindor went on contact — which made me think “oh God not again” until Wetherholt couldn’t get the ball out of his glove and the run scored. Bichette grounded into a double play in the third, but in the fifth he came up with the game knotted at one-all, Carson Benge on third and two out.
The Cards’ Kyle Leahy (pretty good until the tank hit E) left a fastball middle-middle and Bichette whacked it into the outfield for what may have been the most awkward RBI-producing single I’ve ever seen: His follow-through spun him like a top and he wound up sitting on home plate looking a little startled — though fortunately with plenty of time to collect himself and get to first. His next AB was a line shot to the outfield, which Jordan Walker converted into an out but was still much more what we wanted to see.
That’s baseball, isn’t it? You finally get that hit that’s proved so elusive and even then you wind up on your fanny, ready to announce to the world, “You’re probably wondering how I got here.”
Bichette’s mini-saga was the center of a pretty satisfying little game, one refreshingly free of angst and needless drama. Clay Holmes — the only starter who didn’t spit the bit in last year’s disaster — looked solid in his first outing of the year, backed up by near-spotless relief from Tobias Myers, Brooks Raley and Devin Williams. Raley was particularly fun to watch — he has the impassive mien every setup man acquires eventually, going about his business like a grizzled gunfighter who’s walked the deserted street of too many lawless towns, and whose only goal is “not today.”
If I can be petty, it was also satisfying to watch the Mets right their ship against the Cardinals. St. Louis wouldn’t make my list of 100 or even 200 favorite towns: The “best fans in baseball” shtick is self-satisfied and grating, new Busch is surrounded by generic light-beer malls, and the town is a dull place one escapes from rather than aspires to. Nothing sums St. Louis up better than being inside the Gateway Arch: The interior looks like a basement rec room in the suburbs, and when you peer out of it you realize there’s exactly one thing worth seeing in St. Louis and you’re in the one place where you can’t see it. (The only thing I have to recommend in St. Louis is the boozy shake at Baileys’ Range, but even they’ve shuttered their downtown location.)
The Cardinals are bad right now, probably headed for consecutive losing seasons for the first time since the Eisenhower administration. That’s a standard of excellence that even this committed Cardinals despiser has to respect — and it comes with the uneasy feeling that the Cardinals will be tormenting us again before we know it, re-engineered by Chaim Bloom to be a killing machine as per usual. All too soon their fans will be looking smug, SNY will be serving up fawning shots of that useless stupid arch, and the bile will rise in my throat as it has year-in and year-out since I was a kid.
We’ll be back on our butts in St. Louis all too soon, but this time with nary an RBI to show for it. Until then, well, here’s a boozy shake raised in salute to the idea that things change and annoyance can’t last forever.
