It’s a baseball rule: Things get weird in Denver.
Imagine you were a Rockies fan who followed the schedule and dutifully showed up at the start time indicated for each game of your team’s three-game set against the Mets. (And why wouldn’t you, after seeing the Rockies whoop up on the Mets back in Queens?)
Monday? Guess what, they changed the start time on you. Tuesday? No game — it’s snowing. Wednesday? Changed the start time on you again. Thursday? You weren’t planning on showing up then, as the schedule shows it’s an off-day, but the Rockies and Mets will have to.
That’s without the baseline strangeness of Denver, such as the temperature being capable of swinging 40 degrees day to day and the fact that there simply isn’t a sensible amount of air here, which is highly relevant if you have to run around the bases, pursue a ball taking a hard hop off the infield dirt, or try and make a splitter split.
The Mets did pretty good at the running around the bases part, with crooked numbers in the H column up and down the box score. (Particularly Marcus Semien, who emerged from his offensive slumber to torment the Rockies, capping his night with a blast into the left-field seats.) Ditto for the pursuing balls part — and once again Semien was front and center, though that part of his game has been solid all year. Making splitters split? Tobias Myers found that not to his liking, with an inning blowing up in his face that cut the Mets’ 8-0 lead in half, which in other parks would be a cosmetic imperfection but in Denver sounds like the drums of doom.
But Freddy Peralta had handled the Rockies before Myers’ arrival, Brooks Raley inherited a little brushfire but snuffed it without undue fuss and Luke Weaver did his job. Sean Manaea didn’t, getting just one out in the latest misfire of his disconcerting, discombobulated season, but Devin Williams rode to the rescue to secure the win.
So the Mets took their revenge on Michael Lorenzen, continued what’s been a pretty good road trip, and won their second straight game — even if it’s possible they’d fail a quiz about what day that happened or what time their next game is. It’s OK, there are people who’ll take care of that part.
Honestly, it was the perfect setting for Steve Gelbs continuing his hot dog travelogue by whipping out two feet of tubesteak in front of a stricken-looking Gary Cohen and a thoroughly baffled Keith Hernandez. I wasn’t surprised in the least that Keith drew a blank when Gelbs invoked “Lady and the Tramp” — Keith is a Civil War autodidact and has forgotten more about baseball than I’ll ever know, but his pop-culture knowledge seems limited to George Carlin routines and mid-70s AM radio.
It was just the latest reminder that I’d love to spend 30 seconds inside Keith Hernandez’s brain, just to marvel at my surroundings.
I dunno, maybe it’s a lot like Denver in there.
