Wayfaring Strangers

Back in the summer of 1975, Joe Torre hit into four double plays as a Met, and cracked that he couldn’t have done it without Felix — meaning Felix Millan, who’d preceded his futility with four singles. The Mets lost, 6-2.

On Friday night the Mets were a lot more democratic in their shared futility, but it had much the same effect. They put guys on, only to watch other guys not bring them in. The Mets had hits in every inning from the second through the ninth, but only converted that into a pair of runs. Some of that was Sonny Gray, who stifled the Mets despite a day that would have undone many a starter — it took Gray and his teammates an entire night and the better part of a day to get out of Chicago, forcing Friday night’s game to be delayed until nearly 8 and reducing Boston’s pregame routine to “land at airport, proceed to stadium.” Some of it was grounding into double plays at inopportune times, not that there’s ever a particularly welcome time for a twin-killing. (There were two GIDPs Friday night, neither featuring Joe Torre or Felix Millan.) Some of it was the usual misfortune and mischance that stalks all baseball games, though goodness knows the 2026 Mets have seen plenty of both.

Fortune wasn’t particularly on the Mets’ side, either: Juan Soto clanked an Anthony Seigler flyout into a two-base error to start the game, with two runs then coming home on a Masataka Yoshida grounder down the left-field line that just eluded Brett Baty and was eaten by the tarp. In the seventh, A.J. Minter relieved an excellent Nolan McLean and gave up a two-run homer to Seigler that rattled off the very base of the left-field foul pole. No asterisk need be applied to Wilyer Abreu‘s ninth-inning drive off Cionel Perez, however: It was just belted.

Boston Too Many, New York Not Enough. Call it a make-good for the travel woes that engulf us all from time to time, and to which big-money enterprises and their associated traveling parties turn out not to be immune. Call it a workaday loss, the kind of thing that just happens. Or don’t call it anything at all but dismiss it with a vague shrug. It’s the 2026 Mets; there will be more of these.