Where There’s Smoke

Major League Baseball imposing an extended intermission upon its schedule proved absolutely restorative where our parochial interests were concerned. All the Mets needed was a break. A little break. A break a little less long or at least more disjointed than any other team besides the Phillies. We came back from not playing for three days and beat the only other team not permitted to linger by the pool on Thursday, 4-1. Not only did we restart our baseball activities a day ahead of the rest of the sport, we started playing ball an hour earlier than scheduled.

Maybe the secret to our second-act success has been revealed. Give the Mets time to gather their thoughts, but not too much time to forget what they thought they knew about how to win a ballgame. Maybe it helped to nab the Phillies while they appeared exhausted from participating in their All-Star festivities. Unlike the Mets, they boasted multiple representatives. Perhaps Citizens Bank Park itself was all tuckered out from hosting so much fun and frolic in he preceding days. So many home runs had flown out of it for the Derby a few nights earlier that it no longer had the energy to keep any attempted by the Mets from exiting at will. Though that doesn’t explain how the first bid “bye-bye” bid by a home team player missed its presumed destination by the inchiest of inches, but we’re dabbling in theories here. In 2026, there’s hardly ever a clear-cut explanation for the Mets winning a baseball game.

The explanation for starting a day earlier than the bulk of MLB was ESPN needs content, and when they were carving out a slate before the year began, Mets at Phillies appeared to offer competitive programming. Then the first act of the season played itself out, and HA! The Phils are still in it. The Mets would still be packing their bags for their flights out of the break had ESPN employed a true soothsayer, yet there we were, about to be on TV. And there, if you looked hard enough, was the sky over Philadelphia, which on Thursday wasn’t appreciably less murky than sky over New York or anywhere in the northeastern quadrant of the United States. Smoke from distant Canadian wildfires, à la June 2023, colored everything, including people’s breathing. Probably not the most ideal of circumstances for sending two sets of nine people out onto a field to scamper about. ESPN did pay for that time slot and wasn’t of a mind to rearrange what it planned to air, air be damned.

They know — let’s move it up by an hour! As the first pitch was thrown at 6:10 PM, Karl Ravech and Eduardo Perez, yammering nonstop, sounded unaffected in the booth. For the players they yammered about, it was a different story. Christian Scott said pitching in these conditions left him “breathing some metal in there”. Brett Baty related Carson Benge’s observation that it was something like a campfire, but to Brett, “it didn’t feel great playing ball with it.” Francisco Alvarez reported, “It became more difficult to see at the end.” These were the Mets who did the most to engineer Thursday night’s victory, so if they were letting on any sense of unpleasantness about the whole thing, it must have been pretty bad.

Scott, Baty, and Alvarez were all pretty good, conditions notwithstanding. Christian carried a shutout deep into the sixth, though that status appeared endangered when the omnipresent power bat of Kyle Schwarber carried Scott’s 79th pitch deep into the night. Given how difficult it was to make out what was up there in that night, maybe it wasn’t deep enough. It turned out Schwarbs’s shot to right hit about as high in the stadium as it could go without actually departing. It instead bounced off a railing and back onto the field for a replay-confirmed two-out double. So that’s how you stop Kyle Schwarber from hitting a home run.

Our starter, who hadn’t come close to allowing a run to that point, was removed ASAP, which seemed overcautious for a normal evening. Maybe don’t let Christian Scott keep breathing metal, however. For a moment, nothing went right despite the lefty-lefty matchup Andy Green craved in having Brooks Raley face Bryce Harper. A pickoff of Schwarber imploded, allowing the slugger to take third. Harper walked. But Raley got his next lefty All-Star, Brandon Marsh, swinging, and the lead Scott left with stayed intact.

The Mets were up, 1-0, at that point, all on Francisco Alvarez’s third-inning shot to center, which was more impressive than anything seen in the Derby because it was blasted against a pitcher, in this case the accomplished Aaron Nola, trying to get the batter out. That Alvy was still catching by the sixth was equally impressive, considering his mask, with his face in it, took quite the whacking from a Justin Crawford swing in the bottom of the third. While Francisco got his bearings, the foul pop Crawford produced was caught by Scott himself. Announcers, not just ESPN’s, practically faint when a pitcher catches a ball in the air, whether the air is good or not. Christian’s quick reaction was indeed admirable. Alvarez hanging in there to catch the next pitch and all the others deserves its own shine.

Fortunately, we weren’t done admiring Francisco Alvarez. After pausing to applaud Baty homering off Nola to lead off the seventh, we could return to appreciating Alvy, who, directly after Brett circled the bases, lined the Phillie veteran’s final delivery over the left field wall where no railing could stop it. It was Mets 3 Phillies 0, an edge that would be trimmed when Trea Turner clipped Luke Weaver’s heretofore endless no-earned-runs-allowed streak with a solo homer in the eighth. The Met advantage would be fully restored in the top of the ninth, when A.J. Ewing doubled home Jared Young. The 4-1 lead wound up in the right hand of Devin Williams, and contrary to the last time we saw our closer, he closed, notching his 14th save as a Met and 100th as a big leaguer, while establishing the Mets as the best team in baseball since the All-Star break (and providing the Mets a cushion for their well-deserved Friday of rest).

Unless 1981 split-season rules are suddenly adopted, being 1-0 when everybody else is 0-0 or 0-1 at this juncture of the calendar won’t get the Mets much in the weeks ahead. As the euphoria over being undefeated dies down, attention will turn to what almost every Met could get in the way of return in the weeks ahead. The trade deadline portion of the season is here, and the Mets, it has been reported (as if you couldn’t have figured it out months ago), will listen to offers for almost everybody. Rumors involving everybody but Scott, Benge, Ewing, Nolan McLean, and Juan Soto, will fill the skies like more smoke from a distant fire. By August 3, we’ll know who will be told, “Don’t let the screen door hit you on your way out.” It’s a rite of sub-.500 summer that won’t feel right, but neither does playing baseball in an unacceptable haze, even when the outcome itself is quite acceptable.