The House Next Door to Ragged Disaster Lane

When the bores and bureaucrats tasked with making Major League Baseball worse inflicted interleague play on us, they were thinking of Mets-Yankees and Cubs-White Sox and even, say, Cardinals-Royals. They didn’t have the likes of Mets-Rangers in mind, largely because it’s the kind of matchup you’d grudgingly accept when your little brother has gotten his hands on the videogame console.

Mets-Rangers? Well, they have no history, don’t play each other, and that sounds like a dull World Series. But OK, I guess.

Ah, but now the Mets and Rangers do play each other — in fact they’ve now done so 29 times, a run of games from which I remember absolutely nothing. Their latest tilt came at Globe Life Field, which I visited at the end of April to make my tally of big-league parks once more complete (not counting the Athletics’ temporary abode). It’s not exactly memorable either — a giant, bland hotel atrium that happens to have baseball in it.

Kind of perfect as a setting for the tail end of a lost season, come to think of it.

But still, one takes baseball where you find it, and even in a lost season the final games become precious. So OK, I guess: There I was at the appointed time, ready to say howdy to Brandon Nimmo and offer couch congratulations to Andy Green and hope the Mets would win.

Which they did, powered by doubles from Francisco Alvarez and Carson Benge, a ridiculous dash home from Alvarez on a foul pop to the first baseman, and some horrible Rangers defense. The Mets got their first run when second baseman Justin Foscue deferred to shortstop Corey Seager on a ball he should have fielded. They got their second run when Ezequiel Duran got in Nimmo’s way on a fly to right-center that should have been caught. Alvarez scampered home — eventually and barely — when Jake Burger made a Duda-eseque throw to the catcher. God it was a mess.

(The Rangers and Astros are both 78-79 … and tied for first place. These are my eyebrows raising until they reach orbit.)

Meanwhile, Sean Manaea struck out the side in the first but then spent most of the innings that followed teetering on the ragged edge of disaster, nailing batters in the foot with sweepers and trudging around the mound looking dismayed. (To be fair, I wouldn’t be happy about having to pitch in the world’s biggest Embassy Suites atrium either.) Manaea’s pitching line wound up being OK, though Juan Soto barely reeled in a pair of long drives that would have been the building blocks of a Rangers laugher had they gone just a little farther.

But every baseball game is a vessel full of things that might have happened but didn’t, or shouldn’t have happened but did. Manaea got through six, and the dugout reaction after he escaped that inning made me laugh: His teammates, well aware of the sixth having become Manaea’s Waterloo, lined up to greet him like a triumphantly returned war hero, and rather than look dour about it, Manaea bunny-hopped his way through the congratulations. Manaea, alas, is more Just a Guy at this point than the front-of-the-rotation pitcher he briefly was for us, but he’s still easy to root for.

Seeing Nimmo again, on the other hand, was a little underwhelming. I always liked him — his madcap dash to first on a walk still makes me smile — but he no longer fit on the roster, and trading him wasn’t what blew up the season. Nimmo’s been fine for the Rangers — when I was at Globe Life in April I was glad to see that their fans had embraced his mix of moment-to-moment amiability and daily determination to win — but only fine, and his absence in New York opened the door for Benge and A.J. Ewing, the core of a younger, better Mets outfield.

(There’s another half of that equation of course, and I can imagine a more sensibly constructed Mets roster without Marcus Semien — in fact, I imagine it fairly regularly. But the addition of Semien being a mistake doesn’t mean the subtraction of Nimmo was.)

Manaea gave way to Nate Lavender and Dedniel Nunez, who were both aces — the fastball Lavender used to sit down Wyatt Langford was a delicious act of baseball cruelty — and the Mets turned to Kodai Senga for the save. No, not Devin Williams. Guess he’s being eased in — oops, let me retrieve my eyebrows from orbit again.

Senga looked hell-bent on blowing it, again: It was a smart move to pare Senga’s arsenal down to fastball and ghost fork, but no arsenal is effective if a pitcher can’t throw strikes. But he got lucky: A check swing clicked off Duran’s bat and settled in Luis Torrens‘ mitt, turning a leadoff walk into a strikeout, with Skip Schumaker emerging from the dugout to protest that the cosmos is cold and uncaring. Senga then hit one of the many Rangers I’ve never heard of, but fanned another Ranger I’ve never heard of and coaxed an easy flyball from one I vaguely remember, and so the Mets had won.

* * *

I’ve been one of many voices to campaign for the Mets wooing Green to stay as manager, so I was surprised and delighted when that came to pass Tuesday afternoon, with Green shedding the interim tag and agreeing to a three-year deal.

It was also a delight that there was no leak, no “sources report” followed by a scheduled press conference and check-the-box confirmation. I learned the news from an MLB.com alert on my phone, and apparently the players found out in the clubhouse. That was novel, and dare I say a bit refreshing.

Veteran fans will tell you not to get too excited about player performances in March or September, and there’s probably a similar warning about seeing great qualities in caretaker managers: The barn being tightly shut and well kept shouldn’t distract us from the absence of horses. But regardless of the standings or what’s come before, I’ve been consistently impressed by Green’s handling of his young players and how the veterans have taken to him as well.

Green’s press conference with David Stearns only left me more impressed: I liked his description of realizing how much he enjoyed being in a dugout every night, and particularly warmed to his frank appraisal of how he’d grown as a manager since his first go-round in San Diego. Back then, Green said, he was insecure about delegating, and while he was good at being honest, he hadn’t figured out how to make honesty a starting point for motivating players to take their next steps. His tenure with the Mets has shown that he’s learned that, offering pitch-perfect messages that are both positive and pointed.

Green’s self-appraisal reminded me of Terry Collins, who arrived in New York with a reputation for being a high-strung micro-manager who’d wear out his clubhouse, but was the opposite of that at the helm for the Mets. It turned out that Collins had learned and changed; Green was honest and thoughtful about how he’d done the same.

Next year success will be measured by a lot more than “Is this place less of a tire fire?” so we’ll see. But Green’s shown every indication of being the right man for the job, and I’m heartened that he now has it.