The blog for Mets fans
who like to read
ABOUT US
Faith and Fear in Flushing made its debut on Feb. 16, 2005, the brainchild of two longtime friends and lifelong Met fans.
Greg Prince discovered the Mets when he was 6, during the magical summer of 1969. He is a Long Island-based writer, editor and communications consultant. Contact him here.
Jason Fry is a Brooklyn writer whose first memories include his mom leaping up and down cheering for Rusty Staub. Check out his other writing here.
Got something to say? Leave a comment, or email us at faithandfear@gmail.com. (Sorry, but we have no interest in ads, sponsored content or guest posts.)
Need our RSS feed? It's here.
Visit our Facebook page, or drop by the personal pages for Greg and Jason.
Or follow us on Twitter: Here's Greg, and here's Jason.
|
by Greg Prince on 12 May 2022 6:00 pm Taijuan Walker looked to be experiencing back discomfort on the mound and in the dugout throughout Thursday afternoon at Nationals Park. He pitched seven shutout innings while fielding his position like an athlete who happens to be the pitcher. We should all experience such discomfort. “A little tight, nothing serious,” was Tai’s postgame self-diagnosis.
The National League East race is also nothing serious, with the Mets at the moment leading the pack by 6½ games. It’s not even a little tight. Your first-place New York Mets continue to reign over their division with the greatest of ease, though I’m sure it’s not as easy as it’s appeared playing ten series to date in 2022 and losing none of them. The closest thing to a complaint one could muster is there hasn’t been a Met winning streak that’s exceeded three games. There also hasn’t been a losing streak that’s exceeded two games, and there’s been only one of those. So you’ll forgive the complaints department if they hear your gripe; shut their window; and knock off early for the week.
The matinee victory that bumped the Mets up to 22-11 was mostly methodical. They didn’t hit a ton, but they got on base effectively and crossed the plate enough so that sweating wasn’t in the forecast. Thanks primarily to three ribbies from Mark Canha (two in the first on a single, one on a solo homer in the ninth), the Mets filled the runs column sufficiently. Thanks to Walker achieving adequate looseness, they were covered for run prevention. And thanks to the Nationals traversing the bases without regard for likely outcomes, we can add a sparkling web gem to the season’s developing highlight reel.
We’d call the defining defensive play of the season thus far a breathtaking double play, except the official scorer says it was a pair of outs that just happened to occur in the wake of the same batted ball. However you scored it, the Nationals got lost in the agate type. In the fourth, Juan Soto was on second after a leadoff double. Josh Bell grounded sharply to the third base side. Soto, having heard Bell, responded like Pavlov’s baserunner and took off for third, salivating for the treat he was convinced awaited him. Luis Guillorme noticed and chased Soto back toward second, tossing the ball to Francisco Lindor like Luis does everything — professionally. Soto responded with a 180 toward third. Lindor calmly beat him there with a throw to a fundamentally sound Walker. Prodigy Juan tried to take the pitcher out with a slide that would have fit better during Washington Commanders blocking drills. Whatever sport Soto was playing, he reached neither the end zone nor the bag. One out.
But wait! Taijuan saw Bell making for second and alertly threw over. This part wasn’t pretty until it was. Walker wound up flinging the ball into right field, but maybe that was intrinsic to some greater plan, for Bell, not satisfied by simply replacing Soto on second, took his own shot at third. Unfortunately for Josh, Starling Marte, not satisfied to be a spectator, backed up the throw, grabbed it, and whipped it in to Lindor, who had Bell beat by the approximate length of the Washington Monument if you were to lay it on its side. Speaking of notably placed statuary in the nation’s capital, Soto was still loitering facedown in the dirt in front of third while Francisco was tagging his wayward teammate. The Nationals entered the day 11-21. Maybe the three-year plunge from winning the World Series to/through the NL East basement is taking its toll on Washington’s wunderkind.
You really wanna mark those two outs 5-6-1-9-6, but, for the record, it was 5-6-1, then 9-6. However it gets put into the books, it was paving the way for the rest of the game to arrive there eventually. Seth Lugo pitched the eighth without incident. Soto got a shred of revenge by taking Edwin Diaz deep in the ninth, but at that instant, there was a four-run lead, there was nobody on base, there were two out, and not even the tableau of the most menacing of Nats homering off our formerly beleaguered closer in what used to be his personal house of horrors could ruin a pleasant afternoon. The Mets finished their Acela jaunt with a 4-1 win, having taken four of six from the Phillies and Nationals, with last weekend’s rain the only truly vexing opponent they encountered along the way. Next, in a vagary of Interleague scheduling, they welcome the Seattle Mariners to Citi Field for the very first time.
These Mets seem to engage in the business of the unprecedented quite often of late.
by Greg Prince on 12 May 2022 8:57 am Ah, look at all the long relievers
Ah, look at all the long relievers
Stephen Nogosek
Picks up his glove in the pen
And he starts to get warm
Buck likes his form
Waiting since Sunday
Stretching in back with the pack
Of the arms seldom used
Tries to stay loose
All the long relievers
Patience is their key
All the long relievers
The score is eight to three
Megill didn’t have it
Getting lit up by the Nats
Who swung bats with no fear
They kicked his rear
Then Trevor Williams
Holding the fort in a sport
Where pitchers don’t hit
Thus pinch-hitters sit
All the long relievers
Their job’s to mop up frames
All the long relievers
To get us through these games
Ah, look at all the long relievers
Guys never once considered Seavers
Stephen Nogosek
Waxes his ’stache
Soon he jogs through the gate to the mound
He’ll stick around
Throwing three innings
Keeping it close to avail
That would fail to appear
No comeback here
All the long relievers
Whose roster stays are brief
Options make them yo-yos
We’ll see Steve in a week
The latest episode of National League Town takes us to a time before the Beatles, welcoming as its first-ever guest Dave Bagdade, author of the all-new revised edition of A Year in Mudville: The Full Story of Casey Stengel and the Original Mets. Listen to the show on your trip back to Syracuse or wherever you might be headed.
by Jason Fry on 10 May 2022 11:20 pm I had a lousy Tuesday.
No need for condolences — nothing of any real consequence went wrong, just a dog’s breakfast of bureaucracy and mischance and annoyances waiting at every turn. But it was enough to leave me in a foul mood, one that I tried to shake walking home over the Brooklyn Bridge, hopeful that watching the Mets would help me snap out of it if nothing else could.
For the first half of Tuesday’s game, that didn’t seem like a particularly good bet. The Mets kept hitting in lousy luck, with J.D. Davis particularly snakebit, allowing Patrick Corbin to spit the hook again and again. Meanwhile, Carlos Carrasco was pitching well but gave up a run on a Maikel Franco double, though Brandon Nimmo, Jeff McNeil and James McCann cut down a second run on a relay so picture-perfect it should have been immediately ported into an instructional video. Still, it was 1-0, and then it was 2-0 when Riley Adams demolished a slider that in no way resembled its description. (No pitcher has ever called something in their arsenal a tee-sitter, for related reasons.)
It’s amusing how quickly fan arrogance returns once your baseball team plays well for a little while. My mother texted me from Virginia and I assured her it was a frustrating game so far “but they’ll get em,” and since she’s the one who made me a baseball fan and a Mets fan, there was no need to define who was who in that equation. But would it be so? Baseball will reliably make a fool of those who traffic in certainties, the worst team is perfectly capable of pasting the best team on a given night, and even those best teams are going to endure 20-odd frustrating losses a year in which things go repeatedly and perversely wrong for nine innings.
But finally the Mets broke through, or the Nats broke, or maybe it was a little of both. With the bases loaded and one out in the sixth, McNeil spanked a hard grounder to Josh Bell at first. Bell is a Pyrite Glover and I suspect was also screened slightly by Eduardo Escobar on the play; some combination of that or simple bad luck turned what looked like a 3-6-3 double play into a tie game as the ball went up and over Bell’s glove and down the line. The next batter was McCann (who had a very good game on both sides of the ball), who got one in the air, deep enough to give the Mets the lead.
Things somehow felt safe, though I knew they weren’t (there’s that arrogance again), and when my attention stopped wandering it was because Juan Soto was up with the tying run on first and more dangerously the go-ahead run contained within himself. In came Joely Rodriguez, and I steeled myself for a long, grinding confrontation.
The famously patient Soto swung at the first pitch — a changeup high and inside, out of the strike zone — and popped it up to Escobar in foul territory. Then he stood there for a moment, staring over at where the out had been recorded with a look at once faintly puzzled and mildly disgusted — the expression of a man who just stepped out of his apartment in his bathrobe to get the paper and inexplicably let the door shut behind him. Why did I do that? What do I do now?
The answer to the first part, most likely, is that the Nats are horrible, whittled down to Juan Soto and a flag that will fly forever but is no help right now, which has left Soto trying to do the work of three or four hitters, something not even he can do. Someone buy Soto a drink and lend him a sympathetic ear, because he looks like he needs both.
The Mets added another run, which was enough for Edwin Diaz to go to work. Diaz didn’t look quite as sharp as he has of late, giving up a one-out single to Nelson Cruz and having to work a deep count against a determined Yadiel Hernandez. Frustration was still entirely possible — this was the park where Kurt Suzuki once did something unspeakable against Diaz, after all.
Ah, but frustration for whom? Hernandez slapped Diaz’s ninth pitch at McNeil, and two seconds later the Mets had won. And you know what? I even felt a little more cheerful.
by Greg Prince on 9 May 2022 12:29 am A Sunday doubleheader! Doesn’t that sound great? Not a split doubleheader (which isn’t a doubleheader; it’s just two games in one day). Not an abundance-of-caution seven-inning doubleheader (which would actually be a fourteen-inning doubleheader, but let’s not return there). A real settling in, beginning with a regulation game, pausing for a breather, then continuing with another regulation game. The baseball starts earlier than usual on the Sunday afternoon that is doubly blessed and it keeps going as long as it needs to and nobody is charged twice for admission. That’s the ideal.
The platinum ideal, of course, is a Sunday doubleheader that’s scheduled in advance just because can you imagine a better deal to anticipate? I don’t believe the Mets have scheduled a Sunday doubleheader in advance since 1988. They haven’t played a straightforward, unplanned Sunday doubleheader at Citi Field since a wet weekend in May of 2014. It takes an unforeseen circumstance to get you a doubleheader anywhere these days, especially Sundays. It took two days of rain in Philadelphia and the Phillies’ flight to Seattle to keep the home team from pulling any of that Sunday night add-on nonsense. They had to fit two games into daylight and they had to let people in with one ticket. The Mets fan watching in New York could simply sit back and enjoy.
Well, that’s not universally accurate. This Mets fan watching in New York found himself a touch antsy during Game One, up and pacing about so as to coach Max Scherzer through a few luck-deprived rough patches. Max gave up one extremely socked sphere that left Citizens Bank Park and a bunch of halfhearted hits that had the temerity to fall in. Scherzer’s customarily fearsome efforts added up to three runs in six innings. It was quality enough in the “give your team a chance to win” sense. Given that Max’s successors Joely Rodriguez and Adam Ottavino did their part to maintain order, all the Mets had to do was score three runs to even things up, and if they evened things up, you knew in your bones, they’d score however many more runs were required to ensure victory.
They could do that, especially with me lending the offense my encouragement on my feet. Maybe it’s a doubleheader thing that had me wandering around the living room rather than plopping down on the couch. I guess I needed to catalyze the lineup, since nobody else was really doing it until the top of the sixth. The Mets put together their lone successful rally of the opener then via a Starling Marte double, a Luis Guillorme single, a productive James McCann double play grounder (the most productive McCann can be sometimes), a Brandon Nimmo single and a Francisco Lindor double off the base of the right field wall. A Francisco Lindor homer over the right field wall would have been preferable, but something about delivering an extra-base hit off the base of the wall is so resounding that it’s almost more satisfying. When Marte put the Mets ahead with such a blow in their seven-run ninth a few nights before, I liked the message it sent. I could’ve hit it out, but that wouldn’t have been as sporting. Oh, I’m on second base now and might very well be driven in by a teammate. There was a lot of action in the top of the sixth. Seems like there should have been more than two runs from all of that action. Seems like there should have been more runs in the other innings the Mets batted, too. There weren’t.
When the opener closed, the Mets had lost, 3-2, snapping what felt like a winning streak at one. The one win was Thursday, but it was so resounding and so uninterrupted, thanks to the May showers that drenched the Mid-Atlantic region, that I could swear we’d gone unbeaten for days. I guess we did. I could swear we were capable of overcoming any deficit. We were. We are. We were down, 3-0. We got to within a run. The capability was there. The execution fell a bit short, as did Scherzer of escaping the ignominy of his first ‘L’ in practically a year.
Ah, but this Sunday wasn’t over, because this Sunday featured a Sunday doubleheader! If we couldn’t win the first game and thus guarantee we wouldn’t lose twice, we could win the second game and know we didn’t lose twice. Confidence abounds within possibility when you have a team like these Mets taking two turns on your behalf any day of the week.
In the nightcap, the Mets validated that confidence. No fancy comeback needed to be strategized this time, because the Mets scored twice in the top of the first and never trailed once Pete Alonso homered with Lindor on base. Later, in the fifth, Pete homered with a new combo — Nimmo and Mark Canha — trotting home ahead of him. Same basic principle. Pete’s up, Pete homers, multiples cross the plate. The Mets were ahead, 5-1. Chris Bassitt was in control for 5⅔. Chasen Shreve, Drew Smith and Seth Lugo took the wheel from there. Me, I sat back and enjoyed the undramatic denouement, a 6-1 triumph for one win out of two on the day, but the more important one, to be sure. Why am I so sure? Because I’m in a great mood after the second one and barely remember the mild disappointment from the first one. That’s how you do a Sunday doubleheader if you can’t plan in advance on a sweep (which you can’t). You win the second game and you move on to greater things.
That’s how you watch the 2022 Mets — with confidence. You can pace. You can lounge. Mostly you can be confident, however your body language chooses to express it. The Mets are 20-10, in first place by six games, and have won or tied every series they’ve played. They win from ahead. They win from behind. They lose once in a while, but they don’t look lost doing it. If the season to date is not the ideal, it’s extremely close.
by Jason Fry on 6 May 2022 1:50 am Well, well, well.
That wasn’t what I thought for most of Thursday night’s game against the Phillies, but then that’s always the case with a classic comeback — you need to trudge through the vale of despond before getting sherpa’ed up Mount Probability to giddily plant the most unexpected of flags.
That mountaineering metaphor’s less random than most of mine — the game’s win expectancy graph looked like this, courtesy of MetsAnalytics on Twitter:
That kind of sheer vertical face doesn’t get climbed very often, and certainly not when you’re down 7-1 in the ninth.
But back to the vale of despond part.
I was late reporting for duty because it was a pleasant spring night, Emily needed a cocktail and I almost never don’t need a cocktail, and since we were having cocktails we might as well eat something, and then I remembered it was a weird 6:45 start and looked at my phone and saw a 3 in a place I didn’t want there to be one.
“Ah hell,” I muttered, wondering what had gone wrong and deciding to figure it out a little later.
What had gone wrong, primarily, was a double-play ball that Francisco Lindor had botched, and that wasn’t good, not with Lindor’s hot start having turned lukewarm and even a little chilly. By the time we got home it was 4-0 and the Mets were looking dispirited against Aaron Nola and pretty soon it was 5-0 and I was spending more time with my phone than with the game, because while what was on my phone was making me grouchy, what was happening on my TV was making me grouchier.
I did the Wordle, getting a yellow R and an E at the tail end of my starter word and then a ERM in the middle of my next guess, all yellow. While I was pondering that, Bryce Harper reduced a ball to scraps of flaming yarn and cowhide. I watched the ball cease to exist with a sour expression, looked back down at Wordle, and … oh.
Another ingredient of a classic comeback is you don’t want to be the guy or gal who gives up in disgust and winds up saying “wait, what?” the next morning. Fortunately, I consider my duties as a given night’s Faith and Fear recapper sacred I got lucky. I decided I’d go downstairs in the middle of the sixth, most likely to find a book or a better use of my time, but then Starling Marte golfed a solo homer into the left-field seats — after Phil Cuzzi called a close 3-1 pitch a strike, no less.
While a much-ballyhooed offseason acquisition, Marte hasn’t lit the blue and orange world on fire just yet — particularly not on the bases. But I’ve enjoyed watching him despite that. He plays the game with an air of palpable menace that demands you pay attention, has taken to new outfield duties without complaint, and generally goes about his business in a way I approve of. A little earlier, Marte had hustled to make a play in the outfield in what looked like a lost game; now he’d homered to at least put some lipstick on this pig. If Marte hadn’t given up, surely I could handle the low-impact duty of continuing to be a spectator.
There was also the SNY app, which has definitely improved my quality of life, allowing me to watch games in my study without wrangling a TV-via-Internet feed that’s balky, to put it kindly. The Mets were down there on my sideways cellphone while I dealt with email and sundry digital things, and it didn’t really matter if I had to squint at them because I had Gary Cohen and Ron Darling talking to me, which is pretty good company no matter how small your screen is. And while things weren’t getting any better for the Mets they also weren’t getting any worse — Chasen Shreve and Adonis Medina had shut the barn door, which was good news even though conducting an inventory of horses didn’t seem like a particularly wise idea.
When all was done (sorry, spoilers), the statficionadoes determined that the Mets had been on an 0-for-330 streak when trailing by six in the ninth inning. The game before the one that started that bleak count came on Sept. 13, 1997, and the vale of despond had been even despondier than Thursday night — the Mets had tallied a lone single before the ninth and wound up down to their last strike before they scored a run.
But Roberto Petagine hit a two-run single, Luis Lopez and Matt Franco singled to load the bases, and Carl Everett — who’d had a troubled season for unfortunate reasons beyond the existential ramifications of dinosaurs — hit a grand slam off Ugueth Urbina. Bernard Gilkey then won it with a walkoff homer in the 11th.
That game is remembered as the Carl Everett Game — Greg’s written about it here, and revealed that it was actually Stephanie who led us to victory. But I missed the part that made it a classic. I was at a friend’s wedding and if memory serves (which it probably doesn’t), I left my Motorola SportsTrax in a motel room because the Mets were getting creamed, then peered blearily at it hours later while horrifically drunk and stripping off the battered, grass-stained tuxedo pieces I hadn’t already lost. NYM 9 MON 6 (11). Wait, what?
(If you don’t know what a Motorola SportsTrax is, it was a pager that came with a subscription plan allowing you to dispatch a message to wandering monks, who’d journey to your abode collecting alms and then inform you of the current score of a baseball game, albeit in Latin. What we have is way better now.)
(Oh wait, I’m confused. The Motorola SportsTrax looked like this and bleeped and stuff. The point is, it was a long time ago.)
The sequence of those impossible comebacks should always be preserved for posterity, so here’s what happened in the ninth 25 years later: Marte led off against James Norwood with a grounder to Johan Camargo that he beat out for an infield hit — another play where Marte could have opted for half-speed and no one would have clucked but the Back in My Day crowd. Lindor then clubbed a Harperesque homer into the stands, making the score 7-3 and at least giving the pig some mascara and rouge. Pete Alonso scorched a double down the third-base line over Alec Bohm‘s glove. Eduardo Escobar lined out, but Jeff McNeil poked a single through the right side of the infield.
A general rule is not to get too excited about ninth-inning scratching and clawing, because most of the time (330 out of 331 times if you’re down by six) that yields at best a moral victory, which is also known as a loss. A more specific rule is to not get too excited unless the tying run is at the plate, because the moment you let yourself get into ankle bone connected to the shin bone and shin bone connected to the thigh bone hypotheticals, someone will line into a double play. And Mark Canha wasn’t the tying run, but one tally shy of it.
Joe Girardi summoned Corey Knebel, which is another one of those moral-victory things. (“They won but we made them use their closer and he was probably extra sweaty so he drove up the water bill in the shower haha Phillies!”) Canha grounded a ball off Knebel, who sprang off the mound, picked it up and threw to first too late as Alonso scampered home.
It was 7-4, and now Dom Smith really was the tying run, and even though this probably wasn’t fated to work out, it had at least become pretty fun. Dom worked the count to 3-2 … and struck out on a disappearing Knebel knuckle-curve.
That brought up pinch hitter J.D. Davis, who ripped another ball past Bohm into the left-field corner, scoring McNeil and advancing Canha (still one shy of being the tying run, because Rob Manfred hasn’t messed around with that part yet) to third, where Joey Cora wisely opted for something short of his usual level of aggression. Now the tying run was at second, and this was definitely fun. Now the Mets didn’t need a whole sequence of good things but just one more good thing.
That’s usually when the supply of good things runs out, but hey, hope’s free. Travis Jankowski replaced J.D. at second and the game would come down to Brandon Nimmo against Knebel and that knuckle-curve. Just the game, I reminded myself — not the season or my eternal happiness or the fate of the cosmos. Knebel threw a curve for strike one, then a fastball high and tight, and then went back to the curve — leaving it right in the middle of the plate. Nimmo slashed it over the infield to chase home Canha and Jankowski and tie the game.
Which, if you’ve watched enough baseball, leaves you simultaneously cackling with glee and worried that your team will now get walked off in the bottom of the ninth to make everyone involved wonder why they bothered. Except Marte smashed Knebel’s first pitch off the fence in left-center — gone on a summer night or with a differently constructed baseball — to bring home Nimmo as the go-ahead run. UNBELIEVABLE! crowed Gary Cohen, while Knebel lurched around on the mound looking like a man trying to wake from a nightmare.
With the Mets improbably and astonishingly up 8-7, on came the suddenly possibly trustworthy Edwin Diaz, a phenomenon I still find stranger than anything I just used a few hundred words to carefully chronicle. With Phillie fans looking on in shock, Diaz struck out Roman Quinn, coaxed a grounder from J.T. Realmuto and then struck out Rhys Hoskins on three pitches, using that deadly slider as the coup de grace.
That’s one you should bottle — a mental vintage you’ll want to savor should the rain wash away the rest of this series, or during the next 330 games in which being down six in the ninth turns out as you’d expect. In a quarter-century you’ll proudly tell fans who take their neural implants for granted that you were at the Brandon Nimmo Game (or the Starling Marte Game, whatever works) or kept the faith and watched the whole thing on TV or at least squinted at it on your cellphone. Or maybe you’ll admit that you did something more sensible with your night and didn’t know until morning, when your reaction was, “wait, what?”
by Greg Prince on 4 May 2022 9:10 pm The Mets met up Wednesday afternoon with four “old friends,” one of those baseball phrases meant to refer to players who used to be on your team and are now trying to defeat your team. The four old friends all wore Braves uniforms. The parties did not lunch together.
Travis d’Arnaud, a Met from 2013 until 2019, albeit hardly at all after 2017, walked with the bases loaded to begin the Braves’ scoring in the sixth. It had been 0-0 until then. Tylor Megill was throwing his usual shutout through five, his customary no-hitter through four. Then Megill loaded the bases and left, replaced by Adam Ottavino. Was Ottavino, pitching for a third consecutive day, the right choice? The right choice was not having the bases loaded.
Some choices aren’t yours to make. Ottavino walked d’Arnaud, gave up a double to Adam Duvall and then threw a wild pitch to score d’Arnaud. Quickly, old friend Travis made a trip around the bases, his RBI and his R sandwiching four runs. And the Braves weren’t done dining out on our matinee largesse.
Guillermo Heredia, a Met for literally a week in 2020, walked in that same sixth inning. By then, it was 5-0. Heredia would come around as d’Arnaud did, making the score 7-0. The Mets might have been on the board had Guillermo not climbed the right field wall and taken away what looked like it could have been a home run from Jeff McNeil in the second. Maybe McNeil’s ball wouldn’t have left the yard. If it hadn’t, it wouldn’t have hit the wall and put Jeff on base. The only thing it hit was the pocket of Heredia’s glove. Guillermo made a one-handed catch. The defender’s other hand was busy clutching the top of the fence to ensure he’d steady himself while committing highway robbery in broad daylight. It was one of those catches, the kind that demands a surfeit of clichés.
Later, in the eighth, Heredia, who wasn’t scheduled to be in the Braves’ lineup until practically the last minute, whacked a two-run homer than no fielder — not even himself — was going to catch. That made it Braves 9 Mets 1. You might say he did in a day against the Mets more than he did in a week for the Mets (though he did have a pretty decent stretch that fleeting week that quiet year).
Ian Anderson did most of the pitching for Atlanta. He didn’t used to be a Met. Two relievers Brian Snitker deployed did. Collin McHugh, who wore the orange and blue in 2012 and 2013 (traded before d’Arnaud was promoted), faced seven batters, retired five of them and gave up no runs. Darren O’Day, a Met in April of 2009 who was packed off for distant precincts before May of 2009, finished up. He allowed a home run to Luis Guillorme, which is something hardly anybody does, but Darren was protecting an eight-run lead in the ninth, so he didn’t have to stress his gopher. O’Day has been a big leaguer since 2008. He hasn’t lasted this long sweating the small stuff. He overcame Luis’s blast and survived on the mound to receive a “nice game” handshake from his catcher d’Arnaud the instant it ended.
The Braves, featuring their four former Mets, whacked the Mets but good, 9-2 splitting their four-game set at Citi Field and showing enough of a pulse not to be written off after one-sixth of a season. Then again, the Mets still haven’t lost a series, still lead the division by a bunch and, save for the bullpen experiencing its intermittent moment of fragility (both Sean Reid-Foley and Travis May are on the IL and neither Ottavino nor Trevor Williams was impressive) and nobody besides Guillorme (three career home runs in five seasons) showing much power in the homestand finale, they’re doing all right.
Which is to say Atlanta can have our former Mets. I’ll stick with our current Mets.
by Greg Prince on 4 May 2022 9:51 am You get an early lead, which is good. You sweat an early lead, which is natural. You hold an early lead, which is satisfying. You do it all over again a couple of hours later and you’ve really got something there.
In a parallel universe, perhaps the Braves come back on the Mets in one or both games of Tuesday’s semi-twinight doubleheader, with the three o’clock high of bolting to a 2-0 advantage in the first inning of the opener melting away under the pressure applied by a formidable opponent — experienced starting pitcher buckling down rather than buckling under; lineup loaded with certified Met-killers; discomfitingly recent world championship pedigree — and/or the lonesome runs in the nightcap just sitting there on the scoreboard crying out for company, because how long can our starter keep squirming out of trouble?
You know where that parallel universe is? In the receding corners of our Metsian anxieties. It’s gonna be there, but it’s gonna cast less and less light as this season goes along if this season continues to go along if it continues to go along as it has thus far gone along. If it goes along in what has emerged as 2022 Mets fashion, we’ll get along.
In Game One, the Mets indeed have a 2-0 lead after one, and a 4-1 lead after two, and a 5-1 lead after four, yet before you can commence contemplating the chances of a sweep, David Peterson allows a single to lead off the top of the fifth, makes a one-out error as a fielder and allows a three-run bomb to Matt Olson (as if we needed a new applicant for a Met-killing license) directly thereafter. Now it’s 5-4, the youngster returned to the roster for the express purpose of starting this game might be rattled and here are the bleeping Braves of Charlie Morton (still in there), Austin Riley (always lurking), Travis d’Arnaud (apparently vengeful) and Ronald Acuña (not playing but menacingly available), ready to slip their World Series rings on their fingers and take it to us, as they took it to us the night before after we led, 2-0.
Except the night before, like the year before, was ancient history as Tuesday afternoon pedaled toward Tuesday evening. Peterson did give up a hit to Riley after the homer to Olson, but Marcell Ozuna popped up and d’Arnaud, familiarity with Citi Field notwithstanding, struck out, and Peterson got through five with a lead.
The lead was never relinquished, not by Adam Ottavino after a perfect sixth, not by Drew Smith after a scoreless seventh and eighth, and not by trustworthy Edwin Diaz in the ninth. Trustworthy Edwin Diaz is indeed the same Edwin Diaz who used to stoke trauma. The difference is he went in for No-Hitter Therapy last Friday, and since then, you can’t look at Diaz like you used to. You can if you must, but that, too, is ancient history. Not every combined pitching effort calls for lavish group hugs. Sometimes it’s just a matter of everybody doing their job very well. Nine Met hitters scored five runs. Four Met pitchers allowed only four. That’ll lift a lid to your liking.
The nightcap was a dollop of Dom Smith early — two-run double in the first inning — and a torrent of Carlos Carrasco all night long. Carrasco’s night was lengthy, encompassing eight innings and 96 pitches, and it might not have been what you’d think of as classically efficient (Braves reached base to lead off the first, second, third and sixth), but Cookie eventually found his groove en route to a win that required a mere 2:18 to bookify. The Braves didn’t touch him when it mattered. Pete Alonso touched Kyle Wright when it definitely helped matters, socking an opposite-field homer to pad Carrasco’s lead to 3-0 in the sixth. Nervous was understandable. Apoplectic seemed out of fashion. By the time auxiliary fireman Seth Lugo came into close, you remembered that “defending world champion” sounds impressive, but every season is a new season. In the current season, Ozzie Albies nicked Lugo for an infield single, but Adam Duvall flied out and Travis Demeritte grounded into a 5-4-3 double play.
Suddenly, the Mets had swept the Braves. Suddenly, the Mets were 18-8, a record no Mets team had carved after 26 games in this century. Suddenly, for what it was worth, the Mets were in position to win another series if they could take Wednesday’s game. The finale was TBD, as is everything before it happens, yet we could already determine that these Mets were solidly in first place, not at all resembling last season’s accidental tourists who mysteriously stumbled into the top spot of the division and quite explicably tumbled out of it.
Every Mets team holds our hopes in their hands. Few Mets teams hold leads twice as they did in Tuesday’s doubleheader. Few Mets teams have looked like this one. Makes a fan want to keep watching.
The topic of relaxing a little even as we hold on for dear life 162 times a year bats lead off in the latest episode of National League Town, with Teddy Martinez, Sergio Ferrer, Nationals Park and Nora Ephron batting further down the order. Listen to all of it here or wherever you seek 1970s Met utilityman talk.
by Jason Fry on 3 May 2022 12:04 am After the Mets rose up in indignation to snatch a win away from the Cardinals, I said it was the kind of unlikely comeback that would keep me on my couch for umpteen nights when no such good fortune was coming out way.
Nights like Monday, in other words.
How many things do you want to stew about?
For openers, can we have robot umps already? In the fifth inning, with a 2-0 lead, Chris Bassitt threw a perfect 2-2 sinker to Dansby Swanson. It was one of those magic pitches where the pitcher’s leaving the mound while the ball’s in flight with his infielders moving along with him — the batter’s guessed wrong, he’s locked up and can’t swing, and a couple of seconds from now he’ll be standing glumly at the plate with the umpire and a bunch of surplus gear while the scoreboard starts up the usual between-innings folderol.
Chad Fairchild, inexplicably, called it ball four three.
Bassitt, understandably flustered, lost his command, walking Swanson and hitting Ronald Acuna Jr. before getting Matt Olson to pop out. Fairchild then did what umpires rarely do — he got Bassitt’s attention and patted his chest, telling anyone and everyone that he’d missed the pitch. Which was indeed a decent gesture, but I’m pre-weary of the pixels it will generate about honor and accountability and the human element and a bunch of other blather. The fact is that Fairchild missed it, Bassitt had to throw extra high-stress pitches, and when he went back out for the sixth he was facing the middle of the order. The Braves didn’t exactly hit him hard in the sixth, but they hit him, and before you could blink the Mets were down 3-2. Bad umpiring is more than just a thumb on the scale — it’s added weight the pitcher is never going to be able to subtract, with ripple effects beyond one batter or inning.
More things to stew about? How about the Mets commencing to run the bases as if they were blindfolded — both Brandon Nimmo and Jeff McNeil uncharacteristically failed to take extra bases. Or the performance of Trevor May, who’s looked utterly lost so far this year, caught in a spiral of overthrowing and missed execution and self-loathing and further overthrowing.
But here I should note that a common trap of recaps in particular and fandom in general is that a loss gets picked apart for things your side failed to do, which ignores the half of the game that consists of the other guys trying to win. And those other guys did plenty, from Max Fried‘s solid outing and old friend Collin McHugh using his cutter to all but undress Mark Canha with the bases loaded to Austin Riley — not quite Schwarberesque in his Met mastication but too close for my liking — going deep off Bassitt.
And there was Travis d’Arnaud. You’re forgiven if you’ve blocked this out given the owner-related PTSD, but d’Arnaud’s Mets tenure ended when Jeff Wilpon had a hissy fit that a player recuperating from Tommy John surgery was still rusty and engineered his release after 25 at-bats. With a fully healed elbow, d’Arnaud’s been productive for the Rays and Braves, earned himself a World Series ring … and absolutely destroyed the Mets. His first double on Monday night tied the game against Bassitt; his second one put it out of reach against May. Could someone please tell Travis that a) the Wilpons are gone; and b) we all hated them too?
OK, that’s back to something our guys failed to do, or more properly did when they should have known better, which I just said was something to guard against. But it was that kind of night. Even the most magical season will have 20 to 30 teeth-grinders where you wind up too dispirited to even heave the remote in a foolish direction. This was one of them. There will be others. Try not to let any of them drive you crazy.
And if you figure out how to do that, please let me know.
by Greg Prince on 2 May 2022 10:50 am You can’t argue with the numbers. I mean you can, because somebody always wants to argue something, but you’d have to dig pretty deep for a debate let alone a dispute when the Mets are steaming along as they have thus far this young season.
The Mets have won 16 of their first 23 games, a mark previous Metropolitan editions have exceeded only once (19-4 in sui generis 1986) and have achieved only thrice: 1972, 1988 and 2006. We know the clip established in 1988 and 2006 augured highly successful regular seasons, and we can compartmentalize 1972 as one of those injury-riddled years. The thing I really like about 16-7 at the moment is 2022 after 23 games has now surpassed the pace set by 2018 at the same interval. Four years ago, Mickey Callaway’s swift starters were already reverting to the mean at 15-8 after bolting from the gate at 11-1. Once you get past the first few weeks of a season — and most every Jacob deGrom start — 2018 as a precedent serves only as a downer.
The Mets have won their first seven series, something no previous Mets team has done. It’s one of those records it didn’t occur to a person was a record, because who thinks about the record for most consecutive series won? Series vary in number of games, and enough of them are of the two- or four-game variety to change series wins in a row to, at best, series won or split in a row, with the unsatisfying sibling-smooching that implies. Streaks of series victories are something striven for more in theory than in actuality: “Just keep winning series,” you hear to shoo away anxieties over losing the third game of a three-game set after taking the first two. Substantial winning streaks in the traditional sense are thrilling as long as they continue, but stoke anxiety regarding the instant they end and the market correction one fears will follow. The Mets have yet to win more than three consecutive games in 2022. I’ve rationalized this as an encouraging development because, well, they haven’t lost a series…and they’ve gotten this far without the substantial winning streak of more than three games in a row that inevitably awaits every team.
Max Scherzer hasn’t lost a regular-season start since last May. Until this April, that was of little interest to us. Now we’re riding Max’s winning ways for as long as we have his permission, which, when you glimpse him on the nights he pitches, we’ll just go ahead and take as implicit, because we’re not bothering this guy on the nights he pitches. The security people at Fort Knox envy how locked in Scherzer gets when he’s on the mound and when he’s in the dugout in the other halves of innings. On Sunday night versus Philadelphia, Max focus meant leaving the Phillies completely hopeless most of the time. There were three home runs for the visitors to Citi Field, but I choose to process those as long fly balls that permit the pitcher breathers between strikeouts (and anything slugged by Kyle Schwarber versus any pitcher in a Mets uniform barely counts as an extraordinary event). Scherzer went six strong innings — nine muscular strikeouts, four earned runs all tallied via pesky homers, a lead when he left. Technically, it wasn’t a quality start. Max is 4-0 and the Mets are 5-0 when he takes the ball. Tell me that’s not quality.
The Phillies indeed outhomered the Mets four to zero, yet the Mets outscored the Phillies, 10-6. Intermittent festivals of frustration like Saturday’s notwithstanding, the Mets’ offense generally functions in a state of relentlessness. There are too many good hitters bound to get hits. They strung fifteen hits across eight innings. Six came with runners in scoring position, which will generate some runs. Anybody you saw in the lineup Sunday night you don’t want to see plenty of? Jeff McNeil, who I was ready to trade in the offseason, had four hits and is hitting .361. Dom Smith, to whom I was growing unattached during our winter of lockout discontent, batted 1.000 in his four at-bats and timed his explosion to coincide with Roster Cutdown Eve. I assume Billy Eppler noticed. Buck Showalter surely did. Showalter, we have learned, notices everything.
Robinson Cano did not contribute to the rousing Sunday night victory. There’s an “I never miss it, ’cause I never watch it!” punch line in there given that there’s been little Cano contribution evident in most of these series wins. If the Mets had been playing all along with 26 players, Cano’s presence would seem more than a little atonal from a box score perspective. With 28, we could enjoy the presumed benefit his elder statesman role has yielded from the perch of first place. But 28 becomes 26 today. One pitcher, designated enforcer Yoan Lopez, will definitely go, and one position player will have to depart as well. It’s a real reality show wrinkle to a season that hasn’t lacked for twists and turns. Robinson Cano would be the absolutely obvious choice if he weren’t Robinson Cano. Player X with his production wouldn’t require much in the way of comparative analytics. Player X is slashing .195/.233/.268, with a 40th birthday on the horizon and a recent backstory that explains why 2021 is a blank on his career stat sheet. Unless Player Y is playing with a spike through his head, there’s not much comparison to be done if a roster spot is on the line.
Yet he’s Robinson Cano, which speaks volumes internally never mind financially. We can bandy the phrase “sunk costs” all we like, as if we’ve crammed the night away for our microeconomics final — it was very popular in the waning days of Luis Castillo and Oliver Perez — but something tells me Steve Cohen didn’t get to be Steve Cohen by cavalierly dismissing (even for him) absurd amounts of dollars owed. Plus Robinson Cano, as cold as ice as he is and old as dirt as he appears, is not a batch of widgets. People, as they say over in Sociology 101, are people. Cano is definitely one of them. One with 2,632 hits.
None of this should be construed as an endorsement of demoting a more productive option who has options. I’d rather have Smith than Cano; J.D. Davis than Cano; Luis Guillorme than Cano; or Travis Jankowski (no options) than Cano. I’ve just never cared for how venomous we as Mets fans get when we smell the blood of our own. George Foster in 1986. Kaz Matsui in 2006. Cano volubly booed every plate appearance on Friday night before the combined no-hitter diverted our attention. When the team sucks and a given player really sucks, we can live with it because the team sucks, so what’s one more practitioner of the sucky arts? But when we perceive ourselves on the verge of greatness, how dare a player with a track record of achievement require a little extra patience when he’s going badly? He’s getting in our way! Thus, the floe is gleefully prepared. I don’t necessarily mind the decisions that ultimately separate the unproductive player from the aspirational team. I don’t love the mindset that accompanies it so much.
And as long as I’m tilting at attitudinal windmills, I was a tad disappointed the Mets did not devote sixty seconds of CitiVision/social media hat-tipping to Jeurys Familia. A few highlights of key strikeouts, a few clips of giving back to the community, a circle squared before reverting to our competitive postures. Famiia was a Met for eleven seasons, minus a couple of months in Oakland. Familia set the franchise’s single-season save record and threw a fistful of clinching pitches. He was imperfect in certain situations and I don’t particularly miss his right arm in this year’s bullpen, but I’ve always appreciated the philosophy behind the “thanks, ex-Met” videos. They did it for Matt Harvey despite Matt Harvey leaving in a cloud of murkiness. They did it for Asdrubal Cabrera despite trading Asdrubal Cabrera to a division rival based ninety miles south. They did it for Zack Wheeler, albeit in an empty stadium, never mind that Zack voluntarily signed with Philadelphia. It’s a classy thing to do and show. I don’t know if this is a new regime thing — if you’re not with us, you’re against us — or was skipped because the marketing department took its blather about Rivalry Weekend overly seriously. I detest the Phillies, but I can handle a minute of gratitude expressed toward a current Phillie who was very much a Met who mattered for a decade.
Mattering less until it matters again: Sunday Night Baseball brought to us by ESPN and ESPN 2. The regular SNB broadcast was on the so-called mothership, which I gave a whirl more than I usually do because I thought the crew did OK the week before in a non-Mets context. Karl Ravech, Eduardo Perez and David Cone are not an automatic turn-off for this viewer. They would have been helped by the blessedly abandoned seven-inning doubleheader rule, though, because by the ninth, I couldn’t take them anymore. I think it had something to do with them falling back on yammering about where the Mets fit in the New York baseball scheme of things. Fellas, the Mets fit at the top of the NL East, which is all the ranking I need right now. Over on the Deuce, I sampled the KayRodCast, partly to see Keith Hernandez and Hadji, partly out of morbid curiosity. I dug the Manningcast, upon which this variation is based, during football season, far preferring Eli and Peyton to whoever was doing the main feed of the Monday night games, probably because I didn’t particularly care about Monday Night Football and I will always adore Eli Manning. Michael Kay and Alex Rodriguez alongside even a guest you might actually want to hear from is probably a dicey proposition under any circumstances. While a Mets game was in progress, it was not optimal. Their lines of conversation with Mets-friendly guests like Keith and Hank Azaria might have made for a tolerable hot stove chat. The season is underway, however. As was the game.
The radio remains handy for the next Sunday night Met date. And, should the Mets keep winning series, postseason as well.
UPDATE: Robinson Cano has been designated for assignment. Empathy remains, but no argument here.
by Jason Fry on 1 May 2022 12:40 pm You cannot, in fact, win them all.
To be clear, 15-7 with April in the books is pretty good — that’s a 110-win pace according to the dictates of not particularly advanced math. And it’s hard to get too sore about losing a day after watching a no-hitter, even if you’re a fan of a club for which no-nos don’t feel like total solar eclipses.
Saturday night’s loss to the Phillies felt a little like a strange inversion of that combined no-hitter, in fact — Phillies pitchers walked eight Mets and seemed to be perpetually on the wrong side of deep counts, but the enemy hits proved inexplicably absent, this time for the most part instead of totally. The Mets had their chances — second and third with two out in the first, first and third with two out in the fourth, bases loaded with a run in and just one out in the fifth, and bases loaded with two out in the eighth — and one of the reasons we’re fond of the 2022 incarnation of this club is they’ve been excellent at converting such opportunities where the 2021 Mets were maddeningly terrible at it. But on Saturday night, not a single one of those 10 Met runners came home. Meanwhile, the Phillies overcame some dunderheaded early baserunning and belatedly rose from Friday night’s strange slumber as Kyle Schwarber launched an absolute missile off Adam Ottavino in the seventh, with Odubel Herrera and Rhys Hoskins offering insurance the visitors turned out not to need.
There were reasons for optimism beyond the philosophical, most notably that Taijuan Walker returned from the IL and looked sharper than Buck Showalter could have hoped. (He’s also sporting a new hairstyle that makes him look a little like Bartolo Colon — Big Sexy may be gone but there’s certainly nothing wrong with some Medium Sexy.) But that was it on an off-night that also saw Sean Reid-Foley — he of the sumo meets gunslinger mound stance — signal immediately to the dugout after failing to be able to finish a slider, a painful moment that sent me back to Victor Zambrano leaving the Shea Stadium mound knowing something was terribly wrong with his arm. That injury effectively ended Zambrano’s career; I hope Reid-Foley is OK but am pretty sure that he isn’t.
If you want to be callous about that (which you shouldn’t be), the Mets have had one of their decisions taken out of their hands ahead of the Monday deadline to reduce the active roster from 28 to 26. Who gets that second black spot will be a very interesting read on Steve Cohen and his philosophy. It should be Robinson Cano, whose bat speed has decayed precipitously and is taking at-bats away from two guys who look like they could use them in Dom Smith and J.D. Davis. But it might not be — Cano is making a fortune, for one, and commands the respect of Showalter and his teammates as a mentor and clubhouse presence. Still, if any baseball owner understands the concept of a sunk cost, it ought to be Cohen.
That will be interesting, to say the least. But the whole season’s been pretty interesting so far, hasn’t it?
|
|
