I thought it was swell that the Mets told those of us who held rain checks from Saturday’s soggy yet official game [1] against the Braves that we could come back to Citi Field and trade them in for shiny new tickets to Monday night’s game against the Nationals. And I had a half a mind — to use too obvious a straight line to pass up — to take advantage of their goodwill. I wasn’t exactly planning to go see them for a third day in a row but I just kind of assumed my momentum would carry me there. The Mets play, I seem to materialize.
But I couldn’t do it. Could not pull the trigger. Could not bring myself to subject myself to another live and in-person look at them, even though as a Mets fan my default mode is to avail myself of every live and in-person look at them I can get. I mean, c’mon, it’s the Mets game…and it’s free.
Ultimately, it wasn’t free enough. I don’t want to say they would’ve had to have paid me to spend three more hours with the 2012 Mets, but even at a ticket price of $0.00, this wasn’t going to be a cost-effective visit.
Not unless the Mets were going to comp my transportation. And food. And beverage. And mental health coverage.
Yes, I had a half a mind to go see the Mets again Monday night. Thank goodness the other half of my mind stuck up for sanity.
What did I miss by not paying what the Mets of September 2012 are worth when R.A. Dickey isn’t pitching?
• R.A.’s Cy Young rival Gio Gonzalez looking not remotely Dickeyish yet winning handily. He gave the Mets five walks in six innings, and the opportunistic Mets made him pay by…no, actually, Gio, like the Saturday set, didn’t have to pay. The Mets cashed in no opportunities. Scott Hairston hit a solo home run, but by then, Collin McHugh had spotted the Nats five runs, and the score was what it was going to be for the rest of the night [2], 5-1.
• Kelly Shoppach dropped a foul pop that extended a Kurt Suzuki at-bat long enough to turn it into a home run, which reminded me of an observation I made while sentenced to ten innings of Mets baseball at Citi Field on Sunday: if there is one modern-day player who seems likely to get caught up in a Black Sox-like scandal, my nominee would be Kelly Shoppach. That’s not to say I think he was throwing the game. I don’t think any of our catchers is capable of throwing a game, let alone a baserunner out at second.
• The Ramirii, Elvin and Ramon, were effective, as was Jeurys Familia. I don’t know if their combined four innings of no-hit ball means anything in the scheme of 2013, but good for them. It didn’t do the Mets any good since their batters did nothing to three Nationals relievers for three blankety-blank innings, but the Mets, per Terry Collins’s delusional postgame comments on “positives,” would like us to believe what good we see is good, and the rest can essentially be ignored.
• The Mets tied their mark for uninterrupted home-game offensive futility by not scoring three runs in an eleventh consecutive Queens contest and they came up with something I didn’t even know existed besides: they’ve now gone 106 innings in a row without scoring more than one run in any given Citi Field inning. That’s the worst for any team since 1909, back when catchers probably did drop foul pops per arrangements with the gambling community. What’s the 2012 Mets’ excuse?
• Official attendance was a shade less than 22,000, presumably including the tens and tens of Saturday tickets exchanged for Monday. Based on the photos I saw online and the wide shots from the center field camera on SNY, I wish to congratulate the Mets’ official attendance counter on submitting the winning entry for this year’s Pulitzer Prize for distinguished fiction by an American author. If R.A. doesn’t win the Cy Young, at least we’ll have that.