The Braves are out of the playoffs — and their cause of death was the Mets.
The Pirates beat the Brewers, and the Mets finished the deed with a 10-2 decimation [1] that didn’t seem as close as that score suggests.
Let us therefore now observe a moment of silence … whoa, I seem to have badly misspelled “round of high-fiving while cackling with an unseemly glee.”
Seriously, fuck the Braves. Fuck them for all the horrible things they did to us in previous baseball generations, when they were the car and we were the dog barking and snapping uselessly at the bumper. Fuck them for their entitled fans who took a dynasty for granted and wouldn’t fill the stadium for a playoff game. Fuck them for holding up taxpayers for a new stadium when there was nothing particularly wrong with the old one except they could get a better deal elsewhere. Fuck them for Bobby Cox [2] and Chipper and Andruw Jones [3] and John Rocker [4] and Michael Tucker [5] and Steve Avery [6] and Chief Noc-a-Homa and the cheating with the catcher’s batter’s box. Fuck them for those horrible red tops. Fuck them for everything I can think of and everything you can think of and then let’s ask some more people and come back and say fuck them for all of that too.
I’d add fuck Fredi Gonzalez [7], but I think he’s pretty fucked as it is. After a gag job like that, the question isn’t who should go but who, if anybody, deserves to stay.
The Braves played horribly yet again today, with no one looking more bored and limp while losing than B.J. Upton [8]. They got eviscerated and embarrassed, and they didn’t seem either devastated or disappointed by it. (Oh yeah — fuck T@m Glav!ne, no matter what uniform you picture him in.) As we all know, the Mets have their problems. But there’s something hollow and broken about the Braves. Good luck fixing it, by which I mean I hope they never do.
On the winning side of the romp, here’s a potential last shake of the shaggy mop for Jacob deGrom. [9] Ideally, deGrom’s season would end with a happy sendoff at Citi Field next weekend and a 10th win to cement his Rookie of the Year credentials. Ideally, but more likely that’s it for deGrom, felled by the dreaded innings limit. Whatever the case, in an odd way it was one of his more impressive outings in a most impressive season — he fanned eight of the first 11 Braves, then dialed his fastball down a few ticks to conserve energy for when he needed it. DeGrom’s thunderbolt arm is marvelous, of course, but he also has the head to go with it.
The Mets are now a skinny half-game behind those Braves. A rational person would say it’s mildly in the Mets’ interests not to finish ahead of them, because of draft picks and slot money. That rational person is undoubtedly correct. But I don’t want to be rational. I want my team to finish ahead of the Braves, and then I want to look back at them and laugh. And then next year I want it to happen again, but with a lot more distance between us.