100 mph fastball, 95 mph slider, 91 mph change. Syndergaard is what you’d get if your brother cheated making a pitcher in a videogame. #mets [1]
— Jason Fry (@jasoncfry) April 18, 2016 [2]
That was me early in tonight’s game while I watched Noah Syndergaard [3] mow down Phillies with his ludicrously unfair arsenal of pitches. I could have waxed admiring about his curve ball too except I was out of characters.
(David Wright [4] compared Syndergaard to a videogame player too, but I was there first, so nyaah-nyaah to our captain. Um, even if he did hit two home runs while I sprawled on a couch and tweeted.)
This was an intriguingly odd baseball game, what with the two teams collecting 17 hits and fanning 25 times and the Mets’ scoring consisting of four solo home runs and a cue-shot double by Lucas Duda [5] against the shift. The most intriguing aspect for me was Philadelphia’s Jerad Eickhoff [6] playing hedgehog to Syndergaard’s fox, a strategy that for a while looked like it might work.
Here’s your scouting report: Eickhoff was throwing his curve ball when he needed a strike. Whatever Met was at the plate knew it, you knew it, I knew it, the loudmouth guy in the good seats who kept barking attempted witticisms knew it, the little animated whale that briefly and bafflingly pinged around on SNY’s feed knew it, Cindy from Lee’s Toyota in her pretend Yankees uniform knew it, and all the Flyers fans getting ready to throw stuff on the ice [7] across the street from Citizens Bank Ballpark knew it.
It didn’t matter, because that curve was hellaciously good, good enough for Eickhoff to hang around for seven fine innings and depart with the Mets on the plus side of an awfully thin 2-1 lead.
Enter the Philadelphia bullpen, though, and oh well [8]. First David Hernandez [9] gave up an absolute howitzer of a line-drive home run by Duda, one heralded by some Phillie fan’s mocking invocation of “DOOOO-DA” a nanosecond before Duda reduced the ball to a cloud of vaguely horsehide-scented mist. (Don’t you wish that could always happen?) Then Neil Walker [10] once again played perfectly fine second fiddle, connecting for a home run to left that only seemed pedestrian because of what it followed. In the ninth, Wright capped things by hitting his second home run of the game, this one off Elvis Araujo [11], whose name Gary Cohen of course pronounces exquisitely while I can barely type it.
Can you imagine what numbers Wright would have put up if he’d made his 2004 debut as a Phillie in this park and stayed after that? Philadelphia fans would argue over Wright or Mike Schmidt [12] while we bemoaned having run through 712 mostly lousy third basemen. We’d also have come up with half-assed reasons that Wright was loathsome, which makes for an amusing thought exercise. Um, he wipes his nose on his jersey or something before each pitch? Yeah, that’s kind of gross. David Wright is a Phillie snot rag!
Nah, it wouldn’t work. We’d just be bummed that he wasn’t ours.
Happily, he is. The Mets are .500, Syndergaard is a monster, Duda looks alive and reports of Wright’s professional death have been somewhat exaggerated. Funny how a couple of days can change one’s outlook on things.