THAT’S IT! The Mets have made me so mad that I’m leaving the country!
OK, while I actually am leaving the country for six days in Iceland, the trip doesn’t actually have anything to do with the sad JV version of our team’s and their somnambulant performances of late.
Still, it won’t exactly break my heart to play a Get Out of Unfun Baseball Free [1] card for nearly a week if it means I miss games like the weekend’s grisly crapfests against the Brewers. I won’t mourn that I didn’t see our starters’ faces fall if they dared make a mistake pitch or looked up at the scoreboard and saw they’re two runs behind. I won’t be sad to miss watching Mets run the bases like they’ve prepared with an hour of the dizzy bat race, or fielding like their gloves have been replaced by lawn darts, or trying to do whatever it is I dimly recall players wearing blue and orange are supposed to do when they swing a bat.
The starting lineup has been much reduced by injuries — the latest news is the revelation that Michael Conforto [2] is struggling with cartilage damage in his wrist [3], which means he’ll have to go on the DL for a few weeks grimly plow along as if nothing’s wrong. Add in David Wright [4]‘s herniated disk, Neil Walker [5]‘s back, Travis d’Arnaud [6]‘s shoulder, Lucas Duda [7]‘s back and Juan Lagares [8]‘s thumb and you’ve got 2/3 of a lineup replaced with Mayberry-Muno irregulars, whose effectiveness you may remember from last June’s unwatchable baseball.
Granted, last summer turned out pretty OK — there’s a book about that [9]. The Mets came disturbingly close [10] to getting no-hit by Jameson Taillon [11] Tuesday night, but in 2015 they got no-hit twice — oddly, I was in the house both nights — and were still allowed to go to the World Series. Now as then, as long as they can ride their solid starting pitching they ought to be able to hang around all season, and there are three playoff slots available to teams that can do that.
But the highlight films sensibly reduce the Summer of Loathe to a montage before getting to the good stuff; nobody wants to lovingly recall fidgeting as Clayton Kershaw [12] dissected a Triple-A lineup. Since that’s what we’re back to, I’m OK with skipping a week of it.