Let’s get the late news in first: this time the Pirates did the job, stifling the Cardinals to move the Mets into a virtual tie for the second wild-card slot. (It’s virtual because St. Louis has somehow played three fewer games than we have.) Then the Rockies walked off the Giants. Your NL wild-card race is now a hairball, with three teams separated by half a game for two spots.
And somehow, we’re one of those teams. Amazin’!
If Wednesday night’s scoreboard-watching was bliss, Tuesday night’s was agony. We sagged to see Tony Watson [1] get undone in cruel fashion: it was bad enough that Matt Carpenter [2] hit a two-out, two-strike pitch over the fence to tie the game, but then Randall Grichuk and Jhonny Peralta [3] followed with homers of their own. Watson didn’t just look stunned — he looked like a man caught in a nightmare from which he couldn’t awaken himself. A few minutes later, the Pirates had lost their eighth straight, in about as miserable a fashion as one could imagine.
I thought of that game today as the Mets played the Reds under sultry conditions in Cincinnati before a very large number of empty red seats. Not because of what it had meant for the Mets — though that was part of it, of course — but because the Reds were subjecting their loyalists to a different though equally awful form of torture [4].
If Keith Hernandez [5] hadn’t been on hand for this one the Mets would have had to send the Concorde to get him, because today needed his signature mix of disbelief and disdain. The Reds played about as badly as a team could play, deserving every sublative one could throw at them.
Where to start? In the second, Brandon Phillips [6] was called out trying to steal second. Phillips was pretty clearly safe, but the normally voluble veteran displayed not the slightest interest in arguing his case, trotting back to the dugout. The Reds didn’t challenge.
Scott Schebler [7] then walked, and Tyler Holt [8] seemed to miss a sign for a hit and run. Schebler probably would have stolen the base anyway, what with Noah Syndergaard [9] being on the mound and all, but didn’t slide and was out.
In the third, Yoenis Cespedes [10] hit a bad-hop grounder up the middle with Jose Reyes [11] — he of the very welcome first-pitch homer — on first and two out. Phillips and Jose Peraza [12] got in each other’s airspace and Reyes hustled to third as the inning continued. Anthony DeSclafani [13] then buried a curve ball for a wild pitch. The ball came back to catcher Tucker Barnhart [14], who whirled for a play on Reyes … and saw DeSclafani hadn’t covered the plate.
In the bottom of the inning, Syndergaard picked off Eugenio Suarez [15] with Joey Votto [16] at the plate. Peraza tried to come home and was thrown out by Asdrubal Cabrera [17]. Syndergaard walked Votto — and Adam Duvall [18] promptly hit the first pitch for a routine fly ball.
The Reds — particularly Phillips — played like they had zero interest in professional baseball. The irony was that they’d picked the right day to oppose Syndergaard: Noah had very little, with all his pitches sailing erratically away from Rene Rivera [19]‘s target. Only the Reds’ serial incompetence kept them from sending Noah to an early shower — and even then, the Mets couldn’t build a big enough lead to make what felt like a laugher look like one on the scoreboard.
I went into the gory details because not so long ago, this was what it felt like to be us. The Mets weren’t hitting at all, they were painfully lead-footed on the basepaths, and if a starter didn’t spring a leak, you figured the bullpen or the defense would. The Mets couldn’t get out of their own way, it was dismal and depressing to watch, and it felt like it would never, ever end.
We take a Metscentric view of the world. Tony Watson has a nightmare game and we fume about his failing our cause. The Rockies make the punchless Giants look like hitters again and we decry their lousy timing. The Reds wander around like it’s already Honeydew Season and we see Metsian pluck and vigor.
It’s the way fandom works, but that doesn’t make it less silly. Our current streak of walking on air will end, sad to say. (Not until next April, one hopes, but still.) We’ll lose games we thought we should have won, maybe even several in a row, and we’ll groan that we’re the only fanbase sentenced to trudge around under its own monogrammed black cloud. It isn’t so. Sometimes it’s raining elsewhere, on other people, in relentless, mean-spirited sheets.