One of the ads in regular Mets rotation right now is for rebranded cable company Spectrum, and features a pair of monsters under a little girl’s bed during the night. One monster is honked off about fees for some Spectrum competitor (I can’t remember which, because I don’t care) and complaining tendentiously and loudly about this state of affairs to his fellow boogeyman — loudly enough to wake up the child on the other side of the mattress.
It’s a funny concept, but it’s the little things that really make it work. Like the aggrieved monster getting so worked up that he can no longer articulate his roster of complaints, falling back on a helplessly frustrated, all-encompassing “it’s bad.” To which the other monster retorts: “you’re bad — at this!” They’re interrupted by the annoyed little girl, who tells them she can hear them, then throws her hands up when the complaining monster can’t let it go.
Last night those 30 seconds were vastly more entertaining than the three hours of dreadful, deeply boring baseball in which they were embedded. The Mets began the game with an uncharacteristic display of life as Curtis Granderson [1] hit a leadoff homer, then had Rich Hill [2] in their sights in the fourth inning, loading the bases with no one out for Jose Reyes [3].
You can probably guess what came next: Jose struck out. So did Gavin Cecchini [4]. And so did Tyler Pill [5].The Mets had turned their golden opportunity into leaden reality. Womp-womp.
In the bottom of the inning a Logan Forsythe [6] double gave the Dodgers the lead and a three-run homer from Yasiel Puig [7] made the remaining innings academic [8], unless your tastes ran to watching Neil Ramirez [9] do Neil Ramirez things. (If Neil were the boogeyman, the little girl from the ad would have doubled off the wall and gone back to sleep.)
Puig’s homer came with a side of stupid: he admired it and Cadillac’ed, Wilmer Flores [10] took exception, Puig took exception to the exception, Travis d’Arnaud [11] muttered something that was ignored, Puig had a between-innings colloquy with Reyes and Yoenis Cespedes [12] and that was pretty much it until the postgame, when … you know what, I’ve wasted too much time on this one as it is. If you see a cloud that your inner Gossage needs to yell at, load up Google and knock yourself out.
Anyway, I was thinking about the monsters under the bed, the little girl on top of it, the Mets, us and who’s who.
My first thought was that the monsters are your recappers, trapped beneath the weight of a season gone awry and so besieged by terribleness that all we can do is sputter that “it’s bad.” But that doesn’t quite fit: we haven’t done anything wrong, except root for a team put on this Earth to suck the joy out of baseball.
Maybe the monsters are the Mets — because they certainly are bad at this, and going nowhere.
Yeah, that fits better. Which would mean the little girl is all of us, lying there witnessing failure when we should be sleeping. Like her, at this point all we can do is shrug and wait for morning.