The Mets don’t actually travel the earth with a black cloud over their heads, but it sure does seem that way sometimes.
From Zack Wheeler to Hansel Robles to Yoenis Cespedes, Monday night’s game was one stomach punch after the other, almost as if baseball was trying to point out the folly of continuing to subject ourselves to unpleasantness.
Wheeler, a perennial work in progress, looked good early, but his collapse in the sixth had been preceded by a fifth inning that was all warning lights: with two out he walked three, made two horrendous pitches (in terms of selection and location) to Jedd Gyorko and only escaped when Gyorko slammed a low line drive that Asdrubral Cabrera caught at his shoetops.
That seemed to use up all of Wheeler’s luck — in the sixth Yadier Molina was the beneficiary of an infield single that Jose Reyes probably didn’t need to turn into a do-or-die play, new tormenter Paul DeJong homered for a Cardinals lead, and three batters later Adam Wainwright drove Wheeler from the game with a run-scoring double. I could write a bunch of stuff about Wheeler still being young, coming back from injury, etc. It would all be true and be nothing you haven’t read before, so let’s not.
You’re also probably aware that Hansel Robles gives up way too many home runs, which is what got him dispatched to Las Vegas a while back. Robles returned to replace Chasen Bradford, and let the record show that he did manage to throw one pitch without a disastrous outcome.
Then Robles threw a second pitch to Tommy Pham, and that was effectively the end of the ballgame. What happens in Vegas may stay in Vegas, but the pitch Robles offered up in Flushing came down in Whitestone.
The funniest part, if you can force yourself to laugh: after Pham connected, Robles pointed skyward, as if he’d induced a pop-up. Considering the trajectory, who was he alerting? The customers in the 400 level? Airline pilots? Cherubim and seraphim who might be rudely interrupted while thronging the air? It was remarkable, in a way.
The Mets fought back, sort of, via a Lucas Duda homer and a farcical Reyes trip around the bases in which newcomer Magneuris Sierra seemed in real danger of inflicting permanent harm on himself with a baseball, which isn’t how one should field it. But they were turned aside when Michael Conforto’s RBI single intersected the glove of Tyler Lyons at the approximate speed of a cruise missile. Conforto had about the unhappiest day one could imagine that included a homer and a nice catch in center — if not for some buzzard’s luck he might have been 3-for-4 with three RBIs and a possible postgame crown.
That a postgame crown was possible had more to do with the Cardinals than the Mets — like us, the 2017 Cards are plodding through the wreckage of a season undone by injuries, porous defense and crap relief. So let the record state that the Mets had a chance in the ninth, with two onthe bases loaded, one out and Cespedes up as the tyingwinning run … and with a 3-0 count.
If there’s a scenario above that one on the wish list, I’d sure like to know what it is. Cespedes, instead of zeroing in on a ball he could drive, tried to pull a high fastball, which was doing the pitcher’s work for him. He rolled it to the shortstop for a game-ending double play [1].
Once again, I suppose I could go on about injuries and pressure to be The Man (in this case, The Man fled the clubhouse to avoid The Media), or how that’s the kind of thing that happens when you’re slumping. But it’s reached the point where it doesn’t particularly matter. The season is lost and this fizzled incarnation of the Mets will soon be broken up for parts. Memory will smear these games into a vague, faintly distasteful blur, the smudge between Noah Syndergaard grabbing his lat and Amed Rosario being called up, or whatever event signals the next incarnation of the Mets has come into focus.