17 Again?

“You have to respect a ballplayer who’s just tryin’ to finish the season,” Annie Savoy told us after she learned Crash Davis left her at dawn for an opening at Asheville in the South Atlantic League. Crash had a goal: minor league home run No. 247, the record for such things in the world of Bull Durham, if not real-life minor league baseball. When Crash next showed up in Durham, it was only after he’d taken care of business. He hit his dinger, he hung ’em up. Now, at the end of the movie, Crash just wanted to be.

Nobody on the 2017 Mets deserves to just be more than Jacob deGrom. He’s taken every ball, he’s made every start, he’s absorbed every indignity, he’s pinch-hit a few times and, for the most part, he’s kept any dissatisfaction to himself. On Sunday at Citi Field, he betrayed a touch of impatience with the less than stellar defense behind him during the inning in which he finally cracked enough to allow the Marlins to score the runs that definitively torpedoed his afternoon…but he also had the grace to apologize publicly for inadvertently showing up his rookie shortstop. Young Amed Rosario had made like Dear Evan Hansen and went tap, tap, tapping on his glove before making the throw that didn’t retire Dee Gordon in the seventh, which soon revealed itself as prelude to disaster in the form of Giancarlo Stanton taking Jacob deep for a three-run homer.

The blast would have been predictable had it come off any other Met pitcher. After Gordon beat Rosario’s throw, and before Stanton sent a pitch so far it should have had a damn stewardess on it, the starter instinctively raised his hands in disgust that he got the ground ball he needed, yet no outs to show for it. Sort of like the rest of us did, except we weren’t on TV and we aren’t Rosario’s teammate. DeGrom salvaged some diplomacy over the incident afterwards, admitting, “I probably shouldn’t have done that.”

Does anything good ever happen on a Sunday afternoon at Citi Field?

Calendar aside, it wasn’t a great day for deGrom and it wasn’t a passable day for the indisputably inexperienced, intermittently inept Mets, who ultimately lost to Adam Conley and the Marlins, 6-4. Conley notched eleven strikeouts in seven innings. The Mets fumbled continuously for nine innings. DeGrom took the defeat, pulling the ace’s record down to 13-7. There was a time not too long ago when I thought Jake had a shot at 20 wins. A lot would have had to have gone right, which should have been the clue it was an unlikely quest. These are the 2017 Mets. A lot never goes right.

The goal Susan Sarandon’s Savoy cited remains a valid one for all of us, deGrom included: just try to finish the season. We have 40 more games to go. Jake has maybe eight starts, depending on how hard he may be hitting the proverbial wall, which I hope isn’t as hard as Stanton hit him on Sunday. You could definitely envision a moment when all concerned parties agree the ball shouldn’t be given to deGrom because what’s the point anymore? Let him get an early start on winter and let him keep the one reliable arm the Mets have in functional shape ahead of 2018. Or maybe, should there be an alternative after rehabs and callups take effect, he can miss one start and be fresh to finish the season as he started it, on the mound.

Jake said he’d like to get to 200 innings. He’s at 165 right now. Decent goal. It’s an arbitrary figure, but arbitrary figures drive pitchers and fans. I have a figure even more arbitrary as my goal on his behalf: 17 wins. That’s a legitimate acelike total. We already know Jacob deGrom is a legitimate ace, but you so rarely see that many wins these days, no matter how good the pitcher.

I’m gonna put aside that pitcher’s wins are an inane category, given how a starter can put in a fine day’s work, go completely unrewarded because he’s undermined or outdueled, and then a vulture can swoop in briefly and fly away with his W. Hansel Robles, the reliever who’s often been awful, is second on the staff with seven wins. Paul Sewald, the closest thing the Mets bullpen has had to a breakout performer, is 0-5. No starter not named Jacob deGrom has more than five wins. The Mets themselves don’t have 55 wins, so it’s no wonder that the infrequent victories are distributed disproportionately.

We know wins are flawed. But they exist, and I’d like Jake to collect 17 of them. That’s four more on top of the amount he’s already secured. He’s welcome to squeeze out more if he can figure out how. I suppose I should just cut our losses and hope he doesn’t get hurt in quest of No. 14. But I like 17. Seventeen was how many Jerry Koosman had in 1969, how many Jon Matlack had in 1976, how many Doc Gooden had in 1984 and 1986, how many Ron Darling had in 1988 and how many Al Leiter had in 1998. If I may dazzle you with unassailable logic, 17 is not as many as 18, but it’s more than 16. Sixteen wins is admirable — on this team, it would be astonishing — but 17 somehow conveys another level of oomph.

R.A. Dickey was the last Met to win as many as 17. He won 20 in 2012. We’re no longer asking for 20. We’re asking for 17, a Leiter’s Twenty, if you will. Doesn’t seem like to gargantuan a sum to ask for every nineteen or so years. Jake has seven or eight starts left, pending how management chooses to nurture his right arm the rest of the way. “There’s too much nurturing in today’s game,” Keith Hernandez, the quintessential 17, suggested Sunday, just to remind us he’s had it with society in general and baseball in particular, but it’s understandable if the Mets want to cover their asset with caution and a fleece blanket. Yet if Jake is allowed to go out and be Jake, I really hope the Mets can score a few runs for him, catch a few outs for him and smoothly transfer a few grounders from their gloves for him. I hope 200 innings yields 17 wins. As long as we’re trying to finish the season, it would be nice to come away with something that makes it less trying.

In other Jake news, the Mets have received Jacob Rhame from the Dodgers as the player to be Rhame later in the Curtis Granderson deal. Stop me if you’ve heard this before, but he’s a righthanded minor league relief pitcher. My scouting report indicates that if he wants to make it with the Mets, he has a helluva first name.