Sometimes Boring's Not So Bad

Sometimes, it turns out, a dull baseball game is better without a little injection of excitement.

Wednesday night’s series finale between the Mets and Phillies started off glacial and boring and then turned glacial and annoying. The Phils nicked Jason Vargas for a run in the first but nothing else; the Mets couldn’t get the hit they needed against Vince Velasquez, with Wilson Ramos having a particularly frustrating night. And then Robert Gsellman came into a 1-0 game and got pounded and that was effectively it.

I could talk about Vargas being good, which statistically he undeniably was, but something just felt flat and off for both teams until Gsellman showed up and made you reconsider the watchability of flat and off. Take Vargas’s final pitch of the night, a 2-2 fastball to Bryce Harper. The pitch before had been a changeup that started inside and dove into the dirt, designed to get Harper looking inside. The next pitch, it was clear to me, everyone in the park, everyone watching on TV, and anyone you happened to wake up from a nap of between five minutes and five decades for a quick briefing, was going to be a fastball on the outside corner. It was, it arrived at a Vargasian 86 MPH … and Harper looked at it for strike three.

Yeah, that kind of night.

Anyway, Gsellman came in and was bad and that let all the air out of a game that had turned into a fallen souffle anyway. I’d spent an hour and a half waiting for the Mets to get a big hit, then downgraded my hopes to having someone on either team look vaguely awake. But then Mickey Callaway summoned Jacob Rhame because someone had to pitch the ninth, and Rhame had to face his Tuesday-night antagonist Rhys Hoskins. Hoskins came into that confrontation as wired as if he’d just hoovered up a bag of trucker speed, hit a home run down the left-field line, and should finish his trot around the time the other Phillies get off their bus back home.

And now let’s have 1,000 words about how baseball is a pale shadow of what it used to be, followed by a rant about how the pinkos banned leaded gasoline.

No, if you want that go listen to sports-talk radio or find dumb people on Twitter. (And, honestly, what are you doing here in the first place?)

Rhame wasn’t trying to hit Hoskins Tuesday night to avenge his sort-of-fallen teammates — he nearly hit him because he’s not a very good pitcher. To be more specific about something that doesn’t particularly deserve analysis, he nearly hit him because he’s one of approximately 90 raw chuckers stashed at AAA and called up to the big leagues when teams become disenchanted with their other not very good raw chuckers. They’re spaghetti at the wall, except the spaghetti is going nearly 100 MPH so you’re stuck with contractors in your kitchen all the time.

Hoskins was understandably upset because he could have been killed by the 25th guy on a roster demonstrating why he should be the 27th or 28th guy, but the rest was silly, which may occur to him at some point. (Or may not — I don’t know if Rhys Hoskins is a person things occur to.) Honestly, Hoskins doesn’t need to prove himself to the Jacob Rhames of the baseball world with a home-run trot that makes you think of continental drift; he does that by not having to live in an airport hotel when he’s in the majors.

At least the studious-looking Rhame showed some brains by being studiously uninterested in waving further red flags at this particular bull, noting that Hoskins doesn’t get to trot if he makes a better pitch. Points to him for that — and if there’s any sense left on the planet, that’s where this silliness will end. The Mets won’t see the Phils again until June, at which point if Rhame’s logged more than a couple of weeks away from Syracuse, something’s probably gone pretty seriously wrong.

Maybe in that series Hoskins can get mad at Drew Gagnon.

Morning update: The Athletic’s reporting says I’m wrong and this is all much, much dumber than I thought. Enormous sigh.