Jacob deGrom [1] was good. Or at least pretty good.
But Chris Paddack [2] was 2018 Jacob deGrom good. Which — spoiler! — meant better.
Too many of the postgame autopsies focused on Paddack yapping about Pete Alonso [3] being Rookie of the Month for April; too many of the previews of tonight’s game will rev the silliness higher by focusing on Alonso’s yapping back about trying to win a World Series. Personally, it’s been a long time since I paid much attention to what macho dudes still trying out adulthood say with microphones stuck in their faces — Bill Parcells forever summed up said sound and fury with the crushingly bland dismissal that “he’s a young guy, young guys say stuff.”
Anyway, Paddack’s pitching spoke for itself. He kept the Mets’ hitters looking at the wrong part of the plate by throwing a plus fastball at the numbers and the knees, then mixed that with a brutal changeup to wreck their timing. That’s a formula that’s worked for a hundred years and will work for a hundred more. It’s a pleasure to see executed to near-perfection, even when it’s to your team’s detriment.
(If you are going to work yourself into a snit about Yapgate, don’t neglect to note that it worked. A good early sign for Alonso was his steadfast refusal to get anxious in big ABs and expand the strike zone and/or start swinging for fences two counties away. Last night, he was swinging so hard against Paddack that I feared he might dislocate his shoulders.)
But back to the between-the-lines stuff. Even when you’re the team on the short end of a solid performance, it’s always refreshing and reassuring to see bright new stars in the baseball firmament. There’s Paddack, maybe — because a good first month does not a career make. There’s his partner in yap, Alonso, maybe — same warning applies. I was sad to learn the Mets would miss Fernando Tatis Jr. [4], but buoyed by the fact that my visit to Texas and Globe Life Park meant I was in the park for the first career RBI posted by another baseball generational, Vlad Guerrero Jr. New stars are baseball’s lifeblood; with luck two or three of those guys will still be shining in the 2030s, their presence in the sport’s night sky seemingly fixed and eternal. And, again with luck, a new generation of stars will be coming into view. They’re toddlers now, honing level swings in backyard T-ball, but just you wait.
As for deGrom, he left a couple of sliders in too generous spots, and that was enough to lose; following his departure, Justin Wilson [5] was summoned off the injured list without having been sent out for a minor-league tuneup, which is the Daily Mets Hmm we all were unfortunately waiting for. Wilson got spanked and his bad inning moved a 2-0 game into the past tense column [6].
The game was over in a tidy two hours and 14 minutes, short enough and strange enough that afterwards I wasn’t quite sure to do with myself — my baseball clock told me it should be the seventh inning, but Petco Park was emptying out. I decided to see it as another silver lining. Even the best baseball season contains lots and lots of losses; a West Coast loss that takes 45 fewer minutes than expected isn’t the worst thing that could happen.