On Friday night the Mets lost, and they lost in a very 2019 Mets way: good start that felt like it should have been better, not enough offense, poor relief, a silly sideshow.
The GSTFLISHBB game from Jacob deGrom [1], which feels like you could put an “of course” on it for ironic effect, except you could write the same thing about plenty of Zack Wheeler [2] and Noah Syndergaard [3] games too. DeGrom’s numbers look just fine, even enviable — 6 IP, 10 Ks, 6 H, 1 BB, 2 ER — but just ask him if he was satisfied. The problem, as per usual, was a slider that wouldn’t slide, depriving deGrom of his out pitch and making him merely very good.
Why won’t that slider slide? I’ve given up on an answer. Maybe we’ll get one a couple of years from now, when enough people have dissected baseballs and MLB mutters something about a new supplier or coefficients being clustered at the wrong end of an acceptable range and then everyone argues about whether or not to believe that. Maybe statistical analysis will point to a fluke. Maybe nothing will ever point to anything. We’re all playing Clue without part of the rules sheet, so we don’t know who all the players are or if there are other murder weapons or if the killer wrote the rules himself, and boy does it feel aggressively pointless by now.
For all that, the Mets were only down 2-0 when deGrom threw his final pitch of the evening, and it sure felt like they had another late-inning run in them. Michael Conforto [4] homered and Dominic Smith [5] singled, and up came Wilson Ramos [6] and we collectively rubbed our hands together. (Rubbed our collective hands together? Oh, let’s move on.) But no, Ramos had used up his luck in that situation two innings earlier, when Trevor Story [7] inexplicably hurried a double play for which he had all the time in the world and wound up getting nobody. This time Story moved with an appropriate lack of dispatch and the inning was soon over. It was an odd offensive night in general for the Mets, who managed only four hits off Antonio Senzatela [8] despite never striking out, which probably breaks some 2019 baseball law.
In the eighth, Drew Gagnon [9] — who after a brief flurry of usefulness is starting to look like another piece of hard-throwing spaghetti that isn’t sticking to a wall [10] — gave up back-to-back homers to David Dahl [11] and Daniel Murphy [12]. That gave the Rockies a four-run lead, after which Gagnon hit Ian Desmond [13] in the back, causing everyone to come onto the field and mill around and squawk at each other and try and figure out if they were mad or what. Eventually the teams chose “or what,” the benches were warned, and another game settled into listless lossdom [14].
The Mets are 30-33, and if you feel like this could have been a recap constructed Mad Libs style, I’m not going to argue with you. So it goes far too often in the Year of the Disappearing Slider.