While watching Tuesday night’s game against the Rockies, I thought of a good idea and immediately decided I wanted nothing to do with it for a while.
The idea came from the shame bell in Game of Thrones, which you may know as an Internet meme even if you’re not familiar with the show. I was wondering how many games the 2019 Mets lost through terrible bullpenning, horrid defense or managerial dipshittery (shame shame shame for them all), and if listing those games might a) be cathartic; and b) show how close the Mets came to a postseason berth, and where improvements might be most profitably made in pursuit of not missing one next season. Now, a disappointed fan’s hindsight is a lot sharper than 20/20 — confirmation bias and bemoaned what-ifs make for powerful lenses — but I’m pretty sure the shame bell would toll a lot more times than the number of games separating the Mets from the wild-card teams.
And yet, I quickly decided to put this gloomy project aside. Because the Mets were playing the Rockies and I wanted to enjoy the game, even if it was highly unlikely that its outcome mattered the way the outcome of games mattered only last week.
And the Mets gave me a lot to enjoy — not just for 2019, but possibly for 2020.
There was Marcus Stroman [1] riding an improved cutter — with which he’s apparently been tinkering — and a sharp slider to seven scoreless innings of four-hit ball, which would be impressive even if it hadn’t happened at Coors Field. I would have considered Stroman an upgrade over Jason Vargas [2] no matter what he did, because I detested Vargas as both a pitcher and a person, but Stroman has proved easy to root for, demonstrative and energetic whether finishing pitches, hustling to cover first, or just cheering his teammates on from the dugout.
There was Amed Rosario [3] breaking up an unlikely scoreless pitchers’ duel with a tomahawked home run in the sixth. Rosario has evolved from an unsteady fielder with an oversized strike zone to an adequate shortstop with much better judgment at the plate, raising his average from .255 at the close of June to .289 now and committing just four errors during that span, compared with 12 earlier in the year. It’s tantalizing to imagine what his 2020 might look like if he can be the player we’ve now seen for two and a half months.
It’s also tantalizing to imagine 2020 with a full measure of Brandon Nimmo [4], who also went deep in the sixth. Nimmo has had a very strange season. It’s easy to forget that he looked hopeless before running into a fence, starting off with bushels of strikeouts, then making a valiant but ill-advised attempt to play through his neck injury. When he returned in September it was somehow as if his weird April had never happened. Almost from the jump, Nimmo was back to providing the mix of power and plate discipline he’d shown a year earlier. Being able to count on a full season from Nimmo would also make one of the Mets’ offensively potent but defensively challenged outfielders an interesting trade commodity, but that’s another thought and post to consider later.
And, of course, there’s Pete Alonso [5]. The Polar Bear awoke from his home-run slumber to club a ball 467 feet into the Denver night, his 48th of the season. The club RBI mark is probably out of reach, but 50 homers is not, and “I’m disappointed Alonso won’t also break the single-season RBI record as a rookie” is a complaint deserving a truly microscopic violin as accompaniment. Even Alonso’s overly enthusiastic moments make me like him more — for the last play of the game, he fell on a ball that was headed for Robinson Cano [6], turning a play of average difficulty into a more complicated one. (Luis Avilan [7]‘s expression at finding himself involved in the resulting play at the first-base bag was entertaining.) But asking Alonso to forbear in such situations would be like asking your golden retriever not to wag its tail when you come home — sure, you might mourn the occasional thing swept off the coffee table to its demise, but is a broken tchotchke or two really too high a price for a little joy in your life?
Those three homers in the sixth proved more than enough for the Mets, as Justin Wilson [8] navigated the eighth and Avilan completed the ninth, with a Charlie Blackmon [9] moon shot the only blemish in the box score [10]. The Mets even made up ground on the Cubs. It’s almost certainly too late for that to matter, but an evening watching your team win a baseball is always an evening well spent. Too soon — all too soon — we’ll have to get our baseball joy from the heroics of other teams and the attendant, highly temporary loyalties of October. And too soon after that, there will be no baseball joy at all. What we bank now will have to sustain us, until spring comes around again and hope blooms anew.