Go Mets. Better yet, go away Mets. And stay away.
For about a week. Then come back.
Clear your heads. Fill your bats. Get hits. Several per inning. Find your inner line drive in Philadelphia. Keep your ropes frozen in St. Louis.
Anybody who boos you at your next two stops means it. Anybody who booed you at Citi Field as you dropped your second consecutive pulseless offensive outing to Boston, this one by an arid score of 1-0, was just clearing throats, hearts, minds and maybe the rust off a year-plus away from the ballpark.
How do you greet the team you’ve been away from for more than a year? With unconditional love? With caveats that affection must be earned again and again? By brooking no nonsense whatsoever? It’s an individual’s call under any circumstance. I’d lean to vocal encouragement for my players to do well and soto voce grumbling when they don’t.
Wednesday night, they didn’t do well [1]. Most of the Mets, that is. Jacob deGrom [2] did superbly, albeit not quite up to last Friday’s incomparable [3] snuff, but superb should get it done most nights — with the support of most professional lineups. The Mets have a professional lineup. Well, they’re paid to line up, so I guess it’s professional. Jake (6 IP, 3 H, 1 BB, 9 SO) gave up a run in the second and it killed all chances of winning. Bad, Jake! Very bad, Jake!
No, obviously. Jake was very good, as were the similarly uniformed fellows who followed him to the mound. They were certainly a match for Nick Pivetta and his Beantown bullpen pals. Maybe everybody in sight, home and away, chose Wednesday night to be simultaneously deGrominant. It’s hard to tell who’s excelling and who’s far from it when Met hitters fail to generate as much as a whisper of a genuine threat.
I can’t fathom the professionals at Metropolitan Baseball Club of New York being hopelessly rattled by the toughlove practitioners among the intimate gatherings assembled to witness their wan attempts at run production. Citi Field sounded very fond of the Mets last Friday and Sunday. Twice over the weekend, the Mets gave the facility’s socially distanced denizens reason to express affection rather than animus. Tuesday and Wednesday, not so much. I don’t boo when I’m in attendance, but I understand it’s difficult to sit by and imply tacit approval for what your favorite batters do in the bottom of every gosh darn inning when they don’t do a blessed thing.
Except make outs. That the Mets (with their two singles) showed themselves expert at.
Did we mention Jake pitched? Is it necessary to stress those instances don’t come along more frequently than once every five days? And that if Jake is going to go the trouble of essentially never giving up more than one earned run in any game, you ought to make the most of the opportunity he is providing you? Instead, though I imagine it wasn’t your intention, you saddled Jake with a loss. You couldn’t even no-decision him while facilitating a relatively cheap W for Loup, May or Diaz. Unconditional love is difficult for your paying patrons to tender when you refuse to, shall we say, play ball.
So play ball somewhere else for a week. Hit the road. Hit pitchers wearing red caps. Make distance make our hearts grow fonder. Make us realize how much we don’t want to grumble at you at any volume. Make this spate of clearly audible booing a vague April memory.
Go Mets. But leave the non-scoring nonsense behind.