As the Mets scored their first seven runs on Wednesday night, I felt a tinge of sadness for the Orioles pitcher who surrendered them. It wasn’t a particularly ceremonial surrender. No white flags, just pitches that didn’t have much fight left in them. I wouldn’t claim to know if the same could be said for the man who threw them.
We’ve done Matt Harvey [1] postscript plenty since the sun set on the Dark Knight. It would be redundant and kind of cruel to go there again. Likewise, it was redundant and kind of cruel for the Mets to keep hitting him, but that’s what they’re supposed to do to the opposing pitcher, regardless of opposing pitcher pedigree. They were having a very good evening in Baltimore. Harvey wasn’t. I’ll admit I was only partly enjoying the onslaught they’d wrought on our former ace. I was enjoying the runs, but wasn’t totally comfortable that they were being charged to who they were being charged to. I’ll additionally admit that when with two out in the top of the third, the Mets up by one and Harvey threatening to slip out of a first-and-third jam, I almost…almost wanted him to not give up anything else.
Then James McCann [2] singled in Jonathan Villar [3], and Billy McKinney [4] singled in Pete Alonso [5], and Kevin Pillar [6] homered to bring in everybody else in this sentence who’d yet to cross the plate. It was 7-1. That tinge of sadness lingered like the television camera did on Harvey. “He looks like he wants to cry,” my wife said sympathetically. He wasn’t the only one.
Soon, Harvey and his 7.41 ERA departed the mound and the seven Met runs he yielded remained on the scoreboard and I wasn’t about to give a single solitary tally among them back, because though Matt will always be a Met icon to me, he’s not a Met at the moment. Kevin Pillar, who gave his face for our cause, is. James McCann, who borrowed a first baseman’s mitt and said “OK” when he could’ve big-timed or begged off, is. Billy McKinney, who’s now officially gone longer without ever having heard of me than I’d gone without ever having heard of him, is. Those are our Mets at the moment, and that will do when it comes to deciding battles for hearts and souls.
As the Mets scored their second seven runs on Wednesday night, I was quite content to gorge on the offense, regardless of whatever dismay it inflicted on whatever other Orioles pitchers. Listen, I can’t be responsible for the seamy underside of every boisterous blowout (good luck in future endeavors to Adam Plutko and Mac Sceroler). Furthermore, I haven’t checked the rule book lately, but I assume there is no actual saving “some of that for tomorrow,” especially when tomorrow from the vantage point of Wednesday (a.k.a. today) loomed as an off day. If the Metsies want to score 14 runs in one game while giving up no more than 13, they are my guests to do so.
As it happened, they — primarily via seven typically excellent innings from Taijuan Walker [7] — gave up only one run. Nobody ever tells the pitching staff to save some of that for tomorrow, so why should the slugging staff? Better advice would consist of telling Pillar (two homers), McKinney (also two homers), Alonso (his third homer in two games) and Mason Williams [8] (first homer as a Met) to do again very soon what they just did.
The Mets generated two seven-run halves on Wednesday night. While you’re coming to happy grips with such fabulous fractions, you might want to note the Mets completed the first third of their season at 30-24. Few were the games that ended 14-1 in the Mets’ favor [9], but there was a veritable cornucopia of victories in the realm of 4-2 and 5-1 and 3-1 and whatever it took to get on a pace for 90 wins, or twice as many wins as Met players have deployed to date. What’s more likely, ya think — the Mets finishing 2021 at 90-72 or the Mets using 135 players? Cite “at this pace” at your own risk, of course. Still, we’ve run through 45 Mets; maintained a very nice clip without a whole bunch of heretofore presumed key Mets available very much; and, well, here we are, out in front, winning a geographically challenging road trip and, at the end of it, bouncing back from a letdown the night before [10].
The competition stiffens for the next month. All those pesky postponements are knocking on our door demanding an extra seven innings of our time on multiple occasions. The plunge from our version of The Big Three to fourth and fifth in the rotation is as frightening as anything ever ridden at Great Adventure. But ours are the Mets of Pillar and McKinney and all the other blanks that keep getting filled in so very amply. Ample ain’t always sexy, but it gets the job done.
Swell bunch of parts we have here. The sum could be something else.