Should it be your desire, I’m sure you can get one of those inspirational signs for your den/game room/what-have-you that proclaims BASEBALL IS LIFE, and while I might disagree with the chosen vehicle of expression, I’m with you on the message. But the fact is that sometimes life, or at least the non-baseball part of it, gets in the way.
I’m in Virginia visiting my mom, and yesterday we had a chance to sneak in an extra visit to my dad in his assisted-living home. So my mom, my son and I left the Mets and Joey Lucchesi [1] trailing the Padres, 1-0, the one having come on a leadoff Tommy Pham [2] home run.
That didn’t seem insurmountable, not with Lucchesi having settled down and pitched into the fourth with few other blemishes, so we decided to hope for the best. Off we went for our visit, returning to find … the Mets up 2-1! Joshua pulled up MLB.tv to divine the source of the good news — a Jose Peraza [3] homer — while I furrowed my boy in mild concern at what was happening in front of me. The Mets led, but the Padres had runners on second and third and Jeurys Familia [4] had thrown an awful lot of pitches.
Still, the first pitch I’d seen was an evil slider just below the bottom of the zone, one that Profar had swung over to bring the count to 1-2. If Familia could coax one more swing like that, the Mets would be out of the jam and conceivably on their way to a heartening sweep of a team they might see in October.
If you were watching, well, you know that things turned out differently, and we’d wound up missing the entire good part of the game and witnessing only the dregs. Life does that to you sometimes, though I doubt anyone’s going to turn that into a placard broadcasting cheerful wisdom.
Profar refused to fish for any of Familia’s sliders out of the strike zone and drew a walk. Luis Rojas [5] stuck with a clearly spent Familia, who walked Pham on four pitches to tie the game. Rojas chose Jacob Barnes [6] to face Fernando Tatis Jr. [7]; Barnes’s fourth pitch was a cutter that did very little cutting, and Tatis demolished it. The competitive part of the ballgame was over [8], leaving nothing but a few curiosities: Pete Alonso [9] got hit in the helmet with an errant pitch but seems to be fine (whew); Tomas Nido [10] went into the books as the 178th third baseman in team history, seeing no action except heckling from Francisco Lindor [11]; and with the bench nonexistent, the last out of the game was made by Robert Gsellman [12], who looked less than thrilled with the whole thing.
I felt much the same way. Rojas had to navigate some unavailable/gassed relievers, a short bench and the knock-on effects of both problems to the lineup, and he’d thought through how he wanted to solve the resulting riddle. But damned if it didn’t strike me then and now as another case of tree vs. forest [13]: He asked for too much from an exhausted Familia and then chose the last guy in the pen to face one of the deadliest hitters in baseball in a tie game. Spreading out the relief workload may prove wise over the long term, but a game lost is a game that can never be reclaimed, and sometimes just a few of those missed chances mean your October is empty when it could have been full.
Still. The Mets took two of three from the Padres and have now navigated the first 9% of their month from Hell in a manner much to our liking. Here come the Cubs, and I bet the players will tell you they’ll play ’em one day at a time, give it their best shot and the good Lord willing, things will work out. In case you want some wisdom for your wall.