Maybe the Mets just needed a day off.
You’ve probably heard that they’re playing a lot of games. More games than there are days. Including enough doubleheaders to give you the baseball equivalent of an ice-cream headache. Lots of those games coming against good teams. Which will be played with a roster still beset by injuries, and that lacks both enough starting pitchers for the slots needed and clear and obvious candidates for those slots.
Oh, and then Jacob deGrom — the best pitcher in baseball — left his start after three innings. Three perfect innings, because it’s deGrom, but just three nonetheless [1]. Cue muttering in the stands, the anxious wait for Jake’s postgame reactions and self-diagnosis (he’s not a doctor but he’d probably have an absurdly positive WAR at that too), and then the even more anxious wait for the verdict from the MRI tube.
It’s been a lot! For us, and for the actual 26 guys who had to go out there and play baseball.
Anyway, that’s the context for the Mets going out Thursday night and doing essentially zero against Kyle Hendricks and the Cubs’ bullpen. Hendricks never cracked 90 but didn’t need to, tormenting the Mets with fastballs (of a sort), sinkers, curves and changeups. In this era of Lamborghini-speed pitches, it was like navigating around Amish horse-drawn carts with big reflectors on the back. The Mets couldn’t break through against Hendricks and then were stymied by Andrew Chafin, Ryan Tepera and Craig Kimbrel. Meanwhile, Marcus Stroman was wonderful … aside from a first inning in which he hadn’t settled in, resulting in a ball deposited into the Apple Basket by Javier Baez. It didn’t seem like that would be enough to beat the Mets, but it was [2].
(As an aside, don’t tell me “Apple Basket” isn’t going to happen. Because I’ll just become more stubborn about it.)
DeGrom, it turns out, is fine — or at least fine in the context of being a big-league pitcher who’s pushing the limits of what the human arm and its associated parts can do with a baseball, which is to say he’s always dealing with what us mortals would consider unacceptable pain and plying his trade knowing he’s one unlucky pitch away from a date with a surgeon and then a year of profound uncertainty. (As always, the seminal text is this bracingly honest piece [3] by Bob Ojeda, which should be required reading for baseball fans.) Both deGrom and the Mets and the Mets’ doctors think his recent run of maladies — the side, the forearm, the shoulder — are bouts of discrete bad luck and not related indications of some larger problem. Our only course of action is to hope that they’re right, which makes this a good time to remind us all that hope is both free and a renewable resource.
Still, it’s been a lot. Too much, perhaps, to process in conjunction with an enemy pitcher working at throwback speeds backed up by a tough bullpen. Add it up and you got an inadvertent day off during a punishing stretch of schedule.
But hey, more context: The Mets have begun their hellacious run of games by going 5-2 against potentially playoff-bound teams. DeGrom doesn’t seem destined for a lengthy layoff. (Add however many asterisks here that you need.) One of his understudies pitched beautifully again. Reinforcements should be here soon, at least on the offensive side.
We worry — we’re Mets fans, after all — but let’s be thankful for what hasn’t happened so far.