The first game after the All-Star Break is supposed to feel like a warm bath.
Oh that’s better, you think as you sink back into the routine of having something to do a little after 7 or 4 or 8 or sometimes even 1 in the afternoon on the weekends. At first that little break was nice, and there were All-Stars doing All-Star things and looks back at the first half and trade talk and predictions about the second half, but then the novelty faded and you remembered that all you wanted was the metronome of knowing there will be a game tonight, unless it’s a day game or an off-day or it’s going to rain.
Four days without baseball, what a terrible idea! Blink your eyes and it will be winter and then four days will be the very least of it.
Well, Friday night was not a warm bath.
It was a motel bathtub full of ice, the one in which you wake up blue and groggy and wondering what the hell happened, only to realize your back hurts really badly, and then you find the note on the floor, the one in which the organ traffickers explain that they’ve removed one of your kidneys (or your liver, or hell maybe everything) and you should probably call someone with access to an ambulance.
(The note thing always struck me as oddly polite for organ traffickers, but then I am unacquainted with their ways.)
The Mets kicked off the second half against the Pirates, the same ramshackle ballclub that made the supposedly first-place Mets look like a bunch of shambling oafs last Sunday to send us into the break miffed and muttering [1]. And then the outcome [2] of Friday’s game made that wretched loss look like a walk in the park. In that one, you may recall, the Mets jumped out to a 5-0 lead and then got hare-and-the-tortoise’d; in this one, they didn’t even bother with a first hop away from the burrow.
They faced someone named Chad Kuhl [3], who walked five guys and threw approximately 54,288 hanging sliders, every single one of which a Met hitter popped up or missed or grounded straight at an infielder.
Mets pitchers didn’t throw quite as many broken breaking pitches, but every single one they did throw was hit into the next county by some Pirate or other, and it was not amusing.
Marcus Stroman [4] was once again somewhere between unlucky and not particularly effective on the mound and got into a ridiculous tiff with Pittsburgh’s John Nogowski [5], possibly about whose baseball team it’s currently more dispiriting to be employed by.
And Francisco Lindor [6] got hurt. The Mets weren’t providing updates, but he grabbed at his side after hitting a grounder, barely got out of the box and then disappeared, and given the nature of injuries to the oblique, he may remain disappeared for some time. For all his early-season troubles, Lindor has been a useful offensive contributor for the last few weeks and a plus defender and leader the entire year. So that’s bad, to say the very least.
And the Mets had finally gotten the lineup they’d envisioned off the IL, too. Of course they had — haven’t you learned baseball’s cruel like that?
Anyway, it was that kind of night. So call the ER, tell them, “you’re not going to believe this,” and then read them the note left on the bathroom floor. But first, tell them you’re a Mets fan. It’ll all make sense after that.