If there’s one thing I’ve learned in more than four decades of having my heart ripped out by baseball, it’s this: Don’t ever assume you’ve hit rock bottom.
A reasonable person might call the Mets taking eight innings to blow a five-run lead over the Pirates, with Edwin Diaz [1] surrendering the fatal runs, rock bottom.
But no, we call that “last Sunday.” As in a mere week ago.
On Saturday night the Mets blew a six-run lead over the Pirates, with Edwin Diaz surrendering the fatal runs. But this time it only took them two innings to do it, and Diaz pointed at the sky after Jacob Stallings [2] connected for what would be a two-out walkoff grand slam [3], like he was the even more hellish reincarnation of Hansel Robles [4].
A reasonable person might call that rock bottom, but just go read those four paragraphs again. Tomorrow, perhaps, the Mets will blow a seven-run lead in just a single inning, with Edwin Diaz surrendering the fatal runs and celebrating unawares while doing so. On Monday maybe they’ll blow an eight-run lead over the course of two outs. On Tuesday….
You get the idea.
If rock bottom is an entity that flees before you like the end of the hallway in Poltergeist, the only sensible course of action is for all of us to stop doing this thing that makes us miserable, and for the Mets to stop enabling it by inflicting pain on hapless innocents.
The team should release all of the players, implode their stadium, hold a public burning of their gear by way of penance, and then voluntarily contract themselves, after which we should all find something else to do with our lives, something that makes the world better instead of merely making our own lives small and full of pain. And right now, honestly, if a press release to that effect showed up on Twitter I’d be a bit relieved.
But none of that is going to happen. Instead, they’re going to play another baseball game on Sunday, and maybe it will go horribly wrong in some new way and maybe it will go dully wrong in some familiar way and maybe it will even go well, and whatever the case, most of the people reading this and certainly the person writing it will watch, grousing and grimacing and gnawing on fingernails but watching nonetheless. Because it’s what we do and it’s too late to stop.
And really, that’s the cruelest thing about baseball. It’s not that closers give up walkoff grand slams and point at the sky while doing so, though that was pretty breathtakingly cruel. It’s that after such disasters, we still stubbornly insist on hoping, even if we won’t admit that’s what it is. And it’s that deeply deluded yet inextinguishable hope which ensures the countdown has started again to the next time you’ll get your heart ripped out.
See you on Sunday, fellow masochists and suckers.