You know you’re in a bad stretch because your team wins and you don’t feel good — just relieved, if you’re lucky. Or exhausted, if you’re not.
That was me after the Mets somehow beat the Marlins and their own demons by 5-3, a game that felt much closer than that. It was a strange, vaguely seasick affair, as the Mets jumped out to what seemed like a big lead for them given recent events, inevitably surrendered that lead, gained it back in pretty much the least efficient way possible, stubbornly refused to expand that lead, and then held it with a little help from a longtime nemesis.
Like I said, exhausted.
The magic was good at first — Javier Baez [1] broke for home from third on a sharp grounder to first from Tomas Nido [2] in the second and was going to be a dead duck, except as he slid home he somehow pulled his left hand back, used it as a brake to transfer his momentum to his right hand, and rolled over and onto the plate as a dumbfounded Alex Jackson [3] regarded the space where the other hand had been. Even on replay, it still looks like a magic trick. Instead of 1-0 Mets and an inning short-circuited, it was 2-0 Mets and the discombobulated Marlins promptly handed the Mets a third run on an error. El Mago indeed.
Carlos Carrasco [4] rode a very effective slider into the fifth, but the Mets refused to add on, leaving anyone who’s been paying attention with the grim feeling that three runs wasn’t nearly enough. Which proved correct: It was 3-2 heading into the sixth, when Jeurys Familia [5] got ambushed by Jesus Aguilar, who slammed a ball into the left-field seats to erase the lead. The Mets flailed and failed and were generally annoying until Baez poked a leadoff homer into the right-field seats off an Anthony Bass [6] slider that got too much plate, giving them back a lead it felt like they no longer deserved.
Bass kept throwing bad sliders in the eighth and the Mets kept missing them, mulishly refusing to score until a passed ball gave them no choice. With Edwin Diaz [7] away on paternity leave, they handed a two-run lead and the ball to Trevor May [8], whose primary objective was not to walk the leadoff hitter.
So of course May walked the leadoff hitter, throwing a 3-2 fastball to Brian Anderson [9] at the knees that missed the outside corner by a good three inches.
Angel Hernandez called it strike three.
I cannot believe I typed that and the world didn’t explode.
Hang on, I appear to be dreaming.
Angel Hernandez called it strike three.
Nope, still here. Huh.
Angel Hernandez, whom John Franco [10], Bobby Valentine [11] and Mike Piazza [12] would still gleefully jump in an alley for something that happened during the Clinton administration. An umpire who deserves a place on the Mets’ Mount Rushmore of misery alongside Chase Utley [13] and Chipper Jones [14]. Somewhere out there that little bastard Michael Tucker [15] is gaping at his TV in amazement.
It wasn’t a strike. That wasn’t the shocking part, since Angel Hernandez is terrible at his job (he’s blown replay reviews, for God’s sake) and should be separated from that job for the good of the sport and to preserve the idea that fair arbitration of anything is still possible in this cruel, fallen world. No, the shocking part was that an Angel Hernandez mistake was to the Mets’ benefit. I couldn’t have been more surprised if I’d fallen out of bed and wound up mashed against the ceiling.
After that, well, there was tension because there’s always tension when your team can’t get out of its own way, but it wasn’t really tension, because the impossible had already happened and so what did anything mean? The Grim Reaper had wandered off to someone else’s village, Thanos’s snap had vaporized the other guys, and so with two more outs secured the Mets left the field, blinking and amazed, to figure out if they still knew what to do after a win [16].
They’d won through some shake-your-head Baez magic and tried not to win because of some dysfunctional, all-too-Metsian antimagic and then won anyway because of whatever it is Angel Fricking Hernandez channels, and having witnessed all of that and survived it I find there are no words left.