It’s one of the oldest questions for a baseball fan who lives and dies with his or her team: If said team is fated to lose, how would you prefer that fate to unfold? Meekly and with minimal fuss? Or loudly but with the same outcome?
The Dodgers are a quarter-billion-dollar baseball death machine. Their lineup is studded with hitters who grind enemy pitchers into a powder by controlling the strike zone, then hit mistakes to distant precincts; their rotation and bullpen is an assembly line of fireballing monsters. (And for all this, they’re still a second-place team — reminders, if you need them, that baseball is capricious and other teams get injured too.)
That quarter-billion-dollar baseball death machine ate away at Tylor Megill [1], scratching him for single runs in the first, third and fourth and elevating his pitch count to levels at which further duty seemed ill-advised. Meanwhile, the black-clad Mets were being inoffensive against Julio Urias [2], with their biggest accomplishment getting him out of the game after five — though that was actually the result of an odd mistake by the Dodgers, with pinch-hitter Matt Beaty [3] standing in the on-deck circle as a decoy and heading to the plate without hearing his own dugout yelling for him to come back. (You really do see something new in baseball every day.)
Even the fiercest machine throws a rod now and then, though: In the seventh, the improbably named Brusdar Graterol [4] allowed a two-out double to Michael Conforto [5] and departed in favor of rookie left-hander Justin Bruihl [6]. Dom Smith [7] singled, Bruihl walked Brandon Nimmo [8], the Dodgers intentionally walked Pete Alonso [9], and Jeff McNeil [10] hit a little parachute that found grass in center field. Enter Blake Treinen [11] to face J.D. Davis [12], and here came a passed ball through catcher Will Smith [13]. Alonso scored and the Mets had somehow tied the game.
Tied it, but wouldn’t be the ones to untie it, despite the Dodgers’ odd streak of having lost 11 straight extra-inning games. In the tenth, Jeurys Familia [14] (in there despite a heavy recent workload and Aaron Loup [15] as an alternative) gave up the still-ridiculous two-run lead-off homer to Smith thanks to the ghost runner. Against Kenley Jansen [16], the Mets cashed their ghost runner but no more, with Tomas Nido [17] flying out to end the game [18]. Was 6-5 in 10 better than 4-0 in a conventional nine? I’ll leave that one to you.
I said not so long ago [19] that I figured this stretch of 13 against the big bad Dodgers and the somehow bigger and badder Giants would result in the effective end of the Mets’ season, and I won’t be surprised if that’s true. But the factor I’d forgotten about was the weakness of the competition: The Phillies and Braves have their own gauntlets to run, and I doubt any rooter for those flawed/battered clubs has a lot of confidence in their ability to do so. So if the Mets can stagger out of the California wringer with a record no worse than, say, 5-8 or even 4-9, perhaps they can outlast their underwhelming rivals, get healthy in time for October and try to surprise a few folks, starting with us.
Ya Gotta Survive! Not a rallying cry to launch a thousand t-shirt printers, perhaps. But when facing off against death machines it might be good advice.