After two nights of at least looking competitive against the Dodgers, AKA the quarter-billion-dollar baseball death machine [1], the Mets got macerated. Lacerated. Defenestrated. Eviscerated.
Whatever word you choose, it wasn’t pretty [2]. They were out of it essentially from the jump, as Carlos Carrasco [3] showed he’s still working his way back into regular-season form — a plan the Mets had to embrace because they’ve burned through every other conceivable one, but was pretty much guaranteed to yield nights like this one. They made a little noise, but it amounted to faint squeaks amid the roar of the Dodgers at full steam, and it ended with not one but two position players — Brandon Drury [4] and Kevin Pillar [5] — called upon to take the mound.
I’ve never found position players on the mound particularly amusing, because it means the guys paid to play or oversee play know my team is beaten, which forces me to wonder why I didn’t reach the same conclusion and find something better to do with my time. And when position players are on the mound because my team’s about to lose three in a row and its season looks lost, it’s not funny in the least.
As I type this the Mets are somewhere over Pennsylvania or maybe Ohio, flying all night to take on the Giants in San Francisco tomorrow — an MLB/ESPN screw job that ought to make both them and the similarly scheduled Dodgers very, very angry. That makes Monday night’s Mets game about as close to a gimme loss as one can imagine in baseball. And remember that after that, they’ll still have nine straight games to go against the Giants or Dodgers.
The team that comes back from that hellish stretch will be thinking about 2022. And in time that will seem kinder than thinking about 2021, and dwelling on all the injuries, and the subpar performances, and the baffling lack of urgency at the trade deadline, and the weird in-game moves that had to be debated way too often. (Sunday’s head-scratcher was Luis Rojas [6] sending Carrasco up to hit with the Mets down six, two on and one out in the second, then replacing him on the mound for the top of the third anyway. Asked about that one, Carrasco replied, “I don’t know, man. I really don’t.”)
We can argue about the manager and the front office and the players who got hurt and the ones who didn’t perform, but the Mets’ failure owes something to all of those factors, and the real problem is they were never that good to begin with. They bumped along as the least-worst team in a bad division and we saw that not for what it was but for what we wanted it to be — that they had pluck and moxie and all the other pixie-dust qualities we sprinkle on teams that are in the slot we like in the standings. Eventually the injuries and the bad luck and bad years and the baffling decisions got to be too much and the Mets were revealed for what they really were. The crash has been ugly, but it hasn’t been a miscarriage of justice — more like a moment of realization. Now, the best we and they can hope for is not to be thoroughly embarrassed before it’s over.