It’s good to be the Giants.
The 2021 Giants are what happens when everything breaks right — when veterans thought to be on the back end of the career curve have career years, role players step up, and the whole becomes more than the sum of its parts. And you know what? Good for them and for their fans. Charmed seasons are good for the game and a lot of fun.
The Mets … well, they’re the opposite story these days, and not much fun at all. Injuries, subpar performances, buzzards’ luck. You’re probably thinking you read this same rant on Sunday … or was it the day before that, or the day before that? Does it matter? The Mets have become the same old story, day after numbing day, with the only difference a handful of minor details by way of bric-a-brac.
On Monday night, the Mets showed some admirable fight after getting screwed by ESPN and MLB, playing a Sunday night game in New York and then flying all night to face the best team in baseball at home in San Francisco. They even briefly led in the fifth, courtesy of a two-run triple by Pete Alonso [1], of all people.
But it wasn’t enough. It rarely is these days. Rich Hill [2] pitched well into the fourth before imploding in a flurry of enemy hits; Miguel Castro [3] made the Mets’ lead the stuff of mayfly lives by giving up a homer to Kris Bryant [4] (the guy the Mets should have acquired at the deadline, but whatever); Mets hitters short-circuited a two-on, nobody-out situation in the sixth; Trevor May [5] got mauled in the seventh to leave the game out of reach.
The last two paragraphs are the mad lib stuff, the set dressing to be stapled up after the carpenters have finished following the blueprints. The Mets have started their 13-game journey through the ringer of California teams 0-4, and if you have optimism about the remaining nine — or the remaining 44, for that matter — well, bless your heart.
The Mets are now officially a .500 team, which may still strike you as a disappointment but is a far kinder verdict than what they’ve been for the last two months, and what they’ll likely be by year’s end. Games like Monday’s [6] demonstrated why — and if you missed that one, well, tune in Tuesday. Or Wednesday. Or most any day. They’re all increasingly the same in the dregs of 2021.