Who were those strangers in blue and orange at Citi Field on Sunday?
They couldn’t have been the Mets, because they won a baseball game [1]. And they scored nine runs! Which scored all manner of ways — a monstrous home run into the second deck from Javier Baez [2], a less prodigious but equally consequential clout from Jonathan Villar [3], RBI hits from Pete Alonso [4] and Francisco Lindor [5], even a balk engineered by Lindor while dancing off third. That was enough to outpoint Josh Bell [6] and Juan Soto [7], who are about all the Nationals have left, and take the series.
(Perhaps it would be kinder not to note that the Mets have won a total of seven eight games in all-but-over-with August and five of those were against the Nats? Seriously. They beat the Marlins, Giants and Dodgers once each and that was it for your non-Nats part of the schedule. Yikes.)
I heard the first half of the game while sitting in a kayak in the East River, which is a novel way to experience Mets baseball — Howie Rose and Wayne Randazzo painted a solid word picture that was only occasionally an odd contrast to being surrounded by water, and their call of Baez’s moonshot was sufficiently awestruck that I immediately bookmarked it for a look-see as soon as I got home. (In the meantime, I thrust a paddle skyward, whooped and scared a kid in a nearby boat. Sorry about that.)
The original plan in our house had been to depart at about the two-thirds point in the Mets game for a trip down to Coney Island to see the Cyclones, but my wife and I were logy and sometimes Sunday is about deciding the couch is the best getaway of all. As it turned out, Noah Syndergaard [8]‘s second rehab start got scratched anyway — he tested positive for Covid, though thankfully he had the brains to be vaccinated and is experiencing an asymptomatic breakthrough infection. It’s still enough to scotch his plans to return for a while yet, the latest misadventure in an odyssey that’s gone from tragic to downright farcical — we got the setback, the question of whether not to relieve, the odd decision to not throw breaking stuff, the Mets being caught off-guard by that odd decision, and now this. Next we’ll be told that Noah might return for the last series, but he’ll pitch left-handed and throw only eephus pitches. I adore Syndergaard and would find considerable solace in a mere 2021 cameo from him, but this is getting ridiculous. And I don’t see what it would help, now that the horses are running around the pasture and the barn’s burned down (doors and all) and a meteor hit the smoking ashes and uh-oh the horses seem to have fallen into the crater and oops I forgot this was a meteor shower and … well, that could have gone better.
Hey, maybe the Mets can change that bleak assessment with the little time they have left. Scoring nine runs a day would be a good start.
(What’s that? You were expecting a hot take on the thumbs-down controversy? Sorry, I gave up caring about things that are both deeply stupid and utterly inconsequential for Lent — in 1990 — and have stuck with that strategy. I highly recommend doing the same.)