I had a lousy Tuesday.
No need for condolences — nothing of any real consequence went wrong, just a dog’s breakfast of bureaucracy and mischance and annoyances waiting at every turn. But it was enough to leave me in a foul mood, one that I tried to shake walking home over the Brooklyn Bridge, hopeful that watching the Mets would help me snap out of it if nothing else could.
For the first half of Tuesday’s game, that didn’t seem like a particularly good bet. The Mets kept hitting in lousy luck, with J.D. Davis [1] particularly snakebit, allowing Patrick Corbin [2] to spit the hook again and again. Meanwhile, Carlos Carrasco [3] was pitching well but gave up a run on a Maikel Franco [4] double, though Brandon Nimmo [5], Jeff McNeil [6] and James McCann [7] cut down a second run on a relay so picture-perfect it should have been immediately ported into an instructional video. Still, it was 1-0, and then it was 2-0 when Riley Adams [8] demolished a slider that in no way resembled its description. (No pitcher has ever called something in their arsenal a tee-sitter, for related reasons.)
It’s amusing how quickly fan arrogance returns once your baseball team plays well for a little while. My mother texted me from Virginia and I assured her it was a frustrating game so far “but they’ll get em,” and since she’s the one who made me a baseball fan and a Mets fan [9], there was no need to define who was who in that equation. But would it be so? Baseball will reliably make a fool of those who traffic in certainties, the worst team is perfectly capable of pasting the best team on a given night, and even those best teams are going to endure 20-odd frustrating losses a year in which things go repeatedly and perversely wrong for nine innings.
But finally the Mets broke through, or the Nats broke, or maybe it was a little of both. With the bases loaded and one out in the sixth, McNeil spanked a hard grounder to Josh Bell [10] at first. Bell is a Pyrite Glover and I suspect was also screened slightly by Eduardo Escobar [11] on the play; some combination of that or simple bad luck turned what looked like a 3-6-3 double play into a tie game as the ball went up and over Bell’s glove and down the line. The next batter was McCann (who had a very good game on both sides of the ball), who got one in the air, deep enough to give the Mets the lead.
Things somehow felt safe, though I knew they weren’t (there’s that arrogance again), and when my attention stopped wandering it was because Juan Soto [12] was up with the tying run on first and more dangerously the go-ahead run contained within himself. In came Joely Rodriguez [13], and I steeled myself for a long, grinding confrontation.
The famously patient Soto swung at the first pitch — a changeup high and inside, out of the strike zone — and popped it up to Escobar in foul territory. Then he stood there for a moment, staring over at where the out had been recorded with a look at once faintly puzzled and mildly disgusted — the expression of a man who just stepped out of his apartment in his bathrobe to get the paper and inexplicably let the door shut behind him. Why did I do that? What do I do now?
The answer to the first part, most likely, is that the Nats are horrible, whittled down to Juan Soto and a flag that will fly forever but is no help right now, which has left Soto trying to do the work of three or four hitters, something not even he can do. Someone buy Soto a drink and lend him a sympathetic ear, because he looks like he needs both.
The Mets added another run, which was enough for Edwin Diaz [14] to go to work. Diaz didn’t look quite as sharp as he has of late, giving up a one-out single to Nelson Cruz [15] and having to work a deep count against a determined Yadiel Hernandez [16]. Frustration was still entirely possible — this was the park where Kurt Suzuki [17] once did something unspeakable [18] against Diaz, after all.
Ah, but frustration for whom? Hernandez slapped Diaz’s ninth pitch at McNeil, and two seconds later the Mets had won [19]. And you know what? I even felt a little more cheerful.