No Really, the Mets Are Good

I was in L.A. Thursday morning through Monday night attending Star Wars Celebration (and probably getting COVID, but we’ll see), and felt the usual guilt about abandoning my post. Though I didn’t, really — the Mets kept sneaking into the picture, as they have a way of doing.

There they were for the last couple of innings Friday night as I recuperated in my hotel room after a crazy day greeting authors and fans and the occasional dude dressed as a Wookiee. And there they were on Sunday in the hotel bar — I grabbed a seat where I could keep an eye on them, and was certain Drew Smith had torn his UCL after a glimpse of him walking off the mound. (Only a dislocated pinkie? Thank goodness!) Every time I saw them or checked in on the score, they were either mashing Phillies into a paste, ducking from balls that guys in maroon were flinging around unwisely, or doing unlikely heroic things when you really wanted them to. (Nick Plummer? Really?)

Monday, with the Nats come to call, I had no such luck — the Mets started playing after I got on an airplane and were done by the time I landed. So of course MLB was the first place I visited after my phone completed its post-airplane mode throat-clearing and hemming and hawing. That’s always a brief out of body experience: There’s a number next to the name of the antagonists and a number next to the name of the good guys, and it takes a moment to process them and make your brain identify the larger number and conclude that it’s good or bad. Five for them and 13 for us? That definitely qualified as good, and I was probably the happiest person enduring a long late-night wait for JFK’s AirTrain, because I was the one watching the highlights.

And then there was tonight, which was basically no contest once Starling Marte hit a missile into the center-field stands, to become a souvenir for a fan with a child in his other arm. (Good hands times two, my man!) The Mets poured it on from there, bedeviling Patrick Corbin and a parade of anonymous Nat relievers while Trevor Williams and a trio of Met bullpen dwellers were spotless — including the aforementioned Mr. Smith, whose digit is apparently no worse for wear and perhaps even slightly improved given recent history. By the end the Mets’ lineup was studded with numbers in all the right places and the scoreboard and standings were all shouting out glad tidings.

I was talking to my kid recently and said “the Mets are good,” which after a lifetime of being emotionally battered is rare for me to say and vanishingly rare for me to say in May. “The Mets are really good,” my kid replied, and while he has less baseball-related scar tissue encrusting his soul, he knows the game and he was right and we both knew it.

Back in 2006, the second year Greg and I pursued the lunatic idea of chronicling the Mets, they ran away from a weak division and hid, and I remember a) how Greg and I went from fingers-crossed pleased to unsteadily giddy to quietly certain and b) how I was surprised when Greg was the first one to say what were both thinking.

They’re not going to catch us, was the way I think he put it, earlier than I’d dared to say it but not before I’d dared to think it.

This year’s team isn’t there yet, but the calendar says June 1, the Mets are playing at the ’86 club’s clip, the Braves are 10 1/2 back, and Buck Showalter‘s team feels like a club that’s just rounding into form — Canha! Lindor! Marte! Pete! Guillorme! McNeil! — and has an excellent chance of calling on two Cy Young winners by way of reinforcements.

I won’t say they’re not going to catch us — the baseball gods are reliably cruel and a brutal second West Coast trip looms against tough competition — but every day off the calendar makes it harder to believe someone will.