OK, look: That was a pretty great ballgame.
Two aces squared off — Max Fried [1] and Jacob deGrom [2] — and they were both pretty damn good. But the enemy offenses found the smallest of holes in their defenses. For deGrom, it was a lone inning where his slider was disobedient, refusing to be as sharp as its master wanted, which led to two runs surrendered. For Fried, it was a marathon eight-pitch at-bat by Mark Canha [3] which ended in a two-run homer off an errant slider.
The game turned, similarly, on a pair of quirky hits to the outfield. DeGrom departed in the seventh after an infield hit by Vaughn Grissom [4], with Seth Lugo [5] reporting to finish the inning against Michael Harris [6] II. With Grissom in motion, Harris snuck a ball through the infield. Brandon Nimmo [7] closed on it and threw it in to Darin Ruf [8], who relayed it to James McCann [9] at the plate — a whisker behind Grissom’s slide.
The Braves led 3-2, with deGrom shockingly in line for the loss, and turned that lead over to Kenley Jansen [10] in the ninth. For once my paranoia turned out to be justified: The Mets had, in fact, never done anything against Jansen, who was 17 for 17 in save opportunities against them.
It looked momentarily like things might be different, as Francisco Lindor [11] singled and then looked to steal second with Pete Alonso [12] at the plate — Jansen’s haywire mechanics make him tough to pick up but easy to run on. With Lindor halfway to second, Alonso got a high sinker he thought he could drive. He connected, but was under it, lofting a little pop behind the infield.
When the ball plopped in, I couldn’t see Lindor at second and for a gleeful half-second I thought he was on third. But he wasn’t — he was on first, having hustled back there, and so was forced out at second. It wasn’t Lindor’s fault — the ball looked like it was going to be caught, meaning Lindor would have been doubled off first, and the sequence played out almost like one of those canny plays where an infielder drops a ball intentionally to trade a faster runner for a slower one.
Anyway, Lindor was out and just like that, the air had gone out of a certain blue and orange balloon — Jansen struck out Daniel Vogelbach [13], got a harmless comebacker from Jeff McNeil [14] and the Braves had won. Rather than push the Braves back to where they’d started the series, the Mets saw them gain two games in the standings, answering the 1-4 debacle at Citi Field with a 3-1 counterpunch down south. And all that was determined by two odd little plays. Both went the Braves’ way, and that was enough [15] to decide a speedy, taut and frankly terrific ballgame.
It didn’t end the way we wanted. But there’s no guarantee of that, now is there?