OK, there isn’t a plan — baseball routinely makes a mockery of plans — but there is a blueprint a team tries to follow, and I’m pretty sure the Mets’ blueprint wasn’t labeled LOSE WITH BARELY A WHIMPER TO PATRICK CORBIN AND ERICK FEDDE. I flashed back to 1990, when the Mets’ quest for a division title was derailed by a disastrous three-game sweep at the hands of the Expos, capped by a 6-0 whitewashing [1] with Chris Nabholz [2] on the mound.
That was 32 years ago, and I still sometimes catch myself staring at the ceiling and fuming about it.
Chris Nabholz, really?
The Expos have become the Nats, but Nabholz was a rookie then, an unknown quantity, whereas Fedde was thoroughly known yet somehow kryptonite for Met bats on Sunday.
Just a little frustrating.
/recapper bends laptop while apparently ‘just a little frustrated’
I suppose if you squint a little, or a lot, there were good things to be discerned amidst Sunday’s wreckage. Trevor Williams [3] pitched very well in relief, continuing his year of being quietly useful in a range of roles, and the Mets played some adept defense late. But “late” is best understood there as the second half of “too late” — by then the Nats had brought the hammer down on Carlos Carrasco [4] and extended their lead on a homer after Williams was forced to throw strike four (fuck it, we weren’t winning anyway), and you knew the Mets were toast [5] long before you heard the ding from the kitchen.
(They tried, but had an inning short-circuited by a dropped fly ball in left that turned into a double play thanks to some unfortunate umpiring, but if that play sent you to the barricades, I have to ask if you were watching earlier. It’s right there in the earliest baseball laws inscribed by Abner Doubleday: When you’re going horseshit, they fuck you.)
Anyway, the Mets took two out of three from the Dodgers and then dropped two out of three to the Nats, and any rational fan knows such head-scratchings are part of the ebb and flow of a long season, and the view through a three-day magnifying glass is pretty much the worst way to maintain one’s perspective. All of which is true, except the Mets are in a pennant race and the Braves stubbornly refuse to lose games and have now drawn within one skinny, lousy, aggravating, horrifying game of our heroes (I assume — I can’t bear to check the scoreboard), and anyone who delivers a lecture on perspective at this juncture deserves to be doused in beer for his troubles, because read the room already.
/recapper douses self in beer
Anyway. Tomorrow is a new day, lots of baseball left, many paths to the playoffs, but that wasn’t exactly the plan, and the Mets would be strongly advised to ball up the LOSE TO CORBIN AND FEDDE blueprint, throw it in the trash, and find something new posthaste.