Not As Dead As We Were

You score 15 runs, what do you get? Enough peace of mind to carry you through an off day, I hope.

The New York Mets, who entered Wednesday tied for first place in the National League East, exited Wednesday a half-game ahead of their closest competition. Not bad for a team declared deceased by a vocal plurality of its antsiest supporters.

Great to have fans who’ll stick by you in thick and thicker, eh?

To paraphrase 1988 vice presidential nominee Lloyd Bentsen as he took his younger counterpart Dan Quayle to debate school, September 2022, I lived with September 2007, I knew September 2007, September 2007 was a bane of mine.

September 2022, you’re no September 2007.

I don’t think so, anyway. I’ll cop to thinking after the most recent Mets-Braves series, the one in which three out of four games were lost, that I briefly flashed back to not The Worst Collapse Ever, but its preamble, the four-game sweep suffered at Citizens Bank Park in late August, a.k.a. the Jimmy Rollins Series. That quartet of defeats delivered a tangible bruising to the lingering sense of Met inevitability that had hung over 2007, but then came calming series wins over the (fading) Braves, the Reds and Astros. At Shea, in the minutes before Pedro Martinez manned the mound for the first time all year, on September 9, DiamondVision played a montage of what had gone wrong in Philadelphia, followed by highlights from the good things that ensued elsewhere, all to the musical accompaniment of “pick yourself up/dust yourself off/and start all over again”. Then Pedro went out, threw five shutout innings, doubled, scored a run and the Mets won once more.

And within a week, The Worst Collapse Ever commenced, serving as a reminder, perhaps, that nothing is clinched until it is clinched — or, perhaps, when one takes into account the ten wins in twelve games bracketed by calamity (0-4 at CBP) and disaster (5-12 to finish) — that nothing is blown until is blown. After the Truist Park stumble this August, the Mets won three of four at Philadelphia, culminating in Damn Thing IV, one of about twenty candidates for Game of the Year this year. An immediate stumble at Yankee Stadium was obliterated by three uplifting victories over Colorado, the last of those wrapped in the emotional high of Old Timers Day. Then they don’t score for two days before picking themselves up, dusting themselves off and polishing off the Dodgers all over again, winning that series and then staving off any hint of a letdown by summarily stomping on Washington less than a week ago.

Losing three games in a row, each by six runs, to last-place teams, was certainly concerning in the moment, maybe concerning as part of a greater pattern of scoring only in dribs and drabs. As a leading indicator of where the entire season was headed, it probably didn’t have enough sample size to it (0-3), nor did it have an adequate sense of near-term memory (85-48 prior to 0-3) let alone institutional memory. You wanna harp on 2007? How about that September night the Mets let a portion of their first-place lead slip away to an also-ran Pirates club, when the Mets were blown out and there was a three-game losing streak, and talk about a lack of hitting — the Mets were no-hit!

Or have you forgotten about the 1969 Mets? They were swept in a twi-night doubleheader at Shea on Friday, September 19, 8-2 (a familiar score) and 8-0, then came back to work on Saturday the 20th only to have Bob Moose shut them down on zero hits. None among starters Nolan Ryan, Jim McAndrew and Gary Gentry could tame the Bucco bats. Cleon Jones was out nursing an injury. The veteran-laden, star-spangled Cubs were picking up ground, inching back to four out with ten to play.

Things worked out OK for the 1969 Mets. Things will probably work out some version of OK for the 2022 Mets. You might question the relevance of taking solace in 1969 vis-à-vis 2022, which is fair, but if you do, you probably also need to ask yourself the point of being haunted by 2007 every time a very good Mets team loses three consecutive games late in a very good season.

The picking up, dusting off, starting all over again that occurred Wednesday afternoon and evening wasn’t only about five runs in one win (5-1) and ten runs in the other (10-0). It was about pitching. At night, it was about The Ace, Jacob deGrom, throwing seven shutout innings without prime command of his deadly slider. Good thing Jacob can kill with any number of pitches. By the time he handed matters over to a cobweb-gathering Adam Ottavino and the fresh, violent left arm of Alex Claudio, the old wives’ tale of the Mets never scoring for Jake had gone upstairs to bed, at least for another five or six days. The Mets notched 17 hits, six of them doubles, none of them homers. Toss in seven walks and a non-injurious hit by pitch, and you saw the Mets successfully stringing together rally upon rally as if that’s something they have some experience doing.

DeGrom was building upon the fine work compiled by The Stealth Ace, Chris Bassitt, the persnickety rock upon which the 2022 rotation has been built, even if his name is planted below the title on the Met pitching marquee. Since the middle of June, this guy has been mostly marvelous: 14 outings, a 2.32 ERA, 11 Mets wins and at least six innings consumed 13 times. You could do worse than turning to Chris if you have to turn to one pitcher with something heavy on the line the rest of this season or what lies directly beyond it. Bassitt had only half as many runs lavished on him as deGrom did, but those were plenty. Three came on one swing from Tyler Naquin, whose offensive capabilities, like those of Eduardo Escobar and James McCann, suddenly aren’t as defunct as once thought.

Because no day featuring two wins should lack for something to bring a Mets fan down to Earth (as if the gravitational pull of contemporary Mets fandom would allow for floating even a half-game above the ground), the Braves won again. But they played only once, hence we’re in first alone. Also, the IL claimed another Met, The Co-Ace, Max Scherzer, which seemed more a procedural move in deference to letting an extremely valuable left side rest up than a signal to panic. An abundance of imaging on Starling Marte’s right middle finger has revealed Starling absorbed a non-displaced fracture when he was hit by a Mitch Keller fastball Tuesday night. Meaning? I’ll let you know as soon as I complete my orthopedics degree, but the consensus seems to be it’s not that bad, unless we find out otherwise…which could describe any interval along the Mets’ journey if we want it to.

Superstition, Stevie Wonder once made clear, ain’t the way, but if you’re a baseball fan, you can’t help yourself from thinking one wrong move on your part might lead to a dozen missteps by your team. That’s the crux of this week’s discussion between Jeff Hysen and me on National League Town, the podcast devoted to Mets Fandom, Mets History, Mets Life. You can listen to it here. Just press pause should you find yourself walking underneath a ladder while doing so. Not that I’m superstitious or anything.