Angel Hernandez, a master of ruining endings [1] of baseball games, was ready to roll early Sunday afternoon, out to ruin a baseball game that had barely begun. It took him all of five pitches to pull a Sparky Lyle [2] by dropping trou and planting his bare bottom on the Mets-Marlins finale birthday cake. Brandon Nimmo [3], batting leadoff, lashed a ball into the left field corner. See Brandon run! Run, Brandon, run! Brandon ran all the way to third for a triple to set the Mets in motion toward a fruitful first inning.
Wait a sec, signaled Angel Hernandez from about as far away as an umpire could stand from the inflection point of a play. That ball Nimmo hit got stuck under the fence, hence that’s a ground rule double, meaning Brandon would have to trot in reverse, lose ninety feet from his journey and stand on second.
That happens sometimes in a game, a ball being inaccessible to an outfielder because of the physical imperfections of barriers and whatnot. Thing is, Brandon’s ball didn’t get stuck under anything. It traveled as far as it could and sat where it landed. No Marlin threw two hands in the air. No Marlin projected helplessness. No ball was stuck.
Angel saw it differently. Angel sees many things differently in the course of a baseball game. This time he opted to set the baseball game off course from its first batter. Replays showed Angel was misguided. Chatter with his fellow umpires couldn’t budge him. Educational efforts from the walking rule book Buck Showalter didn’t persuade him. An official Met challenge didn’t change anything; I believe the ruling from the replay crew [4] in New York was, Oh, that’s just Angel being Angel.
Nimmo on second rather than third. And though the Mets might not have driven in a Nimmo hypothetically taking a lead off third in the first, they surely didn’t drive him in from second. Mets nothing, Marlins coming to bat, the Angel of Aloof Incompetence with one more innocent baseball game in his nefarious clutches.
If the Mets of September 2022 were the Mets of September 2022 we’ve reflexively considered them when things haven’t broken their way, Angel Hernandez’s miscall might have broken them. We would have had only the satisfaction of Max Scherzer earning ejection from the dugout for giving Angel an earful. Scherzer standing up for all that is correct is fun, but it’s small solace if a game is going to turn on a triple being reduced to a double and leading to a zero.
Ah, but the Mets of September 2022 are roughly the same outfit that has presented itself through all of 2022, which is to say a different fit from other Septembers and other years when adversity would have hung a crooked number on the scoreboard against them in the wake of an Angel Hernandez error of judgment and procedure. These Mets, now in their recordbreaking sixth month of thrilling audiences from coast to coast (or East Side to West Side at least), didn’t fume. They caught fire.
We lost a base to Angel Hernandez? We got it back and then some. Brandon Nimmo got a whole bunch of bases as Sunday progressed. In the second, with two on and two out, Brandon blasted a three-run homer. Hernandez didn’t find a fan interfering after or detect a timeout call before Jesus Luzardo delivered the pitch Nimmo whacked. Nope, it was a genuine three-run homer. Brandon was now only a single and an Angel short of the cycle.
Nimmo didn’t get that far on Sunday, but he kept making up for what Hernandez took away. He walked in the fourth, part of building another Met run. He batted on the heels of a two-run Tomás Nido [5] double in the fifth, working out another walk during a plate appearance highlighted by Nido moving up to third on a wild pitch. This meant second base was unoccupied, which hasn’t meant much to Brandon standing on first all year, but this was a day for Nimmo and the Mets to add base upon base to their ledger, a sharp strategy considering they’d been deducted a base they’d earned to start the game.
Brandon Nimmo stole second. It was his first stolen base of 2022. It is September. Brandon Nimmo bats leadoff virtually every day. Brandon Nimmo is not slow. Yet Brandon Nimmo doesn’t attempt to steal. But having witnessed how effective Angel Hernandez was at snatching something that shouldn’t have been his to take away, Nimmo perhaps adjusted his values system.
Total bases aren’t calculated this way, but that so-called ground rule double, the home run, the two walks and the stolen base…that sums to a total of too many bases for even Angel Hernandez to reduce to nothing. The rest of the Mets were inspired, too. You may have noticed that bit about Nido doubling in two runs. Hold on to your facemask, because Nido also homered. Nido homers about as often as Nimmo steals. A more likely candidate to go deep, certainly in recent weeks, Eduardo Escobar [6], chipped in a homer as well. Escobar spent most of 2022 replicating 1985 third baseman Ray Knight (.218 and a candidate for release the following Spring). Then he went on the IL, came off it and turned into 1986 third baseman Ray Knight (.298, The Sporting News Comeback Player of the Year and MVP in the World Series). Given his switch-hitting abilities, maybe he’ll be slugging like 1987 third baseman Howard Johnson by next year (even if he steals less often than Nimmo).
Offense wasn’t a problem for the Mets on Sunday. All the bases piled up to nine runs. Starting pitching also wasn’t a problem. Taijuan Walker [7], for whom second halves have been his own Angel Hernandez (which is to say a pox on competitive baseball), righted himself to the tune of seven one-run innings, one of the catchiest tunes you’ve ever heard. Only Brian Anderson was a thorn for both Taijuan and Seth Lugo. Anderson homered off each of them, driving in all three Marlin runs. If you’re pinpricked by only one Marlin in the course of nine innings, you’re having a very good day.
The Mets’ Sunday was grand enough with the 9-3 win [8] in their pocket, but it got a lot better later when our temporary favorite American League team the Seattle Mariners held off the Atlanta Braves, 8-7. It wasn’t really a “held off” situation. The M’s were up, 6-2, heading to the ninth, which was the last time I checked. I wasn’t following closely — I hesitate to watch or listen to games in which I’m more interested in who I want to lose than who I want to win (karma’s my program guide) — so imagine my surprise when I digested that final score. The Braves scored five in the ninth, which meant they went ahead in a game that seemed, to the extent that “seemed” carries any weight, settled.
Settle this, said the Braves. But unsettle this, the Mariners answered. Atlanta’s raucous comeback to 7-6 was obliterated by two homers off Kenley Jansen, one from wunderkind Julio Rodriguez, the next from Cincinnati expatriate Eugenio Suarez. I watched the highlight of the latter. I whooped as if I didn’t know what it contained.
After the angst of the Mets’ brief sag into second place, they are first in the East again, an entire game-and-a-half ahead of the Braves. They’ve won their last two series. Had they captured one of the two games they lost against the Nationals last weekend, we’d be talking about a team that relentlessly keeps winning series. Instead, they made the mistake of briefly faltering and we all more or less decided they were cooked. Maybe they were just on a low simmer. September has a way of turning up the heat on all of us. Nobody’s judgment is flawless this time of year.
Just ask anybody who’s watched Angel Hernandez in action.