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A Reminder That Style Points Don’t Exist

Saturday night’s Mets win over the Pirates had a certain family resemblance to Friday night’s win [1]: smothering starting pitching, enough offense to secure the victory, not enough offense to feel secure about said victory.

The margin was more comfortable, to be sure, but once again the Mets proved curiously allergic to the tack-on hit that would have made the rest of the game a formality: Eduardo Escobar [2]‘s three-run homer started the scoring, but the remaining two runs came on bases-loaded walks to Brandon Nimmo [3] and Pete Alonso [4].

But a critical thing to internalize as a baseball fan (and keep remembering every time you forget it) is that there are no style points. Wins don’t come with asterisks to indicate a whew or a meh, just as losses aren’t classified differently if an awww or an attaboy is involved. You win or you lose, full stop.

So let’s review:

The Mets beat the Pirates. That’s what matters. Hopefully they’ll beat them again in a few hours. That matters too. The mechanics of a win’s construction are fun to dissect, whether giddily or with a side of fretfulness, but they’re of secondary importance to whether or not there’s something to dissect [8] in the first place.