The Mets said all the right things after taking apart the Brewers Monday night — how they’d picked each other up all year, how it was a great bunch of guys, how this was just a first step, how they had other goals.
All the stuff a team that’s clinched October plans but nothing more specific in terms of a destination ought to say — not with the Braves staying stubbornly behind them, like the metaphor-freighted posse Butch and Sundance couldn’t seem to shake. Newman and Redford at least needed to peer into the distance to spot their pursuers; the Mets don’t have to look more than a length behind. (And we know “those guys” all too well.) The outcome of that particular pursuit will occupy our thoughts for another two weeks and change — the blink of an eye during the course of a baseball season but an eternity for an anxious fanbase.
But but but but.
This is what we’ve done all year — spend a remarkable season worrying about the gap between “really, really good” and “could be even better.” Well, until the Mets and Brewers go back into battle Tuesday night, we’re all relieved of that particular duty.
Max Scherzer [1] faced 18 Brewers. Max Scherzer [1] retired 18 Brewers. There’s one place where that Mets-fan gap — the one studded with but but buts — simply didn’t exist. Max literally couldn’t have been any better. He was electric, determined and everything we ever dared to hope he might be, collecting a richly deserved 200th career win [2].
Pete Alonso [3] has worried us to no end of late, but it was Alonso who took Corbin Burnes [4] deep, smashing a three-run homer into the upper reaches of Miller Park to give the good guys a heckuva jolt (and, by the way, to bring that club RBI record a little more easily in view). On the couch up here in Maine, I let out a primal scream and applauded so hard that my hands hurt for half an hour.
But the other Met bats contributed too, drilling ball after ball up the gaps, most dramatically with back-to-back triples from Brandon Nimmo [5] and Francisco Lindor [6], most emphatically when they answered a Rowdy Tellez [7] two-run homer with an immediate two runs of “oh yeah?” — authored by Tyler Naquin [8] and Tomas Nido [9], no less.
We have October plans, after a long stretch of accentuating the positive through gritted teeth, or sometimes just the gritted-teeth part. We’re back in the conversation we’ve been left out of for far too long, back in the fight that truly matters, back where we sometimes let ourselves stop imagining we belong.
The Mets took a small step Monday night, or at least that’s what they treated it as. But it was a giant leap for Metkind — whatever explorations lie ahead.