You’ve probably heard this before, but baseball is designed to break your heart.
Twenty-nine of 30 fanbases are destined to have their teams’ seasons end other than the way they’d wanted — with a victory that doesn’t mean anything or a loss that means everything. If you’re one of the unlucky 29, there comes an afternoon or evening when your fervent hopes, pinch-me dreams and wild imaginings are all snuffed out over three or four fatal hours, replaced with months of winter and silence.
For a long time in 2022, we were among the dreamers — cheering on a team built to win and able to live up to its blueprint, with that intangible more-than-the-sum-of-its-parts something that says, “Psst, you’re gonna want to keep your October calendar free. Because this could be the year.”
Until the night that the verdict was delivered that it wasn’t.
I was there for that night, also known as Game 3 of the Wild Card Series. I was at Citi Field up in 527 with my wife and kid, and at least I can report that it was a beautiful evening, not at all the chilly ordeal I’d braced and dressed for, with a searchlight of a full moon in the sky and Jupiter riding shotgun. Unlike Game 1 [1], we had good neighbors — knowledgeable about the game, passionate about the Mets, and philosophical and mournful instead of vengeful and irrational once things spun out of control. My favorite neighbor was in the row below me, a kid about seven or eight in a pint-sized ALONSO 20 jersey. He was still waving his THESE METS towel and chirping Let’s Go Mets!, enthusiasm not at all diminished, with two out in the ninth and the Mets down by six. Nobody gave him so much as a side eye even as the rest of us huddled in our own misery — his optimism was so simple and unassailable that I think it made more than a few of us wonder when, exactly, we’d set that aside in our own lives.
Ah, the game. Sigh.
Look, I was 500 feet from home plate. I can’t tell you anything about Joe Musgrove [2]‘s stuff or location or the Mets’ obviously futile approach to countering it — all I know is Mets kept coming to the plate and leaving in consternation and/or dejection. What was apparent even from 500 feet away, though, was that the Padres flat-out beat the Mets [3]. They pitched better, they played sterling defense, they took advantage of their offensive chances. That’ll do it.
I also can’t tell you anything about Musgrove’s shiny ears or the rest of that whole contretemps. (I’d gone to the bathroom and was nonplussed to emerge and discover a gaggle of players and umps at the mound.) As the umpires were examining Musgrove’s various body parts, our section started tilting phone screens for neighbors to see and then passing them around, showing charts of spin rates and discussions of Vaseline and Red Hot and pitchers’ baseline sweatiness and opinions from Jerry Blevins [4] and Andrew McCutchen [5] and video clips and freeze frames from the broadcast — an impromptu amateur digital investigation. (I’m just happy that in the end the consensus was that Musgrove was innocent, because an alternate conclusion would have been a huge mess and we’d all just be more unhappy.)
It was interesting being part of a baseball hive mind, but my memory flashed back to a very different game, one from May 1996 and the pre-cellphone era. Emily and I were in the Shea stands for an epic brawl [6] between the Mets and Cubs on the day the Mets were lauding John Franco [7] for his recently achieved 300th career save. Back then the Mets maintained a stuffy wanna-be patrician reserve about fights, refusing to acknowledge they were happening and afterwards not imparting information such as who’d been ejected. This became important when the Mets took a two-run lead to the ninth but didn’t bring in the closer they’d just honored, sending those of us who had transistor radios or AM/FM Walkmen to WFAN to figure out what on earth had happened. Which enough of us did so that eventually everyone in our precinct of the stands had been informed that yes, John Franco had been ejected on John Franco Day. (The Mets blew the lead but won on a Rico Brogna [8] walkoff homer. Good times.)
Anyway, to return to more recent history, the Mets lost one and then won one [9] and then their opponents played better and so they lost a rubber game. There’s nothing earth-shaking about that — I could have just described several chunks of any season, even a 101-win one. But because this particular rubber game came in October, people will try and tell you it means everything. They’ll turn it into a referendum on the entire season, or say risible stuff about 26 guys wanting it more than 26 other guys, or opine about who was battle-tested or possessed the will to win. And it will all be nonsense. The Mets lost a rubber game in an exhibition series. It’s disappointing and I’m sad about it, but fundamentally that’s all that happened and all this other … stuff encrusting that fact is more than a little ridiculous. The postseason is a series of coin flips that we spin into Just So stories, and the more baseball I watch, the more resistant I am to the whole narrative industrial complex that surrounds the games.
It’s after midnight and I’m tired and sad. I’ll leave the elegies and the lyrical flights of fancy for another day — our calendars are suddenly clear, after all. But I do want to leave you with two thoughts.
First of all, don’t let losing an exhibition series sour you on a 101-win campaign that was marvelous fun for six months. I guarantee you there will be multiple sleepless nights when I’ll realize I’m fuming about Trent Grisham [10] running down Mark Canha [11]‘s line drive, or about having to remember that Trent Grisham existed in the first place. But that won’t stop me from also remembering Brandon Nimmo [12] robbing Justin Turner [13], or the Mets’ ninth-inning ambush of the Cardinals, or the furious comeback against the Phillies, or Canha saving us twice in Philadelphia the day we discovered Nate Fisher [14] was on the roster, or Francisco Lindor [15] walking off the Giants, or Eduardo Escobar [16] singlehandedly beating the Marlins, or that goofball combined no-hitter, or Nick Plummer [17]‘s first big-league hit, or Brett Baty [18]‘s first swing, or Francisco Alvarez [19] unloading for his first Citi Field homer, or the day Adonis Medina [20] faced down the Dodgers, or the crazy walkoff on Keith Hernandez [21] Day (at least he couldn’t be ejected), or Escobar and J.D. Davis [22] combining for an unlikely game-saving play at Wrigley, or a dozen Luis Guillorme [23] plays that looked like special effects, or Jeff McNeil [24] beaming with a batting title secured. Or so many other wonderful moments from 2022 that you shouldn’t forget. (Here’s a wonderful Twitter thread [25] to bookmark, for starters.)
Second, don’t let disappointment keep you away from these last couple of weeks of baseball. We’ve already seen an astonishing Mariners comeback, a marathon win for the Guardians and the last bow for two generational St. Louis Cardinals, and we’re just three games in. Yes, these series are exhibitions, and it’s unfortunate that they turn regular seasons into footnotes instead of the other way around — but hey, I never said they weren’t fun exhibitions. Before you know it, we’ll be down to two teams and four to seven baseball games and then one team and no games at all. The lights will be off and the talk will be about player options and salaries and budgets and competitive balance taxes, and it will all be boring and it will feel like winter is never, ever going to go away.
It will — I promise — but not for a while. So stockpile all the baseball you can, even if the team we love to distraction and delirium and occasional dismay won’t be a part of what’s left.