Midseason Form

This is the time of firsts, of course. First appearances for Mets old and new. First hits, home runs, stolen bases and, alas, first errors and strikeouts and big chances not converted. First wins — the Mets took care of that category Thursday afternoon — and, nowadays, new additions to the menagerie such as first pitch-clock violations, for and against.

The opening frames of a season move slowly in the beginning — slowly even with men in blue newly deputized to finger-wag baserunners back to their stations and demand split-second decisions on replay challenges. (None of these things particularly needed hurrying along, but my invitation to serve as a consultant for MLB apparently got lost in the mail.) There’s a brief time when you can hold every pitch of the young season in your head at once, followed by a somewhat longer stretch where you can at least recall every AB. We’ve moved beyond both of those as things start accelerating, but for a while we’ll be able remember every game, down to the scores. For a while, but not forever — within a couple of weeks the games will start to blur, and then so will the series, and soon enough our reaction to a mention of some March/April storyline will be belated recognition — “oh yeah, that’s right, I remember that game.”

This happens every year, and I navigate the experience with the odd mix of familiarity and mildly peevish surprise you get when doing something you haven’t done for a full turn around the sun. But in one respect I’m in midseason form already: Friday night’s game was a definite reminder that I hate the Marlins.

Friday night’s game at Tacky Political Grift Park (or whatever it’s called these days, as something tells me I might not be remembering that quite right) had “annoying fucking loss to the annoying fucking Marlins” written all over it from the jump, when the Mets didn’t get a safe call challenging Brandon Nimmo‘s supposed out at first. There were Marlins making plays they had no business making, most notably Jorge Soler out in right field screwing up his pursuit of a Pete Alonso drive just enough to turn it into a spectacular play and later, at a critical moment, making a more authentically fine shoestring grab to rob Starling Marte. Soler also put the Marlins on top with a solo shot off David Peterson, who looked like he was always about to implode but kept staggering out of trouble.

Peterson got help from some nifty/lucky defense on the Mets’ side of the ledger: In the bottom of the first Alonso turned a hot shot down the line from serial Mets torturer Jean Segura into a double play — fortunate, as Garrett Cooper then wound up on third courtesy of a muff by Marte transmuted by hometown scoring into a triple. Peterson escaped, but that was when I started muttering, thinking about how it could easily be 2-0 Marlins with a runner on third and nobody out and Soilmaster Stadium (of course, that’s what it’s called!) about to drop a bucket of teal on the Mets’ fortunes for approximately the 67,000th time since this misbegotten franchise was inflicted on baseball.

Peterson escaped that mess and wriggled free again in the fifth, when Cooper hit a ball off Alonso’s glove only to have Jeff McNeil alertly run it down behind Pete and make a heave home that was both desperate and accurate, plucked by Tomas Nido in time to tag out Jon Berti. But the Mets couldn’t make up that one skinny run, not against an impressive Jesus Luzardo or against relievers JT Chargois or Dylan Floro — though Floro only escaped a blown save in the eighth through Soler’s robbery of Marte. In the bottom of the eighth John Curtiss made his Mets debut a year after a campaign spent rehabbing a torn UCL and pitched pretty well … if we’re not counting a shot into the right-field stands by Jazz Chisholm Jr., which unfortunately even this year’s much-modded rules say we do indeed have to count.

A pause to remind us all that it’s useful to see things from the other guy’s perspective, even if the other guy is wearing a hallucinatory teal belt and is part of the worst collective entity in the history of athletic competition: Chisholm has had a miserable first two days in center field, making misplays each night and looking like he’s playing on skates even when things aren’t going awry. But the guy can hit; given what he’s gone through so far in this young season, his high-stepping post-homer tour of the bases was thoroughly earned.

Thoroughly earned and, as it turned out, enough to beat the Mets: Alonso homered off A.J. Puk in the ninth, but it felt more like another twist of the knife than a gallant attempt at a comeback. Baseball has returned and I’m heartily glad, just as I’m excited to see what the new season will bring. But one thing it’s already brought is an unwelcome reminder that there are Marlins in the world, Ruining Everything™️, as Marlins so often do.