Game Eleven Rather Than Game Four

Six months and one day after it would have done the most good, the Mets beat the Padres at Citi Field. It didn’t tie up last October’s National League Wild Card Series at two apiece, because that was a best-of-three set. Noted baseball analyst Carole King says it’s too late, baby, to do anything about our first postseason series loss to a National League rival in sixteen years other than lick what’s left of our wounds and move on.

Implicit in this framing is the San Diego Padres are now a National League rival of the Mets in something more than cataloguing. From 1969 to 2021, they were as close to incidental in our scheme of things as a team could be. We were rarely good at the same time — the Mets and Padres had winning records in the same season only eight times prior to 2022, the last of those overlapping fifteen years prior. There’d be an occasionally memorable encounter in a Mets-Padres game, because baseball doesn’t ask for ID when it’s arranging ten consecutive strikeouts, or an 8-2-5 DP to complete a road trip, but prior to October 7, 2022, did a Mets fan ever “get up” for a Padres game beyond stirring from a disco nap for those held late at night on the Coast?

Now we and they have a different level of history. It may fade over time the way no Mets-Diamondbacks rivalry took root despite the heat of the 1999 NLDS, when we enjoyed sticking it to that smarmy Buck Showalter from Arizona. Remnants of a grudge may endure, as it seems to versus the Dodgers, a team I can’t look at when they play the Mets and not see Utley U Buttley, never mind that UUB is long gone from L.A. My guess is the sight of those brown-and-yellow duds that no detergent can quite satisfactorily clean will trigger flashbacks for a few years. I couldn’t look at them Monday night without remembering how I didn’t want to look at them (or baseball) ever again once the NLWCS was over. But that’s over, just as the 2006 NLCS stopped actively stinging eventually (even if it still hurts when one is moved to dwell on it). That was the last full postseason series we lost in October to another National League team; the L to SF in 2016 was just one game, barely enough time to build situational enmity. The schedulemakers cleverly had us in St. Louis to start the 2007 season. We swept the Cardinals. It was gratifying in the moment. It was also too late, baby.

But it was a new year. They all are. This one hasn’t mirrored 2022 from a dynamite start aspect. When we’ve looked good, we’ve looked all right. When we’ve looked lost, we’ve lost. We were a .500 club after ten games entering Monday night. Then we looked swell for nine innings and stuck it to the Padres in a way we didn’t much when it counted. Or counted more.

This right here counts very much, given that last year is last year and this year is just gaining traction. This right here, this 2023 season, will take all the boost it can get. Max Scherzer spent five innings boosting the Mets in their eleventh game of the current campaign, albeit via a bunch of full-count duels with Padre batters, but none that erupted into Padre runs. Sure, Max went to three balls on some of these guys, but also to two strikes. He still knows how to navigate those waters.

Maybe more mood-elevating than Max’s one hit and no runs in the face of three walks and 97 pitches; the four Met relievers who kept the Padres from scoring over the following four innings; and those two gasp-inducing dribblers — a bunt from Luis Guillorme, a tapper from Tomás Nido — that teased foul territory only to stay firmly fair, were the two two-out doubles lashed two ways that each plated two runs. That was Met offense coming to life without homers and without Marlins. Jeff McNeil’s to right in the third (off finally vanquished Metropolitan tormentor Yu Darvish) and Francisco Lindor’s to left in the seventh felt like something a team capable of producing offense produces.

The pair of swings may have added up to the first adrenaline rush of the young season. Maybe it was because they had nothing to do with new rules. The doubles weren’t about bigger bases, pickoff-throw limitations and steals that seem somehow stage-mothered into ubiquity (run into the spotlight, darling — show the director how swift you are!) or shiftless defense or the pitch clock on its face. They were two solid extra-base hits down the line when the Mets needed them, with two runners taking off to make the most of them en route to a 5-0 triumph sealed in 2:38, but who noticed the time of game? Until last night, the jury-rigged faster-paced contests didn’t necessarily seem more interesting than the ones they were intended to supplant. They just seemed over sooner. Maybe all of us, including the players, needed to get into the season a wee bit further to shake off the self-consciousness of what baseball is or is supposed to be now.

It helped that the Mets won. It always helps that the Mets win, but even the Mets wins since they lost to the Padres in three haven’t seemed all that vibrant. A slight sense of revenge achieved doesn’t hurt, either, even if it can’t do anything about last October. Anything it does to push us toward this October, however, is mightily appreciated.