The Mets have been both bad and unwatchable for the better part of two weeks, so Tuesday night counted as progress: They were watchable.
Watchable, as they fought back after being put in a deep hole by David Peterson [1], Stephen Nogosek [2], and (one could argue) the umpiring crew, which missed a ball headed for Francisco Lindor [3]‘s glove hitting Wil Myers [4] in the hand as he slid into second. Intentional? Probably not. Against the rules? Certainly. Enough to make Buck Showalter [5] mad? Oh yeah. Buck was ejected for the first time as a Mets skipper and at least got his money’s worth, indicating via a one-two-three-four pantomime visible across the river in Kentucky that four umpires had been on the field and not one of them had managed to fulfill the basics of the job.
Showalter departed dissatisfied, Nogosek gave up a two-run triple and a sac fly, and somehow it was 7-1 Reds, as the Mets continued their ill-advised run of making the dregs of the major leagues look like world-beaters. Seriously, since the wheels came off in San Francisco the Mets have lost series to the Nationals, Tigers and Rockies, and they’re now off on the wrong foot [6] against the Reds, the sole remaining entity on Earth that hasn’t received the memo that drop shadows are out.
Down by six, the Mets did at least fight back: Posterity will record that they scored five unanswered runs. Unfortunately, mathematics will record that they needed to score one more than that. Francisco Alvarez [7] started the futile comeback with his second homer of the night, with additional runs courtesy of homers from Pete Alonso [8] and Lindor and a run-scoring GIDP by Mark Canha [9]. That GIDP wound up typifying too much of what’s been happening, though: It came with the bases loaded and nobody out in the seventh, short-circuiting the inning, and Canha fell on his face after stumbling across first base.
In other words, it was the last two weeks of Mets baseball distilled into about eight thoroughly shitty seconds.
Elsewhere, well, where do you want to start? Peterson, called upon after Max Scherzer [10] was scratched with neck spasms, looked like he’d been replaced with a heretofore unknown identical twin who had no idea how to pitch. He couldn’t throw strikes and when he somehow did you wished he hadn’t. Peterson’s short career has been marked by false starts and reversals, to be sure, but he looks absolutely lost right now, a young pitcher whose stuff, location and confidence have all deserted him. It was cruel summoning him from Syracuse when that’s pretty clearly where he needs to be, but the Mets had no choice — and, in case you weren’t already depressed, he was filling in for a guy who’s destined for the Hall of Fame but hasn’t exactly looked like himself all year either, which is starting to look like a much bigger problem than Peterson’s growing pains.
As for the Myers play, a basic equation of baseball and life is that when you’re going horseshit they fuck you. The Mets have demonstrated proof of the numerator for two weeks now, so getting smacked in the face by the denominator isn’t injustice but simple cause and effect.