It's Not Going Well

A confounding Mets season took another confounding turn Monday afternoon, when the team followed up Sunday’s burst of offensive competence (counterpoint, maybe the Nationals decided to experiment and do Whip-Its between innings) by once again looking like an outfit with zero resemblance to a professional baseball team. Going into Monday, you might have said, “Well, at least we know David Peterson isn’t really a pitcher with a 7.68 ERA.” And you’d be correct — when the Nats were done strafing Peterson, leaving him lying in a daze on the mound surrounded by the components of his uniform, a la Charlie Brown, he was a pitcher with an 8.08 ERA.

8.08! I’m no statistical wizard, but that seems bad!

Peterson will soon be out of a job, replaced by Carlos Carrasco. I take no satisfaction in pointing out at this juncture that Carrasco’s 2023 ERA is … 8.56.

And yet Carrasco now somehow feels at least sort of savior-adjacent. That’s because Peterson has been a metronome of suck, so chronically and reliably horrible that when I hear his name I now reflexively assume the posture of a (much smaller, not even faintly intimidating) bouncer outside of the kind of downtown hot spot I don’t go to. Right now I never want to see him again, a stance that is neither personal nor permanent, but heartfelt for all that.

But it’s not all Peterson’s fault, not by a long shot. He’s one guy having a bad season, a label that could be liberally applied to the Mets roster. We could point to the starters who haven’t started, the starters who have started and fizzled, the home-run hitters who have done nothing to earn that distinction, the 2022 offensive stalwarts who have gone flabby this year, or just to the general rancid crumminess produced by the collective. Since the last two days of their at-the-time-heartening California trip the Mets have been terrible at all aspects of baseball, putting up a 6-15 record against the Giants, Braves, Nats, Tigers, Rockies and Reds.

They now have to face the Rays, who could fall out of a boat and discover that 26 guys can walk on water. In baseball youneverknow, to quote the late Joaquin Andujar, but you can often guess, and let’s just say I’m not filled with optimism. As things have cratered, I’ve been thinking about another old baseball saw: the idea that you spend the first two months figuring out what you have, the next two getting what you need and the last two seeing what you can do.

The end of May will more or less mark the end of the Figuring Out What You Have part of the schedule. A turnaround from this same group of players is possible, and would be no weirder than other things that have happened in this strange Girl With a Curl campaign. (Recall that these same Mets were 14-7 before whatever the hell happened halfway through San Francisco.) But barring a strange and heartening turn, you’d expect the Mets’ braintrust to conclude that what they have is not what they need, and so start making changes. Maybe that means Mark Vientos and/or Ronny Mauricio join Brett Baty and Francisco Alvarez for a ’23 youth movement, which seems risky but once again, it’s not exactly going well; maybe it means pink slips for some veterans; maybe it means some big move empowered by Cohen cash flow; maybe it means some combination of those things; maybe it means something else entirely.

The end of May might feel a long way off while Rays are pell-melling around the bases and the Citi Field faithful are booing anyone down on the field unwise enough to be caught wearing blue and orange. But it really isn’t a distant prospect — it’s 14 games away, which measured by new fast-forward Manfredball standards is about 36 hours.

Thirty-six baseball hours from now, one suspects, the 2023 Mets will start looking different.

Maybe better, maybe worse, but different. And why not? As I believe I and more importantly they have demonstrated, it’s not going well.