The Mets said all the right things after getting beaten by the Rays 8-5 on Tuesday night in a game that was not nearly as close [1] as the final score suggests. Justin Verlander [2] talked about understanding the fans’ frustration and about how the players were frustrated too and about needing to work hard. Buck Showalter [3] talked about worms turning but didn’t sugarcoat all the things that seem to be going wrong all at once. It all sounded good, but if you zoomed out from trees to forest, the vibe was essentially that the beatings will continue until morale improves. And when exactly will that be? The starting pitchers are dropping their teammates in holes early, the hitters have stopped hitting and so are unable to slug their way out of those holes, and this dreary blueprint is followed pretty much daily, leaving the games sour and unwatchable.
Predictably, a Mets team that had just been steamrolled by the not very good Nationals found the Rays a tough matchup. Right now the Rays are pretty much a perfect baseball team: They ground down Verlander, a surefire Hall of Famer even if he won’t wear our uniform on his plaque, until he was forced to make hitters’ pitches, which the Rays didn’t miss. Meanwhile the Mets hit three home runs, which is three more than they hit in Washington, but that was all they did, and this moderate uprising never really felt like a serious threat — frankly, it was a lot of lipstick to waste on one pig. The Mets got screwed on a replay challenge at first, they got booed repeatedly by the faithful, and in the last few innings SNY treated us to about 200 shots of Mets fans looking outraged, astonished, morose or catatonic.
If that’s the scale, I think right now I’m somewhere between the last stages of astonished and early-onset morose — the Rays are a fantastic baseball team, the Mets are a tire fire, and it’s a little like the unstoppable force and the unmovable object if you switched the polarity of one of those entities so that both were pushing in the same direction, which is to say away from the Mets conceivably winning anything. I mean, Starling Marte [4] looks done, Mark Canha [5] remains a shell of his 2022 self, Daniel Vogelbach [6]‘s best moment was cheering a teammate, Francisco Alvarez [7]‘s swing is getting worrisomely long again, Drew Smith [8] had a fit in the dugout … it’s bad, y’all.
Congratulations to Josh Walker [9], I guess, for becoming the 1,200th Met all time. Now that Walker is a made man, though, he’s strongly advised to run like hell away from this Baseball Chernobyl. Maybe see if Tampa Bay could use another arm — those guys look like they’re going places.