Indifferent Karma, False Hope, Few Expectations

Someday in the future, a precocious Amapola Chloe Lindor might look at her birthday, consider her father’s occupation, and ask, “Daddy, what did you to in the first game you started after I was born?” And her dad Francisco will be able to rightly tell her, “I hit a home run for you. What made it even better was that it happened on Father’s Day.” Rightly impressed, the young lady might reasonably respond, “Wow, you hit a home run, which it would naturally follow boosted our family’s favorite team, the New York Mets, to a rousing victory, given the implications of the occasion and the romance with which we imbue baseball.”

To which Papa Lindor might also very reasonably reply, “Don’t you have some homework to do?”

I was very happy to watch Francisco launch a no-doubter of a home run to left field in the bottom of the first inning at Citi Field on Sunday, not only because it immediately halved the deficit the Mets faced from the two-run homer Nolan Arenado hit in the top of the first, but because I wanted to be a romantic about baseball. Lindor wasn’t in the starting lineup on Saturday in deference to the birth of Amapola early that morning. His paternity leave didn’t even last an entire game. He was back at the ballpark before first pitch and, after Buck Showalter determined he was sufficiently rested, he pinch-hit to lead off the ninth. Francisco reached base via hit by pitch to maybe get a rally going in a game the Mets trailed by two. The shortstop made it as far as second base. There was no rally. The Mets lost by two.

Ah, but Sunday was a new day, and Sunday was a literal whole new ballgame once Lindor, returned to the starting lineup and, still not having missed a single game in 2023, greeted Cardinal starter Matthew Liberatore’s fastball with 104½-MPH exit velocity. How could you not feel something percolating after that swing? Lindor, a new father for the second time, channeling the joy he’d expressed after Saturday’s game into a Father’s Day demonstration of appreciation for the miracle of life; putting the Mets on the scoreboard; answering two runs with a run; inspiring the 15,000 attendees within the sellout crowd who were handed orange bucket hats to contemplate tossing them into the air in celebration, creating a sky of blue and orange for the enjoyment for the 28,110 attendees within the sellout crowd who weren’t handed bucket hats…c’mon, this was too good not to work.

Francisco Lindor homers on Father’s Day after his child is born. And Pete Alonso! Pete Alonso burst from the injured list right back to first base! No embedding the Polar Bear with a half-dozen afterthought relievers in the Who’s Not Healthy Now report. No dispatches from Binghamton or Brooklyn on how the latest rehab game went. Nope, just Pete, ready to go. Maybe Pete, like Francisco (or Katia Reguero Lindor’s obstetrician), would deliver memorably before this weekend series versus St. Louis was through.

Usually I avoid setting myself up for storylines. Leave that to the pregame gambling sponsor and the naïve. Most everything you think is going to happen because it should happen doesn’t happen. Maybe it happens just enough to create a sense of precedent, or you can convince yourself that this is the sign, this is the day things get turned around. The sign is almost inevitably a misdirection and the turnaround rarely comes.

Still, Father’s Day, as Metsian a holiday as there is. Mr. Met has two daddies, one who decamped to San Fran, the other to L.A. Talk about being born with a Metipal complex. Our first Father’s Day, was June 17, 1962. We were swept in a doubleheader by the Cubs. The opener was the game when Marv Throneberry didn’t touch first. Over the radio that Sunday afternoon, Bob Murphy transmitted a plea on behalf of the real Baby Mets:

Marv Throneberry and several other members of the New York Mets, now that school is out, would like very much to move their families to New York for the summer if they can find a furnished house to rent someplace. If you know of one, don’t call but write Housing, The Polo Grounds, New York, 39.

You’d think the Metsies had paid their initiation dues by a) Marvelous Marv running them out of a triple (he didn’t touch second, either) and b) having their announcers act as their real estate agents, and therefore should be granted karmic Father’s Day consideration into perpetuity, especially considering what was about to come after never fully settling down in the Polo Grounds. Two years later, the Mets had permanent housing: Shea Stadium. The first Father’s Day they spent there involved another doubleheader sweep at the hands of the visitors — the Phillies — and another celebrated episode of a Met not touching a base — any of them. That was Jim Bunning’s perfect game of June 21, 1964. Mets fans, recognizing a lost cause when they saw one, showed sportsmanship unimaginable nearly sixty hence, and cheered Bunning of the Phillies (ptui!) on toward perfection. They knew they weren’t going to get anything like it from their team.

The Mets wouldn’t come away from a Father’s Day without a loss until 1972, when, on that June 18, Yogi Berra could hand to the home plate umpire a lineup card with “MAYS CF” written atop it and hand the ball to SEAVER P; Willie recorded a single and a pair of putouts, Tom pitched a complete game at Cincinnati, homering to drive in the decisive run, and, with the Pirates losing to the Padres, Yogi had steered his team back into first place. In other words, it took THREE Hall of Fame legends for the Mets to make an unqualified success out of Father’s Day, though, to be fair, there were a few splits of twinbills in the ’60s, there was a rainout in 1970, and, despite the Mets being defeated by the Dodgers in Los Angeles, there was a big-picture triumph on Sunday June 15, 1969, via the trade for Donn Clendenon, a player who would add an air of elder statesmanship to a clubhouse of kids just learning to win.

Baseball being the daily grind that it is, one day, even Father’s Day, probably looks pretty much like the other from the inside. It’s little wonder that it was on Father’s Day 1987 that Ralph Kiner, who was on the New York Mets air for his 26th consecutive Father’s Day and who knows how many other days, sent out sentiments from Shea’s television booth that have outlived Ralph himself. According to Howard Blatt in the Daily News, Kiner said, “On this Father’s Day, we again wish you all a happy birthday.” Generations have chuckled at Ralph’s tongue-tangoing expense, but maybe he was just getting ahead of the game, specifically with Amapola Lindor in mind. On June 17, 2029, Father’s Day that year, Francisco Lindor’s second daughter will mark her sixth birthday.

Father’s Day 1987 stands out in the annals of my mind not for Ralph’s classic Kinerism, but because the Mets won that day. They’d won the day before and the night before that, too. They swept the Phillies. We’d been waiting for the Mets to make a habit of sweeping everybody, the way they seemed to the year before when they were winning more than a hundred games. To date, on June 21, 1987, the Mets were reminding us less and less of the team they had been the year before. They entered that weekend series in fourth place, 7½ games behind the Cardinals. Our team needed a boost. Our team’s fans needed hope. Taking three in a row, culminating in a Father’s Day 8-3 shellacking of Philadelphia at Shea, gave it to us. We’d picked up two games in the standings. More than half of the season remained. We could keep making up ground. Gary Carter, who rested in the bullpen and on the bench that Sunday said to Sports Illustrated writer Douglas Looney before the series finale that he found himself thinking, “Hey, maybe I really am feeling good.” Gary was referring to his nagging aches and pains, but he could have been speaking for our psyches. The year after our Year to Remember had played out as a hangover that would never quite let up. Yet here we were, showing signs of life, beating back a presumed lesser opponent and encroaching bit by fit on first place. Hey, maybe we really feeling good.

Happy birthday to us all, indeed.

The Mets didn’t get any closer to the Cardinals before the first inning finished on Father’s Day 2023, and they fell further behind as the second inning progressed, with an errant Eduardo Escobar throw to first pinning Carlos Carrasco behind an 8-ball destined to roll over him. Cookie gave up three runs on two run-scoring hits, and the Mets were down, 5-1, heading to the bottom of the second. But then, a little lightning struck. With two out, Jeff McNeil appeared barely grazed by an inside pitch, but it put him on first. Then Escobar, making up for his error, laced a fly ball to deep center that became an uncaught RBI triple (Tommy Edman ran it down, only to have it clank off his glove). The veteran who plays less and less immediately making up for his error, albeit with the help of a hit that could have been ruled an error: that’s karma! Then, after Mark Canha walked and advanced to second on a wild pitch, Brandon Nimmo stepped up.

Nimmo was the author of the hugest hit the last time the Mets won on Father’s Day, at Arizona in 2018. The Mets were playing dismally that afternoon and that entire June; they hadn’t won consecutive games in nearly a month. The Diamondbacks had extended their lead to 3-1 in the eighth, almost assuring that the Mets’ win the previous evening would be orphaned. The Mets make two quick outs in the top of the ninth. Then, somehow, a rally: Jose Reyes bunts his way on; Jose takes second on defensive indifference (which is what the Mets were playing with most days); our other Jose of the moment, Jose Bautista, hits a ball that glances off right fielder Jon Jay’s glove and turns into a double that scores our primary Jose to make it 3-2; then Brandon, in his first season as a regular, homers off Brad Boxberger to put the Mets in front, 4-3. Asdrubal Cabrera follows with another dinger, and the Mets go on to win, 5-3. It is shocking that the Mets arose from the almost dead. It is shocking that the Mets had now won two in a row. This was the June of 5-21 — FIVE Met wins the entire month, for criminy’s sake, as Nimmo might have muttered to himself when things weren’t going well. But things were going well for Nimmo. Not only had he created a rare Met winning streak, but he’d be going more or less home the next night, to Coors Field, playing in front of his parents, who were coming down from Wyoming to see him. Brandon gave them a belated Father’s Day present in the form of a leadoff inside-the-park home run, touching off a 4-for-6 performance and fueling a rout of the Rockies for the Mets’ third straight win.

After which, the Mets would lose their next seven, but we didn’t know that yet. We only knew Brandon was the star of the extended Father’s Day weekend show and, five years later, I knew Brandon was up in a game that wasn’t yet lost as of the second inning, and in 2023, he swung and connected for extra bases. Escobar scores! Canha scores! Nimmo, seeing his ball rattle down the left field line after Jordan Walker’s flailing dive totally missed it, steams past second and heads for third! Karma!

Alas, Ebullient Brandon, like Marvelous Marv, doesn’t touch a base he needs to. Or, more precisely, Arenado touches him on the arm before he can touch the bag. Ralph’s broadcast partner Tim McCarver drilled into us by 1987 that a player must never make the first or third out of an inning at third base, which is what Nimmo did by trying to stretch his sure double into an iffy triple. But, well, that’ll happen. I look at Brandon and I think of a term I heard Buck Showalter use a couple of weeks ago when he was asked for his recollections of managing incoming Mets Hall of Famer Al Leiter in the minors. Al, Buck noticed way back when, “had a lot of ‘want-to’.” So does Brandon. So does just about every one of these Mets. You’d figure every major leaguer does, but it doesn’t always show. There’s a so-called dad joke in there somewhere, something akin to “their ‘get up and go’ got up and went.” The Mets might want to win, but even on Father’s Day, even with Brandon Nimmo unleashing his quintessence, their want-to tends to get up and get thrown out at third.

Karma? I wanted to believe the Mets had one more encouraging Father’s Day example hanging from their necktie rack. On June 16, 2013 (which math insists was a full decade ago, but I’m going to ask for an umpire review because, nah, it can’t be ten years already), at home against the Cubs, the Mets were even more moribund than they’d be five years later in Phoenix. The Mets were trailing, 3-0, heading to the ninth. They’d lost three in a row, six of seven, ten of twelve, and were 24-39 overall. Not only were they moribund, you couldn’t imagine they were capable of being bund. Still, they had enough major leaguers and enough want-to on their side to make a Mets fan forget all that for the next half-inning. Marlon Byrd led off with a homer off Carlos Marmol; Lucas Duda walked; John Buck singled; Omar Quintanilla singled both runners up a base; and Kirk Nieuwenhuis ripped a fly ball to deep right that kept going, going…

GONE, GOODBYE! (That’s Kinerese for OUTTA HERE! OUTTA HERE!) Nieuwenhuis had himself a three-run, walkoff home run that set off a bacchanalian celebration at home plate, raised the droll dander of Bob Costas as he showed the highlight during a break in NBC’s U.S. Open golf coverage (“a team fourteen games under .500 celebrates as if it just won the seventh game of the World Series, another indication of the ongoing decline of Western Civilization”), and, for a spell, ignited the hopeless fourth-place Mets to become let’s say somewhat less hopeless. Starting with the Father’s Day comeback and running through almost the next six weeks, the 2013 Mets were bund as hell, going 22-14 and not limiting their joyous days exclusively to Harvey Days.

Kirk’s karma may have been ten years old this Father’s Day, but it came rushing back to me, just as Nieuwenhuis rushed into the line of his waiting teammates at home plate ten years ago (did you know Kirk Nieuwenhuis played high school football?). Maybe I’ve reached a point where I will take anything I can get to make the 2023 Mets more palatable. Usually losing a 5-1 score in the middle of the second would have been enough to elbow aside any optimism for the rest of the game. But if you can’t divine belief that the Mets will do something astounding on Father’s Day, then you haven’t been paying attention for the bulk of the franchise’s life. Sure, Nimmo was thrown out at third, but they’d scored three runs before he got tagged. It was 5-4 with seven innings to go.

Karma!

I was even willing to bring the Braves (ptui!) into it. I’ve stopped paying attention to the Braves where their vast distance from the Mets in the National League East is concerned, but I did notice that they had designated Charlie Culberson for assignment on Sunday. It was reported widely because the Braves had invited Charlie Culberson’s father to throw out the ceremonial first pitch before the game. Instead, they threw out Charlie Culberson. Then, as if karma decided attention must be paid, the Rockies took a 5-0 lead by middle of the second at Truist Park. I could swear something was percolating.

Then again, I’m not a coffee drinker, so how the hell would I know from percolating? Having been brought almost to a level playing field, Carrasco tilted matters back toward the Cardinals in the third, giving up a home run to Paul DeJong, which one could almost overlook since Paul DeJong home runs are proportionally more common to the Citi Field experience than bucket hats given to fans on Bucket Hat Day. Another HBP to the anatomy of McNeil led to another Met run in the bottom of the fourth, by which point Carrasco had exited and John Curtiss had buckled in for the middle relief long haul (two-and-two-thirds). A Jordan Walker solo homer would be the only substantial blemish on Curtiss’s ledger, and it could have been said to have been effectively erased when Tommy Pham answered with a two-run homer off Cardinal reliever Chris Stratton in the fifth. It was 7-7, the Mets had come all the way back, and my lingering suspicion that every Pham RBI is ultimately a mush seemed misplaced. Hot damn, we could win this Father’s Day game!

We could have. Had we, I don’t know that I would have put much stock into what would come thereafter. Thirty-six years ago, the Mets’ inability to make much out of their three-game sweep of the Phillies, cautioned me to be wary of counting on the generation of momentum. With their Father’s Day triumph, the 1987 Mets raised their record five games over .500. Eighteen days later, the 1987 Mets sat four games over .500. That sweep of the Phillies ginned up what turned out to be false hope. Not that I’m dismissing false hope. At this Met moment in 2023, I could use some false hope. I don’t have any other kind for this successor to a team coming off a season of more than a hundred wins.

The 1987 Mets dropped to 92-70 from 108-54 in 1986. It wasn’t the same year the year after. It’s never the same year the year after. The 2023 Mets will not approach the 101-61 record their predecessors achieved in 2022. As Laura Albanese trenchantly observed in Newsday after Saturday’s loss, “Often, guys like Lindor or even manager Buck Showalter will profess optimism that a team so similar to the one that won 101 games last year is just one turning point away from reclaiming its former glory. […] It’s time to put the dream of ‘once things go back to normal’ in the REM cycle. It’s time, too, to act as if the 101-win season was the exception, not the rule.”

A little like remembering that bolts of lightning on a Father’s Day here or a Father’s Day there, let alone a home run by the shortstop on the heels of the birth of a daughter to the shortstop, stand out because they are unusual. The usual with this team is not winning the games that they could win. on Sunday, after the fifth inning, it was business as usual. Curtiss, Dominic Leone, Brooks Raley and David Robertson all pitched credibly, keeping the Cardinals from breaking the 7-7 tie. Robertson needed only eight pitches to put away St. Louis in the eighth. Yet the Mets didn’t do any post-Pham scoring, either, and in the ninth, when Robertson remained fairly fresh, Showalter turned to Adam Ottavino to face the heart of the Redbird order, and the second beat of that heart, Arenado, beat Ottavino with a homer to left, making it 8-7 for the Cards. Maybe Robertson would have faltered, too. Maybe the saving of Robertson for tonight in Houston will pay off. Maybe it was just one pitch by one pitcher going awry and you can say that in any season, even a season like 2022, though we sure didn’t have to say it very much last year.

In the bottom of the ninth, against fireballing Jordan Hicks, Brandon Nimmo expertly dunked a soft liner into shallow left field with one out and Starling Marte coming up. All Marte had to do here was not ground into a double play, and not only would the Mets remain alive, but the next batter would be Lindor. If you were so inclined, you fumbled around for the script you wrote in your head as it pertained to Father’s Day heroics. If the game wasn’t resolved by Big Daddy Francisco on deck, the Polar Bear lurked in the hole. Pete Alonso, escaped from the injured list and doing to Hicks what Arenado did to Ottavino, would make for just as wild an ending as any imagined off the bat of Lindor.

Marte grounded into a double play. Mets lose, 8-7, same score the Mets lost by on June 17, 1962, in the Marv Didn’t Touch First or Second Game. At least there wasn’t a nightcap to lose on June 18, 2023. Meanwhile, as if to tell us karma doesn’t play favorites, the Braves stormed back in Atlanta to crush Colorado, 14-6. Not that you don’t expect that from the Braves. What you don’t expect, as you scan the standings, are so many splendid seasons in progress from so many sources lately transformed from moribund to alive and well. Have you noticed that, roughly ten days shy of the schedule’s midpoint, the Miami Marlins currently own the third-best record in the National League as well as the top NL Wild Card spot? That the Arizona Diamondbacks are first in the National League West? That the Giants have nosed ahead of the Dodgers and that the Dodgers are, if only for the moment, out of the playoff picture? That the Cincinnati Reds have gone from going nowhere to a half-game from first in the NL Central? That the Texas Rangers, a common object of derision when a certain free agent pitcher said he liked the cut of their competitive jib as he departed a 101-61 juggernaut for a 68-94 jugger not, is way ahead of those defending champion Astros in the AL West, and Texas has ascended to its perch without much help from said pitcher?

None among the Marlins, Diamondbacks, Reds and Rangers lost fewer than 88 games last year, and the Giants finished 30 games behind the Dodgers. When I do scan the standings, I have to confess I get an unaffiliated kick out of the uprisings thus far executed by the previously downtrodden. I try not to think that if teams that were “supposed” to lose are winning, it figures that teams that were “supposed” to win are losing, and, unfortunately, that’s a cohort that encompasses us at its core. Reflecting on our shortfalls in years like but not limited to 1987, I told a friend once that we — the Mets and Mets fans — are much better at storming the gates than we are at defending the castle. Sneaking up becomes us. Fending off tends to court disaster. My team has an enormous payroll that I also try not to think about, given that it doesn’t represent currency that can be exchanged for victories. My team also has several players with large reputations built on previous accomplishments, none of which can be translated on demand to doing them or us any good in the present. My team won 101 games last year and clinched a playoff spot with weeks to go; they were universally projected to win a comparable amount and secure even more clinchables this year. That also doesn’t do us any good in the present.

I wouldn’t say I envy the Marlins (ptui!) or any of the other presumed scrappy contenders suddenly establishing a toehold at or the near the top of the divisional and Wild Card standings and becoming less a fleeting phenomenon and more a legitimate contender. But, man, I do miss that feeling from when the Mets would emerge from nowhere and give us a season we didn’t see coming in the good sense. As gratifying as it can be to live up to expectations, it’s an absolute blast to totally exceed them. Had the 2023 Mets been doing what they were “supposed” to do, that would have been fine, too, but expectations never seem to get us where we want to go. This year, they have gotten up and left.