From Min Back to Max

Last time we saw Max Scherzer he was decidedly min against the Yankees, chiefly because his slider was batting-practice quality, hanging obligingly in the strike zone and waiting to be clobbered by any Yankee who fancied a go.

Scherzer vowed stonily that he would fix the problem, which sounded good but also sounded like the kind of thing a parade of underachieving Mets have said during the serial low points of this baffling, exasperating season.

But it was clear from the beginning of the Mets’ Monday night tilt with the Houston Astros that Scherzer had, in fact, done what he’d said he would. The slider was sharp, an ideal complement for Scherzer’s fastball, and the combination was bad news for the Astros, shorn of slugger Yordan Alvarez and squeezed into their dopey City Connect alts. (“Space City” is a fine moniker, but why do the sleeves have a grid pattern? Why why why why why why?)

Bad news for the Astros, but excellent news for the Mets. Scherzer put together his longest outing as a Met, completing eight innings and only passing on a complete game because the scoreboard suggested there was no need to expend unnecessary bullets. (Grant Hartwig, the newest Met and the first newcomer since the Gary Sanchez Experiment, finished up.)

Scherzer had company in making good on postgame vows, too. Daniel Vogelbach continued his adventures in launch-angle home runs; Francisco Lindor had five RBIs and invited a whole team of Astros to join Kalina and Amapola in calling him Daddy; and Tommy Pham continued to slash hits and looked solid in the field. Every starter save for Brandon Nimmo had hits and the Mets scored 11 runs — a formula that I’ll crawl out on an analytical limb and posit will work.

Like families in doorstop Russian novels, happy baseball teams are all alike. Given the multitude of things that have gone wrong for the 2023 Mets, there’s a long list of items that still require tinkering: Next up is Justin Verlander, another serial provider of postgame brave talk who will be returning to the scene of previous triumphs.

A good start from Verlander, the offense continuing to click … that would go a long way to suggesting the Mets might still have a story worth telling in 2023. Wouldn’t it be nice to see them standing around the kind of happy clubhouse we’ve seen before, saying interchangeable dopey things about teamwork and chemistry and passing the baton because there’s nothing to fix?