A grab bag of Mets drawing Adam Wainwright [1] during his farewell tour, with John Smoltz [2] and Fox painting the word picture? Hasn’t 2023 been mean enough already?
That’s what we got Thursday night, with the only reasonable source of hope that baseball’s innate cussedness and delight in confounding storylines would come to the fore.
Which, in fact, was what happened.
Wainwright is just shy of 42 and in his final season, having authored a track record sufficiently impressive that some years ago he crossed the line between Villain Who Ruined Everything to Respected Adversary, one of those borders that’s unmarked but you somehow always know has been stepped over. Of late Wainwright has looked like he’s stayed too long at the fair, gathering tarnish as he staggers toward 200 wins, but in the early innings against the Mets he looked entirely too much like the Wainwright of old, leaning on that fabled curve to dispatch Buck Showalter [3]‘s lineup without appearing to break much of a sweat.
This is a good place for a reminder that it’s not all about us. Other teams have their own devoted fans who craft narratives out of the season’s ebbs and flows, and the Cardinals are having a year every bit as discouraging as ours — more so, in fact. They’re hopelessly below .500, in last place in a crummy division, and you better believe there are Cardinals fans (a couple of them are even friends of mine) who tuned in last night thinking, “Oh great, now we have to watch the Mets ruin things for Waino and listen to John Smoltz? Hasn’t 2023 been mean enough already?”
Wainwright matched zeroes with a sharp-looking Jose Quintana [4] into the fourth, but Jeff McNeil [5] hit a drive to the fence that looked like it would be a home run and then an out stolen by Jordan Walker [6] and wound up as a double. That brought up Pete Alonso [7], who did terrible things to a Wainwright sinker, redirecting it 437 feet away to center and giving the Mets a 2-0 lead.
The Mets added another run and backed up Quintana with solid defense — Jonathan Arauz [8] has been quite good at third, not that we aren’t ready to hold our breaths again watching Brett Baty [9] think about things when he shouldn’t — but Quintana ran out of gas to start the seventh, surrendering a homer, a walk and a single to put the tying runs on base with nobody out.
That put the Mets in a familiar, undesirable spot: looking for nine outs’ worth of firefighting from an assortment of arsonists. Drew Smith [10] was first up and limited the Cards to a sacrifice fly, cutting the Mets’ lead to one but leaving us thinking things could have gone a lot worse.
Enter Grant Hartwig [11], whose initial impression of competence and grit has been replaced by sighs and chronic worrying, which is to say he’s simultaneously a rookie and a middle reliever. Hartwig’s location was best described as theoretical, with the always demonstrative Francisco Alvarez [12] coaxing him through the inning looking like a slightly insane orchestra conductor. Somehow — and this morning I’m still not sure exactly how — Hartwig emerged unscathed.
The Mets got an insurance run from the unlikeliest of sources, as Tim Locastro [13] mashed a 419-foot shot to center for his first Mets hit, which is definitely damning with faint praise but hey, good timing. Closing things out fell to Trevor Gott [14], whose own location was also abysmal. Gott immediately surrendered a single, but then got a foul flyout courtesy of a nice play by Brandon Nimmo [15] and retired Cardinal newcomer Richie Palacios [16] on a scorcher hit right at DJ Stewart [17].
Two outs the hard way, and a Tommy Edman [18] single brought up Paul Goldschmidt [19] — not exactly the guy in this lineup you’d pick to face while showing no ability to command your pitches. Gott in Himmel!
Gott got (sorry) a strike on what was actually a ball, tried a pair of bait cutters in that same location without success, and then left a cutter in the center of the plate which Goldschmidt should have turned into a walkoff souvenir, except he missed it. As Gott came set, I braced myself for Gott in Hölle and counseled myself that it would be undignified to throw things after a garbage-time loss.
So of course, Gott threw his best pitch of the inning and possibly his only good one: a sinker that caught the outside corner at the bottom of the strike zone. Goldschmidt looked at it, straightened up in dismay and trundled off to think about the unfairness of the universe [20].
Because baseball, and because it’s not always about us.