Ah well.
A nightmarish inning of bullpenning, combined with Paul Goldschmidt [1] realizing, “Hey I’m Paul Goldschmidt,” did away with the Mets’ modest winning streak and hopes of sweeping the Cardinals, and I was first surprised and then a little heartened to register that I was annoyed. I didn’t think I was still capable of that, not after the selloff and with garbage time upon us.
Well, you know what? It’s good to be annoyed — or, to be more specific, it sure is better than being numb.
It’s also good to realize you were wrong. I greeted the arrival of DJ Stewart [2], Rafael Ortega [3] and Jonathan Arauz [4] with disdain, declaring them the sort of Quad-A fill-ins whose only function is to tell you things have gone disastrously wrong. (Stewart actually arrived pre-selloff, but work with me here.) That’s not wrong, exactly, but it was dismissive in a way that missed some things.
Stewart is a barrel-shaped player out of the Vogelbach sample book — since he’s never been a Milwaukee Brewer we can only conclude he will be one before his career ends — and while it’s no surprise to discover he has some thump, he’s also a much better defender than you’d guess. He’s not exactly lithe and graceful out there in right, but he gets to balls you’d assume he wouldn’t, his instincts are sound and he’s got a good arm. Ortega (who was genuinely useful a couple of years back as a Cub and so perhaps shouldn’t have been a total shock) is a capable center fielder, has speed and can spray the ball around. Arauz — who’s only 25 — hasn’t hit, but has brought some much-needed stability to third base now that Brett Baty [5], Mark Vientos [6] and Eduardo Escobar [7] are elsewhere, and he’s proven sound at the other two infield positions too.
There’s some hypocrisy here, of course — if your team wins, you discover all sorts of positive qualities in players that proved elusive when your team was losing. But it’s been a valuable lesson to realize Stewart, Ortega and Arauz are a little better than my first scouting report, the one that relied more on the spleen than the eyes.
Not that I think the reconstituted Mets are going anywhere — they’ve beaten up on terrible teams and the talent ceiling has still been substantially lowered by the Steve Cohen Supplemental Draft. But that’s OK. The floor is higher than I’d thought, and that’s a relief given how much baseball there is left to play.
I still have no use for Trevor Gott [8], but give me another winning streak and maybe we’ll talk.