The Mets played a ridiculously entertaining game Saturday night, once that saw them come back from three runs down and again from four runs down, one that featured a DJ Stewart [1] homer and a Mark Vientos [2] moonshot and a Francisco Lindor [3] screen-rattler, and one that turned, as so many games do, on Daniel Vogelbach [4] using his speed.
Honestly, everything about it was fun except for the final score [5], which featured an 8 and a 7 in places we wished had been reversed.
(An admission here: Emily and I were at dinner in Torrington, Conn., while the Mets fell behind the first two times, meaning I reported for duty with the forces of good down 7-3. This means that the portion of the game I saw was a 4-1 Mets victory, which unfortunately doesn’t count but made for more pleasurable watching. I highly recommend this as viewing strategy, should you find a way of reliably accessing it.)
Adam Ottavino [6] giving up what turned out to be a fatal homer to J.P. Crawford [7] does not count as one of the entertaining parts: Ottavino is another example of a 2023 Met who’s regressed, though I find it a bit harder to grouse about Ottavino’s backsliding than what we’ve seen from various teammates. Ottavino is a reliever and so knows perfectly well that a good season doesn’t guarantee another good season any more than a bad season is a life sentence. Relievers are spaghetti hurled against a wall; Ottavino stuck the horizontal landing beautifully in 2022, but a lot of 2023 dinners involving him have wound up with pasta on the floor. That’s just the way it goes, which is why the man invariably looks grim and slightly weary on the mound — he’s seen some shit and knows he’ll see some more of it before he’s through.
For a second straight night, Vogelbach was at the center of the game. This time, he led off the bottom of the ninth by spanking a Justin Topa [8] changeup into the left-center gap. Vogelbach rumbled around first, saw the ball on the warning track and shifted into … well, second gear in an effort to reach that base ahead of the throw. It didn’t work: He was tagged out a good foot and a half shy of the promised land.
This was, of course, unfortunate! Vogelbach’s time at first after a single and a more conservative decision would have lasted just long enough for Tim Locastro [9] to replace him on the bag; Locastro might have been on second after a steal (the equivalent of a double if you’re scoring at home and even if you’re scoring in the middle of the desert, looking up the barrel of an abandoned nuclear silo or while peering at the heartbreakingly beautiful blue curve of the Earth from a space station) when Stewart rapped a single up the middle, and that in all likelihood would have tied the game.
After the Mets had lost, various commentators tut-tutted at Vogelbach for pushing beyond his limitations and forcing the issue. And this is indubitably correct … but nevertheless I must protest. On Friday night Vogelbach won a game for the Mets [10] by being aggressive in a situation where we’ve often seen him be passive: He went into protect mode and fouled off a number of close pitches instead of expecting the umpire’s sense of the strike zone to align with his own. He was aggressive again Saturday night in a situation where it was going to take a perfect relay to get him; as it happened, the Mariners made a perfect relay.
You know what? So be it. The Mets tried to play spoiler for a second straight night and almost pulled it off with nine innings of scratching and clawing, playing never say die baseball at the tail end of a season we can’t wait to shovel dirt onto. They played highly watchable baseball after a spring and summer in which too many games bordered on unbearable to witness,. I’ll take that every time — even if the final score winds up not to my liking.