A Good Curve At Last

Tell me if any of this sounds familiar to your experience regarding your favorite baseball team of late:

• Sometime in early Spring: YAY, BASEBALL!

• A little later this Spring throughout this summer: Does it have to be this baseball?

• Now, as summer blurs into fall: Sigh…there goes baseball, just when the baseball is getting kinda good…

That, I believe, serves pretty accurately as the inverted bell curve charting one’s fondness/tolerance for Mets baseball in 2023. Start out reasonably high; plummet; maybe start climbing anew as events warrant. We’ve won three in a row. That’s the trajectory we’ve been missing.

Another dip is possible over the final sixteen games, because these are the 2023 Mets, and when it comes to going for a dip, they sure do know how to pack a swimsuit. But let’s go with the vibe of the moment, which corresponds to being a little shy of a week from the autumnal equinox. The weather has gone schvitzless, and the Mets have become hitful. Or maybe they’ve just been enjoying the company of the Arizona Diamondbacks.

It was fitting that the Wild Card-contending (a.k.a. a little over .500) Diamondbacks furnished the opposition for the 9/11 commemoration game, because I couldn’t think of another non-New York team that gave a great deal of New Yorkers — not all of them, but plenty of us — more joy when it was needed in the fall of 2001 than the ballclub from Arizona. Bless you, Luis Gonzalez, wherever you are. Letting the D’Backs grab one win all these years later, as they did on Monday night, represented an appropriate gesture of appreciation. Then, with our eternal thanks for saving Mets fans from any further pinstriped deification twenty-two Novembers ago registered, we could return to the present and our uncanny knack for whacking those desert snakes. I don’t know why the Mets usually take it to the Diamondbacks. I’ll just enjoy that they have in nineteen of their last twenty-three meetings, including Thursday afternoon’s 11-1 stomping of the visitors from the West

Ten minutes after four o’clock on a Thursday afternoon isn’t necessarily the most convenient time to commence a baseball game when there are so few remaining in a season and a person might have other tasks looming, but if 4:10 PM starts yield 11-1 wins, well, bring on the inconvenience, not to mention the shadows. This was the last weekday afternoon game we’ll know this year. Everything else is either at night or on the weekend. Everything else is invited to work ten runs in our favor.

I saw some of the game, listened to more of it, missed a little of it, managed to revel in all of it. Deposed champion of batting Jeff McNeil hit another home run. Jonathan Araúz received a rare opportunity to step to the plate and made four bases and three ribbies out of it. DJ Stewart did not add HR to his initials, but he did knock in a couple of his fellow Mets, as DJ is known to do. Brandon Nimmo did something similar. Saving some of that for Kodai Senga‘s next start was not possible, so the Mets piled it on in support one of the league’s best pitchers. Our very own Rookie of the Year and Cy Young candidate struck out ten while giving up no runs, two hits and two walks. His ERA has taken the best dip of all, under 3.00. BBWAA voters take note.

Senga is known more for his forkball than his curve, but the curve the Mets are riding is a most pleasant upward slope. Paying attention to this team any time of afternoon or evening has been something of a sap’s errand this year, but this week will make a person with a selective goldfish memory forget all about that. For example, on Wednesday night, it barely crossed my mind that the Mets have been mostly horrible in 2023. Wednesday night, you see, was when I was fortunate enough to be tapped on the shoulder by a hand from the past.

The hand belonged to Skid.

And by Skid, I mean SKID! You can’t invoke the man’s name without a requisite level of excitement.

Skid Rowe was the prophet of good times to come at the outset of 2015, when this Mets fan from Northern California decided his life wouldn’t be complete unless he spent an entire baseball season in New York going to every single home game the Mets played, and, it turned out, crossing paths with myriad Mets fans who felt blessed to get to know him (I was one of them). He and his experience were both a blast, especially when 81 games at Citi Field proved not enough to suit his proximity to everything orange and blue. Skid showed up, blended in, and the Mets won their division, won their division series, won their league championship series, and went to the World Series. We didn’t win the World Series, but Skid rooted us into November. Pretty good for an out-of-towner.

That was eight years ago. Skid went home to California following the Fall Classic. Long story short, he remained a Mets fan, if not the kind who’d uproot his existence for seven months for the sake of immersing himself in Metsdom. As the late 2010s morphed into the early 2020s, you might say Skid became a Mets Fan Emeritus. Still with us in spirit, just not as all in as he was through the last pitch of 2015. It would be hard to keep up that pace into perpetuity from 3,000 miles away.

Then I felt Skid’s hand on my shoulder. Technically, it was a text and a followup phone call. Through machinations that aren’t vital to recount, Skid found himself with a bunch of seats in his name in the Hyundai Club for Wednesday night, September 13, 2023. It was too long a haul from Northern California for him to be there, roughly an epoch removed from the September days of 2015 that involved counting down a magic number. Yet the seats had Skid’s name on them. Skid’s name is also imprinted on the Mets fan soul of all who consider him synonymous with our most recent pennant.

Skid asked me (plus some other folks from way back when) if…

a) I’d like a couple of those tickets; and

b) I could do my best to see some more didn’t go to waste.

I didn’t want to detail that the September he remembers from 2015 shaped up as nothing like the September at hand when he got in touch, or that a lot of people who love the Mets for better or worse have had their fill of the latter in 2023. Filling those seats, I was thinking, might be a challenge akin to Terry Collins filling out his lineup card pre-Cespedes trade.

Instead, I responded…

a) yes, thank you; and

b) yes, absolutely.

And ya know what? Mets fans answered the call. I was at Citi Field on Wednesday night with others who knew Skid, either from 2015 or by reputation. We filled his seats. All except one he told me he personally hadn’t found a taker for. That’s all right, I thought — you’re supposed to keep a chair open for Elijah the Prophet.

Imbued by the spirit of Skid, we who were there to partake of his largesse had a spectacular time in this, the most dismal of Met seasons. Granted, it helped these seats were in Skid’s favorite section of the ballpark, the Hyundai Club, and the Hyundai Club includes a buffet, and who doesn’t like great seats with great food included? But it’s September 2023 and the Mets haven’t contended for anything but disdain since April; even the most loyal Mets fans could be forgiven for choosing to make their own fun and their own dinner as this season winds down.

This meeting of the Skid Rowe Alumni and Appreciation Society is declared a success.

Nope, we members of the Skid Rowe Alumni and Appreciation Society decided, we wanted the fun of being with one another; being with our team, their so-so nature notwithstanding; and thinking aloud about one of us who wasn’t with us on Wednesday night, but we knew he was out there following along via Gamecast, when not checking in with us via a device or two. We wanted a soft summer evening on the cusp of fall. We wanted to watch the Mets stomp the Diamondbacks as they had done the night before, as they would do the afternoon after.

We know a little too well that Hyundai might as well be Korean for aberration. We won’t be playing the Diamondbacks this weekend. Maybe that won’t matter. We won’t be throwing Senga against the Reds. Maybe that won’t matter. The forecast looks good, but you never know with weather. Mets baseball will be gone in a tad over two weeks. We’ll probably be glad to be done with it. It’s not as if a three-game winning streak is suddenly upending standings that have sat on our head without pause.

Yet a few good days after a ton of bad ones, especially when one of the good nights is enriched by so many good friends — and enabled by one who was there in every sense but physical — are to be treasured if you value what loving baseball oughta be all about. We can go back to dismissing these Mets and this season soon enough. Sticking around has its rewards.

National League Town relives the Mets’ journey through the American League, from Oakland to Minnesota and everywhere in between. What a long, unprecedented trip it was. Take it yourself by listening here or anywhere you pod.