Just Enough Still Counts as Enough

Baseball — perhaps you’ve heard — is a game of contrasts.

Take Hunter Greene vs. Jose Quintana, the starters for Friday night’s game in chilly Cincinnati. Greene is young, enormous and all but dripping talent, in possession of a high-90s fastball he can throw past big-league hitters as well as an evil slider tailor-made for embarrassing them. He used both to great effect against the Mets, retiring 10 in a row at one stretch and looking borderline unhittable in doing so. I can think of one bad slider that Greene threw all night — the one he hung to Starling Marte in the middle of the plate in the sixth. Marte’s swing caught too much of the bottom of the ball, and his look of disgust told you he knew that was the best swing the Mets were likely to have against Greene all night.

Quintana isn’t the physical specimen that Greene is, he isn’t young, and his arsenal isn’t one to elicit oohs and ahhs. And yet he matched Greene, bedeviling the Reds by shaving away at the edges of the plate and the upper and lower boundaries of the strike zone. Quintana was badly hurt on only one pitch: a first-inning sinker that didn’t sink, and that Spencer Steer sent away with a ticket to Kentucky, or near enough for a Reds’ run.

Another contrast came with two young infielders, Brett Baty and Elly De La Cruz, whose paths through the big leagues have been rocky in different ways. De La Cruz arrived as a jolt of human electricity, bringing power and speed and high-stepping flair, and looked like the game was too easy for him. Until the game reasserted itself and smacked him in the face. The flair is still present, but De La Cruz amasses strikeouts in bushels and his fielding has become hold-your-breath erratic.

Baty arrived with a home run in his first AB, but that was pretty much the last crackle of electricity — the rest of his rookie season was a humbling experience and his sophomore season was worse, both in terms of statistical results and in terms of intangibles that became distressingly tangible. You could see Baty thinking out there and you could also see that the thinking wasn’t helping him: the game speeding up as a grounder hopped in his direction, the strike zone expanding with a two-strike count, first base suddenly retreating to a million miles away when a throw needed to be made. By the time Baty was installed at third base this year, he was perilously close to going from prospect to suspect and getting labeled as one of those players who was never able to get out of his own way.

And who knows? Maybe that will be the verdict on Baty when verdicts get written. But Friday he had the kind of game you’d imagined for him from the beginning: a couple of hits, hard contact when making outs, and no ABs that snowballed and ran him over. And he was even better in the field, particularly in the sixth when De La Cruz smacked a ball to third. It was a tough chance for even the most sure-handed and confident infielder; as Baty moved to intercept it I was urging him don’t think don’t think don’t think. He didn’t — he scooped it up and fired a seed over to first, retiring De La Cruz by a step. A little run of games like that and maybe, finally, Baty will relax and become what all the scouting reports have said he can be.

When I wasn’t thinking about contrasts I was tempted to watch the game through the shutters of my fingers, because it was grinding and quietly terrifying. The Mets tied it at 1 on a sacrifice fly, converting a run out of an inning that featured a lone single, then took the lead on a what should have been a crusher of a double play off the bat of Pete Alonso that De La Cruz muffed.

It sure didn’t feel like it would be enough, particularly given recent late-game disasters. The Reds kept coming at the Mets and that skinny lead, with Drew Smith and Brooks Raley escaping trouble. The eighth inning, oddly, seemed to have parachuted in from some blissfully less stressful game, as Jeff McNeil lined a homer for a 3-1 run and Adam Ottavino looked the sharpest he’s been all year. But then Edwin Diaz was given an actual save to try and lock down and looked nervous and out of sorts. Diaz’s error on a comebacker put Jonathan India on first; he walked Steer; the Mets got just one out on what should have been a double play when Lindor and McNeil got their wires crossed at second; a sacrifice fly marked the second out but brought the Reds within one; and Diaz’s location was spotty against pinch-hitter Jake Fraley, with a wild pitch moving the tying run to third.

Disaster appeared nigh, but baseball is nothing if not a confounder of expectations. Somehow Diaz found a perfect slider — the Sugar Special that had been missing all inning. It might have been the only good one he threw all night, but it was the one he needed to retire Fraley. I’m not quite sure how the Mets won, but they did — you could look it up. They did just enough, perhaps, but just enough still counts as enough.