A Victory That Dare Not Speak Its Name

It’s a tenet of our blog that there are no moral victories in baseball — the loss column comes without asterisks, parentheses or stuff in superscript. Moral victories are losses.

Well, except when one of us declares that moral victories do too exist.

Maybe I was just in a good mood: Monday night’s game found me and Emily in Buffalo, where we’d gone to visit an old friend and hopefully experience a total eclipse. The eclipse part was largely spoiled by a blanket of clouds, though even without a clear view of totality the experience was still pretty cool: three minutes of nighttime followed by the light coming back up like God had flipped a cosmic dimmer switch.  (Though two hours later the skies over Buffalo were totally blue, grrr.) The rest of the visit was great fun, though — so much that I left Julio Teheran to his struggles for dinner, then returned to the fold after a surreptitious glance at Gameday informed me of the heroics of Brandon Nimmo and DJ Stewart. I watched the ninth on my phone, without sound, and this morning had to double-check that they’d actually won, because what I’d seen seemed so profoundly unlikely.

It was a win to put a little extra pep in one’s step, so much so that I largely shrugged off Adrian Houser getting tattooed when Tuesday night came around. I’d prefer Houser not do things like that of course, but the current incarnation of the Braves may be the most terrifying offense I’ve ever seen assembled, and it’s more of a surprise when a Met hurler doesn’t get mauled by them. I was less philosophical about the Mets repeatedly short-circuiting their own offense in particularly frustrating fashion, with leadoff baserunners erased through mischance or their own dunderheadedness, but hey, don’t watch baseball if you can’t handle the idea that the universe is perverse and cruel.

I was also cheered by the subtraction of Teheran, though I mean no slight against him or his long-ago Bravedom. Rather, it’s that I was cheered by the Mets evidently concluding that young, homegrown Jose Butto deserves that chance more than a retread whose ceiling is that he can give you innings, whatever that means. It wasn’t so long ago that the Mets sent Tommy Milone to the mound over and over again to be a metronome of suck, leaving me spluttering in rage by the end of the summer. Those Mets would have given Teheran the ball until Tylor Megill or perhaps Kodai Senga returned, greeting each loss with wide-eyed horseshit about veteran leadership and clubhouse presence; these Mets thanked him for his service and moved on after that first trial balloon deflated.

And there was Dedniel Nunez, thrown into the lion’s den in his first big-league go-round. Nunez showed both good stuff and admirable poise: Most pitchers making their debut look like they’re on the verge of hyperventilating through their first batter, if not their entire appearance, but he stayed cool and collected even as bad luck and his defense conspired against him. Collecting your first three big-league outs by retiring Ozzie Albies, Austin Riley and Matt Olson? That’s doing it the hard way.

And all that came before the Mets awoke from having slumbered through the pitching tenure of journeyman Reynaldo Lopez. Pete Alonso‘s three-run homer cut the deficit in half in the eighth, and the Mets added two more runs in the ninth via the unlikely combination of Harrison Bader and Omar Narvaez. Alonso batted with the game suddenly to be decided and it turned out he didn’t have a second thunderbolt in him: He went down on a nasty changeup from Raisel Iglesias, putting this one in the books with the Mets a run in arrears.

But still. An encouraging debut, a roster move to applaud, and a spirited comeback that forced the Braves to use personnel they’d have preferred to keep far from the action? That’s not a win, granted, but it’s not unpraiseworthy.

Or, like I said, maybe I was just in a good mood.