Old Habits and New Victories

How do you know things are going well? Here’s a sign: You take the lead off an opposing pitcher before he even throws a pitch.

The Mets somehow did that Tuesday night, the culmination of several unlikely events. They were down 1-0 to the Pirates in the seventh after being smothered by Pittsburgh’s Jared Jones and watching that lone Pirate run come home on an excuse-me bleeder off the bat of Bryan Reynolds, the kind of evening that makes you think this time the deck is too stacked for you to find your way to safety. But with one out in the seventh Francisco Lindor walked and Pete Alonso singled him to third. Brett Baty should have been next up, but he’d recently exited with a tweaked hamstring. (Baty is … wait for it … day to day.) Instead of Baty, we got the so far relatively unassuming Joey Wendle — who of course spanked a double into the left-field corner off Luis Ortiz to tie the game. Francisco Alvarez flied out, the second time in the game he’d stranded a gimme run at third, and Jose Hernandez relieved Ortiz.

From my vantage point up in 423, what happened next was … well, it was confusing. There were umpires running around and Jeff McNeil was conversing intensely with Henry Davis and then Alonso was happily trotting home and Hernandez hadn’t thrown a pitch yet the Mets had taken the lead. OK then! When Hernandez finally did get to actually pitch things didn’t go much better: McNeil served a ball into short left that fell in and gave the Mets an insurance run, and eventually a 3-1 win.

There was more to it than that, starting with my late afternoon decision that I ought to go to the game, because it was a warm spring night and going to the game is what I do, or at least what I used to do — a mournful realization but one I decided had an easy remedy. I secured a pretty good StubHub ticket for a whopping $13.61 (that’s with fees), got to Citi Field early and amused myself strolling around before finding my way to my seat, where I was soon happy Emily wasn’t with me.

I better explain that last part: If I determine someone within earshot is a baseball ignoramus or otherwise detracting from my evening, I calibrate my ears accordingly and essentially erase them from my audio experience. (Yes, it’s a gift.) My wife, on the the other hand, has what baseball players call rabbit ears as well as an unfortunate ability to attract dummies like a magnet. The guy mansplaining while getting basic facts wrong? The shrieking child on Day 1,724 of not being told no? The leather lung confidently calling balls and strikes from an oblique angle in the Promenade? In a typical game you’ll find at least one and possibly all three of them directly behind Emily; it’s usually around the fourth inning that she boils over and I (who’ve noticed nothing due to the aforementioned calibration) am soon thanking God she isn’t armed.

Now, a bunch of my neighbors for Tuesday night were actually Mets fans, and none of them were bad people — one Dad was even diligent about keeping hyperactive kids in their seats and out of the sightlines of those behind them, a rare courtesy these days. But the kids were part of a birthday party which inevitably turned distracted and sugar-addled, behind the kids was an assemblage of vaguely Goth kids whose primary interest seemed to be vaping, behind me were two girls yammering away in rapid-fire French … entire innings passed during which I was pretty sure I was the only person in the section watching the game, and it was taking considerable effort to not get swept away by the aggressive non-game-watching surrounding me. If my wife had been there I might be dictating this to Greg from jail.

Oh, and I was also getting cold — two unseasonably warm April afternoons lulled me into forgetting that a night game before May isn’t to be taken lightly. How soon we forget!

Between the yammering and the shivering I was beginning to think the night would go down as a cautionary tale, with baseball part of the lesson: Jose Quintana was annoyingly inefficient and I kept waiting for the roof to cave in on him as it eventually had on Adrian Houser. That didn’t really happen, in part because for a second night the Pirates kept getting in their own way. A Connor Joe baserunning blunder short-circuited their first inning, they inexplicably played the infield in against Alvarez with the score 0-0, and they pulled Jones after five innings.

It turned out after the game that was the plan, and Jones even expressed appreciation for the kid gloves, and while I roll my eyes at Once Pitchers Were Manly Men nonsense, I have to admit reading that made me feel 10,000 years old. Jones was unhittable and fearless: He threw 59 pitches and 50 of them were strikes, for Christ’s sake! He was clearly better than anyone else the Pirates could have put out there, as Ortiz and Hernandez soon demonstrated. And yet 59 pitches and a 1-0 lead was enough, somehow. The Pirates arrived at Citi Field as an early-season success story, and I’m happy for their long-suffering fans, but they’ve spent the last two nights taking aim at their own feet.

The Mets, on the other hand, keep scratching and clawing and doing enough things right so that they could fall into a little luck. Reed Garrett recorded all six of his outs via Ks, Jorge Lopez navigated a spotless eighth and Drew Smith looked as good as I can recall seeing him, filling in for Edwin Diaz as closer. They got some nifty defense from Alonso and Baty and Harrison Bader. And of course they took the lead without a pitch being thrown. It was a night for getting reacquainted with old habits, but that was a new one.