There’s honestly not a lot of insight to be had comparing a mediocre baseball team with a very good one. Very good teams make plays and get hits when it matters; mediocre ones sometimes do and sometimes don’t. Christian Scott [1], forced to cosplay as a chimney sweep for his first-ever Citi Field start, was pretty good: He showed an electric fastball, was aggressive in tackling the Braves’ lineup, and most importantly he threw strikes. Honestly, he made one bad pitch all afternoon, a fastball to Orlando Arcia [2] that got too much plate and so became a souvenir.
But Max Fried [3] was better, using his devastating curveball to set up all his other pitches. The Mets ground out some good ABs, leaving Fried out of pitches and forced to depart after seven despite not having allowed a hit. And with less exemplary glovework from Atlanta, the Mets might have been right in the game: Michael Harris II [4] made two spectacular plays in center to deny extra-base hits to Pete Alonso [5] and J.D. Martinez [6], Austin Riley [7] snagged a low liner at third, and the Braves made all the routine plays.
After Fried’s departure, Joe Jimenez [8] staggered through the eighth without an effective slider but survived, and with two outs in the ninth only Martinez stood between Raisel Iglesias [9] and completing a combined no-hitter. After a near-miss in Friday night’s ninth, Martinez didn’t miss this time, slamming a homer over Ronald Acuna Jr. [10]‘s head to spare the Mets the humiliation of a hitless day. Brett Baty [11] came to the plate as the tying run and hit a ball solidly, but Harris was there in center, as he generally is, and the ballgame was over [12].
The Mets weren’t no-hit, which is good, but humiliation was still the order of the day. The Mets somehow took two of three in Atlanta last month, but these first two games at Citi Field (with the Phillies’ juggernaut in waiting, oh joy) have followed the usual formula for Mets-Braves tilts. These games feel like a living-room dispute between brothers on a rainy weekend afternoon, with Mom responding to cries of alarm to find the older brother has stiff-armed the younger with a hand on the forehead, leaving the junior partner in the dispute to flail impotently at his tormenter, unable to land a blow and dissolving into tears of rage. I don’t recall the exact numbers, but the Braves are playing .750 ball against the Mets in recent seasons, and the sample size is no longer small.
The Mets are trying to have it both ways this year, developing the young players they hope will be the future of the franchise while positioning themselves on the periphery of the wild-card race and hoping to get lucky. The jury’s out on the former but the latter looks increasingly unlikely; more and more I wish the Mets would quit kidding themselves and go all-in on the future. Instead they’re caught in between, and that’s a recipe for more sour afternoons spent facing futility and a chance of humiliation.