The game wasn’t lost when Edwin Diaz [1] gag-jobbed the save, though Diaz’s slider has been MIA all season, his command was horrific again, and some of us have been sounding the alarm for some time now.
The game wasn’t lost when Whit Merrifield [2] was inexplicably given a free base after clearly swinging through a 3-1 Diaz slider, even though this umpiring crew was an embarrassment and yet another flashing red indicator that balls, strikes and all the other decisions MLB umpires get serially wrong need to be taken away from them posthaste. (Though when this finally happens we’ll get another idiotic challenge system that shoves baseball closer to the numbing bureaucracy of football, because baseball’s custodians are business-school vandals who shouldn’t be charge of anything, let alone humanity’s highest achievement.)
The game wasn’t lost when Kody Clemens [3] singled off a noncompetitive Diaz slider, or later when he made a leaping catch to rob Francisco Lindor [4], but it should be noted that Kody Clemens [3] is the son of a war criminal and so should have grown up a lonely exile in some forgotten place, destined to become a schoolyard legend in the annals of Elba, St. Helena or the Ross ice shelf.
The game wasn’t lost when Joey Wendle [5] bunted Jose Alvarado [6]‘s second pitch of the 10th in a polite little arc to Alec Bohm [7] at third, though one wonders what the point of Joey Wendle is, since so far this year he’s demonstrated that he can’t hit, can’t field, can’t be trusted to make sound decisions and has now shown that he can’t bunt.
No, the game was lost a lot earlier. It was lost in the third, when the Mets took a 3-1 lead off Cristopher Sanchez [8] on a J.D. Martinez [9] walk that left them with the bases loaded and nobody out. That’s a gimme run there at least with a second in reach; good teams get something out of those situations even if they don’t manage another tally. What happened? Brett Baty [10] struck out, Harrison Bader [11] struck out and Jeff McNeil [12] struck out. The Mets didn’t stretch the lead to 4-1, 5-1 or break the game open; instead they went down meekly against Sanchez, let the Phillies stick around and eventually the roof caved in.
Mediocre teams lose games in this fashion all the time — blowouts don’t materialize but turn into close games, which turn into losses. The highlight-grabbing plays are the ones that get recorded as the heartbreakers, but it’s not really the case. The real heartbreakers [13] come and go with a lot less notice, when something needs to happen and it doesn’t.