Baseball is always about momentum.
On Thursday night the Mets emerged from a terrifying game with the Phillies as the owners of a hard-fought win [1]. It’s the kind of game that pulls teams together, that gives them a certain sense of purpose when they head for the next battleground, newly confident that they can, in fact, do this. The kind of game that …
Wait a minute, I’ve just been handed a dispatch from the Faith and Fear news desk.
On Friday night the Mets got steamrolled by the Marlins, 8-0 [2].
OK, so baseball is sometimes about momentum.
The Mets were shut out, the defense wasn’t particularly crisp, and the Marlins did the annoying Marlin things that the Marlins do to the Mets at New Soilmaster. They made great catches, had balls carom off people right to them, were in the right place to intercept hard-hit balls, and were generally Marlinesque in their usual teeth-grinding way. If you’ve been laboring in the mines of Met fandom for even a few years, you know that you could pluck a dozen vagrants from one of south Florida’s near-infinity of dodgy byways, dress them in barftastic neon, and watch them beat the Mets at least one game out of three, probably by sneaking a ball through the infield in the bottom of the 11th to make it hurt worse.
The only good thing about Friday night’s game counts as an ever so slightly shiny silver lining, if you squint hard enough. Christian Scott [3], making his third-ever start (two-thirds of which have now been in his native Florida) reported for duty with his splitter nonexistent and his slider not to be trusted. Predictably, he got whacked around, with the first awooga-awooga of alarm a home run off the not particularly imposing bat of Nick Fortes [4]. Fortes entered the night hitting .127; he went 3 for 3 with a trio of RBIs and is now hitting … .159.
(You’re wondering where the silver lining is, because this all sounds pretty terrible. Patience.)
The hint of something possibly metallic came in the bottom of the fourth. Scott, in trouble all night, found himself on the ropes after a Jeff McNeil [5] error, a single and a walk that loaded the bases with nobody out. Scott was left out there to find his way out of trouble (or not), a necessary rite of passage for every young pitcher, and I looked up from grumpily being bad at Sudoku, mildly curious how he would fare, hoping that he’d keep it to an additional run or two instead of flat-lining and waiting to be rescued. (There’s a variant of this where you get your brains beat in and then throw your teammates under the bus by passive-aggressively musing about plays you could wish had been made; that’s known as the Full Niese [6].)
Scott didn’t flat-line. He struck out Jazz Chisholm Jr. [7] on a slider that actually did what it was supposed to, got Bryan De La Cruz [8] to pop out to short, and coaxed a ground ball from Josh Bell [9]. After which Carlos Mendoza wisely went to the pen, letting Scott depart on a relatively high note. Maybe it wasn’t much, not on a night when you got beat by more than a touchdown, but it counts as something.
* * *
How about a palate-chaser to send you off a little less down in the mouth?
The Mariners recently saw their 1,000th player go into the record books, and celebrated this milestone in a pretty wonderful way [10]: Kirby Snead [11] got a SNEAD 1000 jersey as part of an on-field celebration featuring appearances by Mariners 505, 644, 677 and 823, all of them Oh Yeah That Guys primarily of interest to people going for a rarity score in Immaculate Grid, and wearing signs with those numbers to indicate their less than routinely celebrated place in team history.
Isn’t that wonderful? How I wish the Mets had done that for their Mr. 1,000! Greg and I could have helped! (If you’ve forgotten, the milestone Met [12] was Michael Conforto [13], back in 2015. The Mets’ tally now stands at 1,236, with the aforementioned Mr. Scott proudly occupying that particular cell in the Excel sheet.)
There was another Metsian touch to the Seattle celebration: They made not one or two or even three but four cakes for Snead’s party – a 1 and three 0s — and the guest of honor reported that he somehow didn’t get a single slice.
Somewhere, I imagine, Marv Throneberry [14] hoisted a Miller Lite [15] and smiled.