Believe it or not, the Mets did some good things on Saturday afternoon before decidedly not good things started happening.
Mark Vientos [1] collected a pair of hits, drove in a run and played the kind of defense I didn’t think he could play. J.D. Martinez [2] once again looked like he’s shedding the rust of his late start. The recently somnambulant bats of Starling Marte [3] and Jeff McNeil [4] were heard from. Even Tomas Nido [5] made some noise at the plate.
And since I’m in the habit of sneering and/or snarling at the Marlins when the slightest opportunity presents itself, a tip of the sartorial hat to Miami’s City Connects. The Sugar Kings alts aren’t just a good City Connect uniform — they’re a good uniform period. Better, in fact, than anything the Marlins have sported in their aesthetically misbegotten existence. It’s a pleasure to see them, even when those wearing them are doing horrible things to the Mets.
Which they did. Oh boy did they ever.
This one had the feeling of a New Soilmaster disaster when the Mets failed to put the hammer down in the first, again when they let the Marlins creep back into it against Luis Severino [6], and — sad to say — when Edwin Diaz [7] warmed up with only a four-run lead. Yes, you read that right, and yes, I thought that.
I’ll spare you the particulars because I don’t want to relive them, and the historical record will just have to be the poorer. Suffice to say that Diaz is a walking disaster right now [8]: not enough life on the fastball, slider out to perform sabotage, the pitch clock in his head and zero confidence in his pitches.
This is 2019 all over again, except this time it’s even crueler. Then, we didn’t know Diaz and reacted to his failures with the visceral distemper of a shopper sold bum goods with a forged warranty. The first time around Diaz, to his immense credit, somehow gave a doomed New York sports story an unlikely second chapter, in which he was transformed from reviled bust into a folk hero. Then he got hurt, and somehow he and we are back at the beginning. He isn’t scorned this time; instead your heart goes out for him, because we’ve seen what he can do and we’ve learned how much things mean to him and we’ve seen how failure eats at him. It seems impossible that we’re back in creeping dread mode, yet we are. And that’s left us wondering if we can possibly go through this again.
Now, baseball is habitually cruel: To quote a key tenet of the Kanehlian school of philosophy, “the line drives are caught, the squibbles go for hits. It’s an unfair game.” But there’s habitually cruel and there’s Book of Job outtake stuff. That’s where Diaz is right now, and unfortunately we’re all strapped in for the ride.
What happens next? To him, to the Mets, to us poor observers living and dying on the outcome, which means mostly dying right now? I wouldn’t dare venture a guess, not with the narrative having turned so Gothic and dour. Things are bad enough without tempting the baseball gods to show you that you’re still too optimistic.