Bad Ideas Upon Bad Ideas

I’d like to put 6:10 pm start times on the list of things that I thought would be good, or at least novel, and turned out to be terrible.

First off, I completely forgot. I was doing something non-baseball-related, noted it was around 6:35 pm, and reflexively went back to what I was doing, because 6:35 pm is too early to be worrying about things that everyone knows kick off at 7:10 pm.

[record scratch]

Oh yeah, that’s right.

I got upstairs to find it was already 2-0 Guardians, with the Mets having done ill-advised things in the outfield. J.D. Martinez doubled and I had a brief happy thought that the worm might be turning: Several times in the last week I’ve arrived at my post with the Mets having made first-inning noise, only to get stage fright and decide further runs are beyond them. So that was nice, at least.

About 45 seconds later, Starling Marte hit a grounder up the middle that looked like it would elude Ben Lively, except Lively speared it and found Martinez between second and third. He was run down by various Guardians, with Marte moving up behind the play to take Martinez’s place at second once he was tagged out. Except — whoops! — Marte wasn’t on second but between first and second, and a moment later he was in the dugout with his teammate, presumably with neither one of them wanting to talk about what had just happened.

That was really it for the game. Tylor Megill pitched OK. Tomas Nido hit a home run. Josh Walker did well in relief. But the Mets looked sleepy and put upon at the plate, and even at 2-1 it didn’t feel like they were much more than the night’s designated opponent. The most noise they made came in the sixth, when Pete Alonso and Brandon Nimmo hit one-out singles. But Lively ended his night by getting Martinez to swing through a high fastball, departing in favor of Nick Sandlin. Sandlin walked Tyrone Taylor, who’d entered when Marte was tossed out for offering a purist’s critique of home-plate ump Manny Gonzalez’s undulating trapezoid of a strike zone, and so Brett Baty came up with the bases loaded and two out.

Sandlin … well, he eviscerated Baty. Two fastballs separated by a splitter, all at different eye levels, no chance. Pretty soon the game was over, only now I was confused because my baseball-oriented biological clock kept insisting it was an hour later than it was.

Honestly, the whole thing was misbegotten from the start. I’ve already done my best to forget this one — which pretty much ensures I’ll smack myself in the forehead at 6:35 pm or so on Tuesday and we’ll have to do this again.