Reed Garrett [1] and Adam Ottavino [2] were good, but Jake Diekman [3] was not — handed a 4-3 lead in the ninth, he surrendered a pinch-hit double and a home run (Ketel Marte [4]‘s second of the afternoon) to put the Mets in their familiar behind-the-eight-ball position [5] before an out was recorded. How familiar? Since May 1 the Mets have coughed up six leads after leading through eight, which is the kind of thing that turns casual fans into ex-fans and sends the diehards back into therapy. (Particularly when the game ends with the sight of perennially irritating [6] Met Jonah Paul Sewald [7] triumphant on the mound.)
For me, the real issue isn’t Diekman’s failure, but my sinking feeling that you can rearrange the above three Met names as a Mad Libs of purposelessness, throwing in Drew Smith [8] and other bullpen colleagues as you see fit. Maybe tonight Diekman and Ottavino will be good but Garrett will fail, or maybe Smith and Dedniel Nunez [9] … you get the idea.
Such are the serial failures of junky enterprises: Something different breaks every day, until consternation gives way to bleak assessment.
At least if you were at the park you got a nice day, a Darryl Strawberry [10] bobblehead (if you came early enough) and a J.D. Martinez [11] triple — back-to-back triples, in fact! All neat, but soon it’ll be hot as blazes, the Mets have gone about as deep down the nostalgia well as they can, and J.D. triples are as rare as Met relievers converting saves.
Ahead lies D.C. and then a trip to London, which one fears will amount to giving hapless English fans an object lesson in how baseball shouldn’t be played. Though perhaps, as our Twitter buddy D.J. Short cracked [12], “it’s actually good timing for the Mets to go to London. Maybe they just take the summer off and backpack through Europe.”