Happy teams, like Russian families, are all alike — and somehow the Mets are a happy team again.
That happens when you win four in a row, when J.D. Martinez [1] is locked in, when Brandon Nimmo [2] collects two RBIs, when Francisco Lindor [3] pulls off an eye-popping play at shortstop, when Jose Quintana [4] actually throws strikes and gets rewarded for it, and when the relief corps does its job.
I mean, what’s not to like?
Martinez is ridiculously hot right now, and it’s fun to finally see the deadly, professional hitter we were promised now that the rust of a late start is shaken off. Granted, it would be nice for some other Mets hitters to step up — before Nimmo’s eighth-inning RBI single Martinez had been responsible for seven of the Mets’ last eight RBIs — but that’s criticizing the brush strokes on a W after weeks and weeks of not seeing enough of that letter.
I’m still far from convinced that the Mets are any good, and seeing them part of a National League scrum shoving and elbowing for a wild-card spot leaves me grousing about too many wild cards instead of daydreaming about October. But they’re at least watchable again, with a certain seriousness of purpose and crispness of play that was galling in its absence. And that’s welcome — the season is too long to spend it mad at your baseball team.
We just arrived on Long Beach Island for our annual beach week, and between driving and attending to various logistics I lost track of the start time. So it was that I wound up riding a bike down an LBI boulevard with MLB Audio burbling out of the cellphone in my hand, knees pumping just fast enough to keep the bike moving beneath a perfect sunny sky. The Mets hadn’t done anything wrong yet (and basically wouldn’t all day [5]) and I listened to Howie Rose painting the word picture and thought, This works. This works just fine.
Would that it could always be this way. But you take every day you’re given.