I loved watching the great victory today, a shutout for our side, with New York coming through toward the end. I am referring, of course, to my annual viewing of 1776, a film I still find worth watching every Fourth of July, my custom since 1991 and something I hope to do as long as the American Experiment continues to produce net-positive results.
[1]Some late-inning Fourth of July box scores are more promising than others.
Before the movie, I watched New York not come through toward the end nor at any point of the proceedings, resulting not in a suspenseful 13-0 blowout for the forces of independence, but in a 1-0 drubbing in Washington, a town where good things have been known to intermingle with the other kind. The best part of this particular blanking was it was over with early, a function of the game staring at 11:05 AM. My pregaming, as it were, consisted of a nap. Continuing it rather than disrupting it so I wouldn’t miss too many pitches likely would have been more satisfying.
The game in a nutshell: it’s nothing-nothing at the outset of the bottom of the eighth. I wander into the kitchen, half-listening to the TV audio from the living room. I hear Gary Cohen identify a Nationals batter as someone who has hit five career home runs off Adrian Houser [2]. I do a quick calculation and assume he’s talking about ex-Red Jesse Winker, since who else on the Nats would have faced ex-Brewer Houser often enough to hit five home runs off him?
A moment later, I’m watching Winker Dinger No. 6 fly over a fence. I not only saw it, but I saw it coming…as, I imagine, did every Mets fan who processed the foreshadowing.
Kudos to Jose Quintana [3] for preventing more than a bullpen cameo. Seven shutout innings ain’t nothing in the land of double-negatives. Thanks to Jeff McNeil [4] for assuring we wouldn’t be no-hit, though some days it doesn’t feel as if avoiding highlight infamy matters. When you’re not hitting, being one-hit is only one hit better than being no-hit — y’know? Jake Irvin quelled every non-McNeil Met completely for eight innings and Derek Law took care of the rest. There’s something about a 1-0 Met loss [5] put in the wrong side of the books in under two hours that’s as American as apple pie. It’s part of summer the way you remember it from when you were a kid, kind of like getting bitten by a mosquito.