Monday night’s game against the always delightful Marlins in always delightful New Soilmaster Stadium unfolded as your recapper and family made their way from coastal Maine to an ancient inn outside of Boston, and the game kept morphing and changing shape along with our situation and surroundings.
While we were bombing down 95 south of Portland it was anonymous and a little dull: The Mets laid into Yonny Chirinos [1], with a seemingly resurgent Jeff McNeil [2] connecting for an early two-run homer, Francisco Lindor [3] hitting the first of two on the night and Jose Iglesias [4] not connecting but getting connected with, giving the Mets a 5-1 lead via a bases-loaded HBP.
We missed some of that while eating dinner in Kittery; my kid conveyed the at times slapstick doings via Gameday updates, accompanied by shakes of the head at the indignities involved. The Marlins were up to typical Marlins things, which is to say they were not fielding balls as one ought to or throwing them as one ought to or sometimes both. The Mets were also doing recently Metsian things, though, never quite landing the big blow and letting the Marlins hang around being detestable, which always makes you worry that they’ll transit over to being Detestable.
(Seriously, the other night I asked, “Why would a benevolent God allow there to be Marlins?” and I wasn’t entirely trying to be funny.)
The Mets increased their lead to three runs courtesy of Lindor as we exited 95 and headed through the Massachusetts night on our way to Sudbury and the Wayside Inn, which has been around in one form or another since the late 1600s and is widely reputed to be haunted, but it’s OK because the ghost is my third cousin eight times removed. (No, seriously [5], she is.)
They were doing construction on the old Boston Post Road, which meant a detour off into the dark, with Google Maps trying to catch up with where we were and where we needed to be. That was about the time Edwin Diaz [6] came in for the save, and pretty soon I was a lot more worried about Marlins going bump in the night than whatever scare the lonely spirit of my cousin might bring to some hapless traveler. The car twisted and turned down increasingly unlikely roads as Diaz, having secured one out, gave up a single and then a walk and then made an awfully casual throw on a grounder to the pitcher that didn’t get anybody.
The bases were loaded, the tying run was a double away from scoring, and Josh Bell [7] was at the plate. We were fumbling through the darkness and so was Diaz, and it wasn’t entirely clear if any of us were going to reach our destination.
But then Diaz got Bell to ground out (making the score 6-4 but who cared) and got Jake Burger [8] (so many detestable Marlins!) to pop a ball up [9], and a few minutes after that a winding ribbon of barely two lanes merged with the Boston Post Road and there was the Wayside Inn, a literal light in the darkness.
Whews all around. Should my ghostly cousin appear and seem bent on spectral mischief, I think I’ll say boo right back. Hey, if it works on Marlins, why not try it elsewhere?