One out from another inning on this, the eve of the Summer Olympics. The Mets had handed out pickleball paddles to lucky ticketholders when the night began, though I don’t think pickleball is an Olympic sport. I don’t think baseball is an Olympic sport this year, either, but that’s OK. We’re not going for the gold. First Wild Card isn’t even the bronze, but baseball has chosen to be not so choosy. Everybody gets a medal? Not quite, but the top six finishers in each league do get a ribbon. And despite having no designs on taking any bows when the year started, it turns out we really want one.
That’s for much later. The only finish line we can worry about in the present is the finish line of this game. We’d like it to materialize magically with us rushing through its tape before we use up our next out. Good luck to us getting there, for we are that one out from pushing our luck into the eleventh. One out from having to do more than we’ve already done, which is withstand vintage Chris Sale; escape a replay review that probably shouldn’t have gone our way but did; extract zeroes from our perpetually beleaguered bullpen; and defuse a botched squeeze play in which one throw was a little high and one catcher was bumped a little hard. One out from wondering whether we could bring Francisco Lindor back to the plate ASAP, because without Francisco Lindor, we would haven’t made into the tenth inning, the inning currently in agonizing progress. Lindor homered with a man on in the third. That was the extent of our scoring. The Braves scratched out one run in the second, another in the fifth. That was the extent of their scoring. Statistically, we’d been as close to beating the Braves as we’d been to losing to the Braves. Emotionally, a matter of time before the Braves did something dastardly to us was on the clock.
Then with that one out remaining, Jeff McNeil, the Met who hadn’t hit most of the first half and the Met who’d started hitting like crazy since the All-Star break — and the only Met not named Francisco Lindor to have recorded a hit all of Thursday night — gets ahold of one.
Maybe “gets ahold of one” overstates the case. Jeff has, however, struck a long-ish, high-ish fly ball toward the right field corner.
Is it long enough to…no, it’s not that long.
Yet it is high, so it hangs up there a while.
Not a pop fly, by any means. Kind of a rainbow, an arc, a parabola. This is no time for SAT synonym prep. The only meaning we want out of his ball is it landing fair, out of the grasp of a Brave’s glove. Should it cooperate with our wishes, it will facilitate our ghost runner, Jose Iglesias, scampering home from second with the winning run.
Win in ten, here and now.
Don’t play eleven, when who knows what could go wrong?
Discover that pot of gold (or gold Wild Card medals) awaiting at the end of that rainbow, if everything I’ve ever learned about rainbows in cartoons is accurate.
The ball’s not deep enough to leave Citi Field, but it’s not obvious it’s going to be caught. You watch the ball at first. Then you watch to see if a fielder is going to be there to meet it. The right fielder, Ramon Laureano, starts coming into view. He’s racing over from right-center. We will track no leg of any relay from the Parisian Olympiad with the intensity with which we are viewing this race.
Laureano had just entered the center of our consciousness a half-inning ago, in the midst of that botched squeeze play. Laureano was the ghost runner who’d moved up to third. Jarred Kelenic, speaking of beings that might haunt, was at bat. The ex-Met prospect could have made us once and for all totally regret our trade of his potential, receipt of Edwin Diaz notwithstanding, with one well-placed hit. Instead, Kelenic showed bunt. Not exactly a squeeze play. More like a squeeze play ploy. But delineate the difference to Laureano, who broke for home. Francisco Alvarez sized up the situation and threw to third when there was no contact on the part of Kelenic. A little above third, I thought, but Mark Vientos grabbed the fling before it could sail into the outfield and effected a successful rundown. Alvarez absorbed a brusque shouldering from Laureano. Like any commuter shoving onto the 7 as the doors are closing, Francisco did not take kindly to it.
An inning earlier, a Brave baserunner also came close to causing trouble in the vicinity of third base. That was Whit Merrifield, the pinch-runner who had stolen second (despite an accurate zip from Alvarez) and now sought an encore. This time, Francisco had him dead to rights at third. Vientos caught the throw, put down his glove and, crap, did Merrifield get his hand on the bag before Mark made a tag? Mark wasn’t particularly aggressive with the leather there. Fortunately, the umpire was too impressed with the throw beating the runner to call the runner safe. The Braves challenged the call. The replay proved a little too inconclusive for the judges back in Manhattan. Honestly, it looked like Merrifield pulled a headfirst slide version of that Michael Phelps half-stroke move from the 2008 Olympics, the only specific Olympics moment — certainly the only one involving swimming — that’s ever sprung to mind for me in the midst of a tenth inning of a baseball game. Bottom line: the call stands and the Braves are all wet.
[1]Phelps was safe. Merrifield was out.
As Mets fans, we fret instinctively at the sight of the tomahawk, the aura of the Atlantans, and the reality of a pitcher like Sale (7.1 IP, 2 H, 1 BB, 9 SO, just that 2-R HR to Lindor) too much to notice, hey, those bleepers aren’t accomplishing anything offensively, either. Luis Severino engineered another not terribly efficient (95 pitches over five-plus) outing that still proved reasonably effective (two earned runs), if not as long as we’d have liked. The Braves didn’t take advantage of Luis, and they sure as hell couldn’t touch secret weapon Jose Butto. He won’t be a secret much longer. Three innings pitched, nine batters faced, no runners on base. Butto aces the math portion of his examination.
Diaz got us a bit nervous in the ninth, but there was that out call at third that stood, which diminished the residual anxiety associated with Edwin’s leadoff walk to Eddie Rosario (which was why Merrifield on base to begin with). Phil Maton doesn’t have enough equity in orange and blue to not get us immediately nervous in the tenth, what with the automatic runner nonsense hovering overhead and him being a Met reliever, but that squeeze/not squeeze only served to squeeze the Braves out of a chance at scoring. We didn’t do anything against any Brave reliever between Sale leaving in the eighth and McNeil’s at-bat in the tenth.
Prior to newly redubbed Happy Jeff taking his best shot, we did have Iglesias trotting out to second to start the bottom of the tenth because Rob Manfred said so, and we did have Pete Alonso trotting to first because Brian Snitker said so. J.D. Martinez had struck out between the intentional ghosting and intentional walking. Vientos had struck out directly after. Almost ten full innings of waiting for the dam to burst or have it burst all over us.
Hey, wasn’t there something about a long-ish, high-ish fly ball a few paragraphs ago?
Yes, there was.
Whatever happened with that?
Ah, let’s see…
Laureano sprinted as best he could.
The ball began its dive, a little shy of the right field corner.
It was going to be fair, it appeared.
But where it would land?
A tad behind Ramon Laureano, it turned out.
Dude won his race, in that he sprinted right by the darn sphere — and the darn sphere fell in.
Hot damn!
Iglesias indeed scampered home, crowning the Mets 3-2 winners [2], shoving the Mets a hot breath from the Braves’ standing atop the Wild Card leaderboard, and extending our Amazins’ string of triumphs to four.
Let Paris have its opening ceremonies. Let the games continue in Flushing.