Don't Look Down

I’d like the bottom of the third inning from Friday night’s game bottled, if you please.

Seriously, that was a high ABV brew to settle even the most high-strung Mets fan’s nerves. Down 2-0 against Charlie Morton — one of the few remaining big leaguers with sufficient tenure to have appeared at Shea — the Mets loaded the bases with nobody out on an Austin Riley error, a HBP and a walk. That brought up J.D. Martinez, who smacked Morton’s 3-1 offering to right, in the vicinity of Adam Duvall, the warning track and the fence.

The ball carried just far enough, touching down atop the orange line and bouncing onto the roof of the Cadillac Club, where it was greeted with appropriate jubilation. The Mets led 4-2, and they were just getting warm. Pete Alonso grounded out, but Jeff McNeil doubled and Mark Vientos drove a curve lacking curvature into the Party Deck. After a Jose Iglesias groundout, Francisco Alvarez crushed one off the facing of the second deck in left. One way to tell a home run is a no-doubter? You hear the contact on the radio — as Emily and I did while navigating the Major Deegan — and crow, “That’s gone!”

The Mets led 7-2, and Citi Field was in full cry, as a big crowd promised fireworks got them a couple of hours early. That included me and Emily, grinning like fools in our seats as Howie Rose and Keith Raad described jubilant Mets high-fiving and disconsolate Braves trudging about.

We knew full well that a win would mean passing the Braves in the standings and so claiming the first wild card — a singularly unlikely turn of events given that the 2024 Mets looked ready for the knacker’s yard on Memorial Day while the Braves were, well, the Braves.

As Alvarez high-stepped it around the bases, you better believe I was thinking about that, as well as decades’ worth of slights and insults and misfortunes, from Brian Jordan ruining everything and Bobby Cox sending up relievers as pinch-hitters because it was funny to innumerable abysmal reversals at Turner Field and White Flight Stadium to the horrific conclusion of 2022 and “tie, you lose” and Ramon Laureano shoulder-checking Alvarez Thursday night. (Nice catch buddy!)

I’d like to say I rendered that into some stemwinder delivered on I-87, but my reaction wasn’t anything that highbrow. No, I kept thinking, Fuck you fuck you fuck you fuck you fuck you, ad infinitum.

We didn’t know it, but the garden party was about to get crashed by skunks. Kodai Senga had settled in after an early Duvall homer and looked borderline untouchable in the fourth and fifth. Riley opened the sixth — a rarely visited land for Mets starters — with a pop-up above the mound. Alonso caught it, but nobody was watching that: They were fixated on Senga, who’d grabbed at his leg in vacating so the infielders could do their work and was now lying on the ground.

Senga walked off more or less unassisted, which may or may not be good news but certainly isn’t bad news; an MRI should give us a better idea whether he’ll be out a couple of weeks or a couple of months. Let’s hope for the former, obviously, but I won’t crawl out a high window if it’s the latter: The Mets climbed 99.03% of this mountain without him, after all.

Senga gave way to Eric Orze, whose MLB debut in Pittsburgh ended without his having recorded an out; Orze’s second bite at the apple also started poorly as the loathsome Marcell Ozuna crushed a homer off of him and then took about a week to round the bases. (Hey you: Look at the scoreboard.)

Orze’s misfortunes had me flashing back to Lino Urdaneta, an agate-type 2007 Mets transaction who arrived with an asterisk. Urdaneta had debuted three years earlier for the Tigers, giving up six earned runs without recording an out, and then spent two seasons in the minors while sporting a big-league ERA of infinity. Urdaneta was brought up to the Mets in May, replacing the less than immortal Chan Ho Park, and pitched in two games before getting sent back down. His time as a Met wasn’t particularly impressive: three batters retired, two hits and an earned run allowed, but it did lower his career ERA to 63.00, where it will sit forevermore.

Back in the present, Orze walked Matt Olson, marking the fifth big-league hitter he’d faced without retiring anybody. But the worm was turning: Travis d’Arnaud flied out to right, and having experienced the joys of getting outs Orze indulged himself, recording four more of them in completing his two innings of work. His career ERA now stands at 21.60, not ideal but at least finite.

Orze arrived as part of a roster shuffle that also saw Dedniel Nunez going on the IL, Adrian Houser and Shintaro Fujinami getting DFA’ed and Ryne Stanek being acquired from the Mariners.

Stanek throws hard, doesn’t always throw accurately and gives up his share of home runs, which in modern baseball parlance means he’s … a guy, more or less. He has a decent postseason track record, which is the kind of intangible talked up a lot around the trading deadline but that I doubt means anything. When the season started Adam Ottavino was considered a stalwart we were lucky to have but he’s now greeted with knocking on wood and celestial beseeching; Nunez was thought of as Triple-A depth on Opening Day and his absence now feels like a body blow.

That’s a lot of words to restate a baseball truism we don’t like to acknowledge: No one knows anything.

The Mets have come this far, and to say it’s been quite a ride is understating it rather dramatically. I’m not quite sure how they’ve managed it, and have no idea where they’ll wind up, but right now it’s exhilarating. Just don’t look down.