So that was certainly a palate cleanser.
The thud made by the back half of the series against the Braves left me fretting: that the Mets were about to topple into one of their periodic team slumps, that their starters would routinely implode in the middle innings, that new bullpen acquisitions would flame out, that … oh, insert another half-dozen bad things here.
Was that an overreaction to a two-game losing streak from a team that’s been at the pinnacle of baseball for the better part of two months? Of course it was. Was such fretting surprising given that the Mets are in an actual pennant race, nouveau baseball wild-card asterisks notwithstanding? Also yes. Living and dying with a temporary assemblage of 26 young millionaires dressed in bizarre livery is what we do, and though it’s self-evidently ridiculous, I wouldn’t have it any other way.
But there I was, frowning and muttering as the Mets started their half of the fourth inning down 1-0 to the Twins and once-upon-a-time Mets farmhand Simeon Woods Richardson [1]. Yes, Jose Quintana [2] had kept the Mets in the game, limiting the damage to a single run in the first and using his curveball to befuddle the Twins. But the Mets weren’t hitting, as was their recent pattern, and I could sense a little black cloud forming above my head.
Little did I know that the Mets were about to hit Woods Richardson and the Twins like a tornado.
Pete Alonso [3] got it started with a bolt of a homer off the facing of the second deck in left; he ended the inning by striking out. In between, eight non-Alonso Mets batted and the team put up six runs.
It was so much fun that in the sixth they sent 11 men to the plate and scored five more runs. The seventh saw eight Mets bat and four runs score. All 11 guys to appear in the batting order on the night collected hits, including substitutes Tyrone Taylor [4] (who added a superb, homer-robbing catch) and Ben Gamel [5]. Alonso is still chasing offspeed stuff out of the zone but hitting balls with authority again. Brandon Nimmo [6] put together the kind of solid ABs we’ve missed seeing. Luis Torrens [7] filled in nicely for Francisco Alvarez [8], whose shoulder is sore.
By the end of the game the questions had turned outright farcical: Why does Carlos Santana [9] wear his uniform pants so they look like a sufragette-era woman’s bathing costume? If you shuffled the Twins’ and Marlins’ helmets, would players on either team notice? Can pinstripes on the road be classified as a capital offense? Did Gary really just bait Keith into railing about technology? Is Matt Wallner [10] going to get proper credit for being the Twins’ most effective pitcher of the night? Did Jose Butto [11] just record the least stressful save in baseball history?
These are the kind of questions that get batted around as laughers saunter to their inevitable — and oh so welcome — conclusion [12].