It is one of my most deeply ingrained articles of faith that if a Met hits a grand slam, especially if a Met hits a grand slam that puts the Mets in front — especially if a Met hits a grand slam that puts the Mets ahead in the late innings of game that stands to symbolize the unstoppable momentum they have generated and are sure to continue to generate…if that happens, obviously the Mets will win.
Obviously, this does not always happen.
J.D. Martinez delivered the grand slam that catapulted the Mets from behind to ahead in the seventh inning at Angel Stadium Saturday night. They were down, 2-0, despite quality starting from David Peterson. They had run into a buzzsaw of ex-Met defense, with Kevin Pillar reminding us why he remains baseball’s Roy Kent (he’s here, he’s there, he was every fucking where in center), but here was Martinez turning it all around off another ex-Met, Hunter Strickland, a member of 2020’s Silent Generation, taking that particular journeyman to Disneyland, or at least its parking lot.
We’re up, 4-2, in the middle of seven. Get up and stretch, then settle in for the two-run lead that will stand up as long as our newest bullpen acquisition, mellifluous Huascar Brazoban, stays tonal and tends properly to setup business. He indeed strikes out his first two batters, carries the count to two-and-two on the third, and…
Too many ellipses in this story. Reader’s Digest version: Michael Stefanic singles; Nolan Schaneul walks on a full count, and Zach Neto homers.
Sadly, our honeymoon with Huascar has just been cancelled, a common occurrence every time we trade for somebody else’s unwanted reliever, because whether his last name is Maton or Stanek or Brazoban, they all blow up at least once within their first three Met appearances, and we can never look at them with wholly trusting eyes again. Of more immediate concern, math (or “maths,” as they said on Ted Lasso) informs us that the 4-2 lead has become a 5-4 deficit. A team teeming with momentum shakes off that setback in the eighth and/or ninth, grabs the lead back, nails the game down, stays in Wild Card position, and inches up on its division rivals in the process.
Momentum, however, had oozed out of the Mets. Nothing was done with Mark Vientos’s leadoff double in the eighth, and nothing else good happened from there. Elsewhere, the catchable Phillies lost. The Braves lost. The Diamondbacks lost. But the Padres won, and now we are fourth in a race that bestows medals on only three. We got help, but not all the help in the world. We can watch just so much of the scoreboard in search of others’ L’s. Just one game, lots of games to go. Still, Roy Kent always had the right four-letter word for such a development.
J.D.’s big blow was a jolt of late-night caffeine for an offense that, like some of us attempting to follow the Mets from three time zones east, needed nudging. The first through sixth, whether due to Pillar’s defensive wizardry or the frustrating effectiveness of Angel starter Jose Soriano, could have been sponsored by a mattress company. L.A. of A closer Ben Joyce in the eighth and ninth might as well have been pouring Sleepytime herbal tea to Met batters. Whichever side of the country the Mets are on, they need to remain alert to the possibility of plating multiple runs in multiple innings.
Always happy to help bring the obvious to light.
Nineteen times a Met has hit a grand slam in what became a Met loss. Logically, of course that can happen. Four runs are four runs and therefore can be superceded by five or more if they are not augmented by additional Met runs. It’s the same graspable form of calculation that allowed me to understand at a young age that Steve Carlton could strike out nineteen Mets in 1969 yet go down to defeat because Ron Swoboda bashed two homers while Carlton’s Cardinal teammates scored only thrice on their record-setting lefty’s behalf. Emotionally, though? No way! A grand slam is such a huge deal it has its own name! GRAND SLAM! One swing! Four runs! Exclamation points everywhere! Including on the Roy Kentian epithets that presumably flew across Metsopotamia in sync with Neto’s three-run bomb over Southern California.
Sigh…
Sure, this one hurt, but not really.
Gotta bring this up, as I do (multiple times) every year.
If there were no Wild Cards, baseball would be a lot more fun, especially for we Met fans. We would be laser focused on Atlanta and Philly, and of course our own Metsies, with every game meaning the world to us. Great gnashing of teeth would ensue with every pitch, rather than the virtually emotionless WC race involving 500 teams, where nothing much changes daily, including our emotions, which remain pretty much level. Let me know when the games will begin to matter. SEP 15th, perhaps?
With no WC, a gain/loss of 1 or 2 games means everything. And every game is a 100 times more meaningful than what we have now.
There is no debate regarding this, so please don’t bother trying.
So far in the current NL wildcard race, 1 game is making a difference. If the Phillies keep struggling and enough wildcard contenders stay hot, the NL East division lead will join the scrum for the 3 wildcards, and 1 game could make a difference there, too. This is one case, of course, but my impression is that in general, there’s usually a cluster of approximately .500 teams around 6th place in the 15-team league. The 3rd wildcard makes them a mediocre, closely matched quasi-division. So if a team is at the competitive level of the 3rd wildcard rather than a division leader, which is the case for the 2024 Mets, then 1 game, both in overall record and tie-breakers, could very well make the difference for winning the scrum for the 3rd wildcard among similarly middling teams.
What’s interesting is that the 3rd wildcard has raised the competition level at the league’s middle tier so that teams that in the past would have been also-rans and not bought at the trade deadline, this year bought, or at least strategically bought and sold, in order to compete for the 3rd wildcard.
With that, a possible secondary consequence of the 3rd wildcard is that division leaders who may have coasted in the 2nd half before as the middling teams looked to the future at the trade deadline are now dealing with the potential threat of the middling teams reinforcing at the trade deadline. That’s done with an eye on the wildcard race, but wildcard contenders that get hot enough can challenge for the division lead, too. If enough wildcard contenders get hot enough, a stumbling division leader can lose their playoff berth altogether on the heels of losing their division lead. 1 or 2 games could mean everything then, even with 4 ways to make the post-season.
Eric, you’re my hero!
The ONLY good thing about Interleague Play is that these are the Games that Gary tends to take off. Rather have that nebbish Gelbs bore me to tears than that unfunny know-it-all schmuck.
It could be worse, Eric. The Mets telecast is blacked out for me here in SoCal. Last night the Angels broadcast had Randazzo paired with Mark Gubicza. Randazzo is fine. Gubicza is absolutely useless. Friday night, Randazzo was off doing the Apple game and Gubicza was paired with Bobby Valentine. They spent the entire 9 innings talking about everything except what was happening on the field. The only pair I could consider worse than Skip Caray and Don Sutton on the old TBS Braves broadcasts.
Blame Huascar if you must (and I do), but as you point out, the Mets had numerous opportunities to score more runs. I don’t know what to make of this offense.
If Gelbs is the play-by-play heir apparent, we are all in a lot of trouble.
The failure to score the virtual ghost runner from 2nd, a fast runner with Iglesias pinch-running for Vientos, with no outs in the 8th inning was a microcosm. Torrens’s grounder left freezing Iglesias at 2nd was cold water.
Hopefully, the Rose-trained Wayne Randazzo would come back when it’s time. But if Rose leaves before Cohen, that would still leave the TV job open for Gelbs or someone else. Randazzo’s successor on the radio, Keith Raad, is showing potential.
Wayne Randazzo is a moron.
I was a fan of Randazzo’s play-by-play and post-game work on Mets radio. His product was always smart. That was his calling card from the start. (Plus his Italian-American sports hall of fame thing.) Rather, Randazzo needed work on the technical stuff, voice inflections, pacing, home run call, etc.. He was significantly improved on that side by the time he left for the Angels job.
I haven’t followed Randazzo’s work since he left the Mets, though, so I couldn’t say whether he’s dumbed down his product since he left the Mets booth.
When Steve Gelbs is either doing an in-game report, or filling in as the play-by-play guy, one thing you can be sure of: He will always make it all about Steve Gelbs.
Every comment seems to be self-referential.
Oh, and for someone who is billed as clever and witty, I have never once laughed at anything Gelbs has said (no matter how much Gary Cohen tries to prompt me to with his painfully forced cackles at every Gelbs comment).
Two straight games they scored a run because Vientos didn’t get to a ball one step to his glove side. I’ve been pretty ok with his defense this year – not expecting Brooks Robinson – but those two plays need to be made.
Could be Vientos’s legs are getting heavy, and he doesn’t have the Guillorme hands to make up for a lost step. His bat needs to stay in the line-up, though, especially with the offense reverting to its RISP LOB May version.
Brazoban is supposed to be the safest and best of the bullpen additions, so I can see why Mendoza stuck with him this time longer than I would have. Hopefully Brazoban has just the one meltdown, and he just got it out of the way. Nunez is needed back (hopefully with no drop in effectiveness from his injury) ASAP.
The new Mel Rojas? Let’s hope not.
Steve Gelbs is the worst play-play announcer ever to defile the Mets broadcast booth.
For me, the (nearly) untold Mets story below the surface is horrid failure of top pitching prospects at AAA. Vasil, Hamel and now Tidwell all with eras well north of 5, and terrible outings this weekend, no real progress. Scott, despite watching innings, still got seriously hurt and pitched to a 4.50 era in majors. Sproat now called up to AAA but do you trust Mets pitching coaches? Butto, hooray, did well but was only briefly at AAA. Lucchesi has been horrid, and Megill also bad in AAA and majors, if you count him. And they traded Stuart, who had some promise. Of course, has been largely a disaster for position players as well with Mauricio and Jett missing season, Gilbert badly hurt and now doing nothing, Parada and Ramirez still off and Acuna with .650 OPS and Baty down to .260 as of tonight…
So I am not among those hailing Stearns, who has a VERY mixed record going back to winter, he has picked up 2nd or 3rd level relievers and, yes, thank god Blackburn had good first start but still has Hauser potential. And Severino now pushing past his own “innings flashpoint.” Tell me where does pitching help come from especially with weak bullpen? Even in pen, Nunez still two weeks away and he came out of nowhere… Garrett terrible since first month and SRF–really?
Left Coast Jerry,
During the SNY telecast last night, they showed Valentine and Gubicza in the booth, and Valentine was very animated for those 10 seconds. Luckily, we could not hear him, but he was wearing that same Felix Millan moustache disguise, so I could only imagine.
And to clarify my earlier point, I am referring to the lack of emotion, not the closeness of the WC races. When I said 500 teams, I meant a lot of teams, not teams around .500.
We lost in 1985 and 1987, and that horrible emotion felt during those seasons, I would not trade for anything. It was just so much fun, if you know what I mean.
I know it’s a cheat by MLB, pinning a playoff value on the league-wide cluster of middling teams that usually have similar records but who before were out of playoff contention except for the ones in a top-to-bottom weak division. But even knowing it’s a cheat, the wildcard race is emotional for me because we’ve seen many a wildcard, including 3rd wildcards, go on long playoff runs, including World Series appearances and WS wins. So the wildcard race has valuable stakes for fans. Scoreboard-watching teams in other divisions doesn’t make it emotionless. Like I said, the wildcard race is like its own closely contested-by-design quasi-division. Do the wildcards undermine the fan value of a division race? Yeah, I think so. But we didn’t expect the Mets to contend with the Braves and Phillies this year. A wildcard was optimistic.
In terms of my fan emotion, the difference this year is following a team that’s in the playoff hunt yet I also know is too flawed to reach the playoffs traditionally. The June version that just needed a few tweaks at the trade deadline, which Stearns delivered, is in them. The May version that wouldn’t be good enough if Stearns gutted the farm system at the trade deadline is in them, too. That makes for an emotional yo-yo or roller coaster, and adds up to one kind of mediocre team that before we could write off as a playoff contender, barring a ‘magical’ late run. Yet we can’t write off the Mets because they’re still in the thick of the wildcard race. Assuming the Phillies stabilize like the Yankees did, unless 3 other wildcard contenders have improved enough to fix their own streakiness and pull away, the Mets will stay in the wildcard race while running hot and cold.
Not only has the WC put a damper on the regular season, because, actually, there is no urgency yet, but if a 3rd WC team makes it to the WS, it puts a damper on the WS as well.
Because:
Fans want to see the BEST of the BEST playing in the championship series, rather than the teams a level below. Since ANYONE can beat anyone in a 5 or 7 game series, these WC teams should not be given the opportunity to get to the WS. Just put 2 nobodies in, and call it the WS.
And here’s the ultimate clincher:
Nobody is really THAT upset right now about the Mets recent struggles, but believe me, if there were no WC safety net, every game would feel like do or die.
We still have time, so ho hum.
If the Mets were a top team, then sure, the wildcards would be a safety net, although this year, not so much, since stumbling into the NL wildcard scrum would be a short step from losing hold of a playoff berth altogether.
It’s relative. Division races have gone down to the wire, too. The Mets aren’t a top team and the wildcards aren’t a safety net for them. The Braves, Diamondbacks, and Padres have been streaky, too, so right now we can tell ourselves the Mets have time and it’s not urgent because one or all of them will likely fall back and reopen a spot even if the Mets go cold again. But maybe they won’t. Maybe a wildcard opens up and the Cardinals reach past the Mets to take it. Right now the Mets are 1.5 games out of the 3rd wildcard. If the Mets fall behind further and join the Cubs and Reds, or even the Pirates and Giants in the wildcard standings–and another bad series will be all it takes–, the urgency will grow. It’s not a 162-game season anymore.
I think we should take this on the road for a series of debates.
Of course, the moderator would have to be Steve Gelbs. Due to the current tastes of the modern baseball fan, he would most likely get better ratings than Bob Costas.
I’ll add one point in agreement.
What if all else were equal right now, particularly the same front-office buying and selling choices, but there’s no wildcard system, the Phillies were stumbling the same way, the Braves had closed to ~5 games, and the Mets were on the Braves’ heels at ~7 games behind? (That’s a big ‘if’ because without the wildcard path to the post-season, Cohen and Stearns might well have chosen a fire sale to reap more prospects, which was a trade deadline option they designed when piecing together the 2024 roster.) 50 games to chase down 7 against the Phillies and Braves is not unrealistic. I agree with you that the purer excitement of that pennant race has been essentially undermined by the muddying addition of 1, then 2, now 3 wildcards.
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Thanks, Eric, for agreeing on that point, all things being equal, of course.
And you are totally correct that had there been no WC, Stearns may just as well have torn everything down and we could have been 15 GB now, with no chance of anything.