If Shea Langeliers touches home plate with two out in the top of the fourth Thursday, two batters after JJ Bleday’s grand slam, the A’s completely make up the 5-0 deficit that stared at them when the inning started and they are on their way to an exhilarating victory. But Langeliers misses the plate, and after Carlos Mendoza realizes Scott Barry has misread the situation, the call is challenged and overturned, getting Jose Quintana out of the inning. Now it is the Mets with the momentum. They hang on to a 5-4 lead, Luis Torrens stands out as the headiest of catchers for tagging Langeliers despite Barry making with the safe sign, and once Mark Vientos launches his second homer of the day, it’s clear the Mets are the ones heading for exhilaration and victory. It was close there for a minute, but we’re up, 6-4, we’ve got the momentum, and everything’s obviously gonna work out for the contending Mets as they brush aside the also-ran A’s.
[1]Sometimes the mood swings in a completely different direction than you anticipate.
Except everything you think you know about how a baseball game is going to play out based on swings in mood doesn’t show up in the box score if the competing teams don’t cooperate. The A’s didn’t cooperate, scoring a run in the fifth and then two in the sixth. The Mets didn’t do their part at all after Vientos’s second blast. No more runs for New York, and no help whatsoever from a pitching staff that left its control in its lockers. Quintana and five relievers combined to walk eleven. You walk eleven batters — A’s batters or any batters anywhere in the alphabet — you’re setting the table for a dish of well-earned defeat. Requiring three hours and forty-five minutes in this age of pitch clocks and other move-it-along innovations to certify the loss as official was simply the sadistic chef’s kiss to this matinee disaster [2].
So Shea Langeliers (nice name, nice backstory [3]) was out at the plate when he first appeared safe. The A’s won, anyway. Buddy Harrelson was called out at the plate against the A’s in Game Two of the 1973 World Series despite video evidence to the contrary in the pre-replay rule era, and despite Willie Mays having a better angle on Ray Fosse missing the tag than Augie Donatelli. The Mets won that game, anyway, but it still irks.
We didn’t need fresh irk in 2024, but we have it in the form of A’s 7 Mets 6 in the finale to a series that carried echoes of another three-game set at Citi Field versus a California club we were pretty sure we were gonna take two from but didn’t. I speak of the 2022 Mets-Padres Wild Card Series, whose pattern was two-thirds replicated this week. Padres won easily the first night, the Mets won easily the second night. The comparison loses its resonance when one remembers we were bleeping one-hit by Joe Musgrove, Joe Musgrove’s ears, and whoever else came on after Joe Musgrove, but the same bottom line unfurled. We lost two out of three. That series ended our postseason.
This series and its ramifications? The well-honed fan instinct says we’re not going anywhere after playing as we did Thursday and have lately, losing nine of our last fourteen and looking like so many distinct forms of dreck when we lose. Dreck that doesn’t hit in the clutch. Dreck that doesn’t hit at all. Dreck that plays down to the opposition. Dreck that walks the ballpark. Dreck that blows a five-run lead.
Yet Thursday was just one game and the Mets are just two games out of a playoff spot. They keep making playoff spots, thus we are compelled to continue acting as if our proximity to one indicates we could be a playoff team. In the ultimately playoff-bound year of 2016, the Mets played more than a few games like this as summer crested, and my towel was summarily thrown. Soon I was reaching into the linen closet for another towel to clutch, because bad games and rough patches can be overcome across a season’s last quarter no matter that you’re absolutely sure there’s no way your team is capable of getting its act together. The Mets are doing themselves no favors at the moment. They can start being good to themselves by, you know, playing better on a consistent basis. Maybe all they need is one break to go their way…like a run for the opposition disappearing from the scoreboard because a slide is off, a catcher is aware, and the system works.
OK, bad example.