Sunday afternoon’s Met affair amounted to an absolutely aggravating abomination of a 3-2 defeat at the hands of the fucking Marlins, the victors’ most accurate appellation. How absolutely aggravating was this game that started at 12:05 PM, itself aggravating? Let me count some of the ways.
Mark Vientos should have scored in the first, but was out on an 8-9-4-2 double play.
Francisco Alvarez didn’t hang onto a relay in the eighth that should have maintained a 2-2 tie.
An ill-timed wild pitch was particularly unhelpful in the seventh, given that it forged that 2-2 tie.
Also, there was an attempt to bunt in the bottom of the ninth that had to work if it was going to be of use (it didn’t, thus it wasn’t).
By my calculation, the Mets hit 400 balls that died at the warning track.
Paul Blackburn and Reed Garrett combined to pick off three baserunners, which falls into that especially aggravating realm of “how do you lose a game in which you pick off three baserunners?”
Brandon Nimmo homered and made a great catch, possibly hurting himself on the latter of those feats.
The whole thing was a drag. It belonged obscured on Roku and deserved to be described to death by Anthony Recker, who could learn from that Odd Couple episode where Oscar and Felix go to a monastery and take a vow of silence.
Four years ago, the Mets and every other MLB team played baseball in front of nobody. It was as strange to live through as it sounds to recall. It sounded even stranger because noise was piped inside each ballpark to replicate a crowd that didn’t exist. Talk about a quiet riot. Potemkin and his village had nothing on the 2020 season.
Ever since that truncated campaign ceased to exist, I’ve been fascinated by the circumstances that surrounded the twenty Mets who became Mets in 2020, many you’d generously classify as having arrived in our Metropolitan midst from out of nowhere. Out of nowhere also pretty well covers how the sixty-game pandemic season unfolded (fittingly, the 26-34 Mets went nowhere). My fascination relates specifically to the way those twenty Mets never heard a cheer from a Citi Field crowd as Mets. Maybe a few of them had been on-site and overheard applause for Mets when they visited as opponents prior to 2020, so they knew how Mets fans made noise, but the positive Queens kind was never directed at them. Ask Chase Utley how it sounds when we greet a player less than warmly — it’s a very distant cousin of “atta boy, Ruben!” or words to that effect.
Starting in 2021, the twenty Silent Generation Mets began to have their individual situations resolved.
2020 Mets team picture?
Two Mets who made their club debut in 2020, starter David Peterson and reliever Miguel Castro, remained Mets, so they were able to experience the singular sensation of being a Metsopotamian object of affection. Maybe not consistently, but at least every now and then. I’m pretty sure we shout words of encouragement toward Peterson to this day. He’s the only member of this cohort who is still a Met.
That leaves eighteen.
Another Met who came aboard in 2020, reliever Chasen Shreve, left but came back in Recidivist fashion in 2022, and we probably liked something he did at some point that year enough to have clapped in his general direction.
That leaves seventeen.
One 2020 Met, starting pitcher Ariel Jurado, played in exactly one game for the 2020 Mets. It was on the road, in Baltimore. He hasn’t appeared in a major league game since. Ariel Jurado slipped into his own Silent Generation Met limbo. To him, Citi Field never got to look familiar never mind sound familiar.
That leaves sixteen.
Another 2020 Met, heretofore lights-out reliever Dellin Betances, was a Met in 2021 for exactly one game. It was also on the road. The four-time Yankee All-Star got hurt and never pitched in the majors again. The last time Betances pitched at Citi Field before 2020 was in a Subway Series game against us on June 9, 2018. One inning, three hitters, all strikeouts. He probably heard too many cheers from too many skewed-priorities people attending that particular game.
That leaves fifteen.
Betances had been a somewhat ballyhooed Hot Stove signing when 2020 loomed as just another season. Then came COVID and it became anything but. Four veterans who showed up to lesser fanfare — infielders Eduardo Nuñez and Brian Dozier, reliever Jared Hughes and lifelong Mets fan/former AL Cy Young winner Rick Porcello — finished their accomplished big league careers as Mets in the worst year one could pick for a farewell. If they tipped their caps en route to eventually announced retirement, it was to tight-lipped cardboard cutouts planted at seats, not actual fans rising to acknowledge tenures that were coming to an end.
That leaves eleven.
Two additional major league careers were not resumed by new-for-2020 Mets, those of outfielder Ryan Cordell and reliever Franklyn Kilomé, neither of whom you would have labeled a veteran during that silent summer. Each young-ish man tried his hand in the minors a little longer. As of this juncture, neither appears en route to Citi Field to serve in a playing capacity despite their respective ages of 32 and 29. (Age is hardly everything in baseball; Adam Ottavino is active at 38.)
That leaves nine.
Thirty-six year-old catcher Robinson Chirinos, who’d been on the MLB scene since 2011 and crouched in a World Series as recently as 2019, wore a Mets uniform in action for a dozen games in 2020, half of those at Citi Field. Then he tried on two more jerseys, those of the Cubs (2021) and the Orioles (2022), playing 112 games in his final two seasons, none in Queens. He has since retired.
That leaves eight.
Now we’re on to my favorite subset of Silent Generation Mets: players who at some point after they were Mets in 2020 and no other year alighted at Citi Field as something else and maybe got to hear some conscientious Mets fans applaud them when their name was announced for the other team. I’d like to think it happened. I know it happened a couple of times when I put my hands together for them. It probably didn’t happen that much. But the opportunity presented itself, and that, I’ve decided, is the important thing.
Here are the seven Silent Generation Mets — along with an asterisked other — who positioned themselves to receive their hypothetical scattered “hey, we remember you” Citi Field cheers from May 2021 through April 2024:
1) Guillermo Heredia, outfielder, Atlanta Braves, May 29, 2021
2) Jake Marisnick, outfielder, Chicago Cubs, June 14, 2021
3) Hunter Strickland, reliever, Milwaukee Brewers, July 5, 2021
*) Chasen Shreve, reliever, Pittsburgh Pirates, July 10, 2021
*Shreve is technically double-dipping here, having become a Met anew in 2022, but it was as a Buc that his aura initially got unmuted
4) Erasmo Ramirez, reliever, Washington Nationals, May 31, 2022
5) Billy Hamilton, outfielder, Miami Marlins, July 7, 2022
6) Andrés Giménez, infielder, Cleveland Guardians, May 19, 2023
7) Michael Wacha, starter, Kansas City Royals, April 12, 2024
That left one heading into this weekend.
Catcher Ali Sanchez, who played five games for the 2020 Mets, strapped on his gear twice for the 2021 Cardinals, but did so no closer to New York than Cincinnati. He did play against us in St. Louis, but I don’t track who The Best Fans In Baseball® applaud. Sanchez’s brief post-Mets big Redbird break didn’t last long. In 2022 and 2023, he bounced among the Cardinal, Tiger, Pirate and Diamondback organizations, never bouncing up to the bigs. His 2024 commenced with him filling the role of Triple-A backstop for the Cubs; forty-one games at Iowa, but no callup to Wrigley. It was the professional equivalent of hiding in the darkness with his beer. Then Chicago picked up somebody named Tomàs Nido, which made Sanchez expendable. The Marlins, in turn, acquired Ali. The Fish visited Citi Field on Friday, August 16, 2024, and they started him behind the plate.
Ali Sanchez came up to bat for Miami in the top of the third, and from my couch, I applauded heartily. Maybe I did that when he played for the Mets in 2020, but not with the same sense of purpose. Once his name was called over the PA system and actual people heard it, Ali Sanchez had now a) been a Met and b) heard the Citi Field crowd — necessarily in that order. Whether the vast majority of Friday’s Citi Field throng recognized the dynamic of this plate appearance by this former Met was beside the point. They were presumably just happy he proceeded to fly out to center on the seventh pitch Sean Manaea threw him. I was happy about that, too, but not only about that. As I counted down from Peterson and Castro in 2021 to Giménez in 2023 and Wacha in 2024, I’d actually been waiting for Ali Sanchez, who first played in Queens on August 10, 2020, when he was 23, to have his Citi Field moment. His real one.
Wherever you are all this time later, Silent Generation Mets, tip your caps if you like. Come on and feel the noise, too. Sorry we couldn’t make it for you where you deserved to hear it four years ago. The world surely didn’t mean to come down with a virus just as you were getting to be Mets.
Only thing I know about the Potemkin village is that it sure contains a lot of Cadillacs.
And any Odd Couple reference is welcome at any time of year, not only at Oscar’s Cap Awards time.
I bet that klutz Nimmo actually hurt himself on that barrel roll into home plate yesterday.
And he also could have hurt himself overrunning 3B yesterday on that Little League triple.
For a skinny guy, he is the most uncoordinated klutz I have ever seen.
We’ve got a few of those. Alvarez missed two months because of an uncoordinated fall on his thumb. Should never have happened. And Pete does great stretches at first base but other times looks unathletic. And yes, Nimmo’s klutz-tumble across home plate was ridiculous.
I’m probably overreacting but this game screams “not quite good enough” to me. Except for starting pitching – Blackburn deserved better – we were not quite good enough in every aspect of the game.
Relief pitching? Not quite good enough.
Defense? The same – you can at least argue, considering Taylor took the wrong route to the ball in the third, that Florida should have scored zero. Runs came off that play. a wild pitch, and Alvarez not holding onto the ball (tough play but again, not quite good enough).
Hitting? We had our chances but did the now customary 1-for-9 RISP hitting with 9 LOB.
And I don’t like to criticize Mendoza because he’s sure pushed the correct buttons a LOT this year but with Blackburn’s last 2 innings being quick and clean I thought he’d come out for the 7th.
Very disappointing. Unfortunately, I think the game reflects what we are right now, what we have been for some time, and what we’re likely to be through the rest of the season. And yes, recency bias. Maybe in a week we’ll have made clutch hits, saved runs defensively and relievers will have locked people down. But for today – ugh.
The relief pitching is good enough when Butto is on call. Diaz has stabilized too. Other than that, the reinforcements have been a disappointment.
I was wondering what happened on the Taylor dive. At first, I criticized him for taking the chance instead of keeping the hit in front of him and playing it on a hop. It turns out Taylor took such a bad route, he needed to dive just to try to stop the ball. I didn’t see how well Nimmo backed up the play, or if he got there late.
A lack of timely hitting and a lame bullpen.
Let the competent starters go seven at least.
The Mets are allowed to win 2-1.
To do that, the Mets need Nunez back ASAP and need him back in his pre-injury form. Brazoban has the stuff to be a high-leverage reliever, but he hasn’t performed like one since the Mets gave him that role.
I’m disappointed in Garrett that he hasn’t adjusted to the league adjusting to him. Hitters are laying off his stuff out of the zone that they were swinging at when the season started, and he’s still throwing the same pitches.
The “silent generation” must refer to the 2024 Mets’ batting averages.
Zanzibar is a great song.
Agreed. Although with 20-20 hindsight, I always snicker at the lyric about Rose knowing he’s such a credit to the game. The Cooperstown curators would vehemently disagree with that assessment.
“Anthony Recker, who could learn from that Odd Couple episode where Oscar and Felix go to a monastery and take a vow of silence.”
Recker always maintained that vow of silence in his playing days whenever he had a bat in his hands.
“Also, there was an attempt to bunt in the bottom of the ninth that had to work if it was going to be of use (it didn’t, thus it wasn’t).”
I disagreed with Mendoza’s call for McNeil to sacrifice bunt in the 9th. That being said, with the call made, I disagreed with McNeil failing to execute the sacrifice bunt, especially since he pulled the bat back and took strike 2 on an eminently buntable (and hittable for that matter) pitch.
Frustrating loss. As you recounted, the Mets should have won the game against a bad team trying to hand them the win. There’s a pile of those this season.
Even so, the Mets won the series. This is what I expect the rest of the way based on their performance since Senga’s calf strain. Frustrating losses with the Mets playing down to bad teams, but not another prolonged losing streak. About .500 ball overall and hope that the other teams in the wildcard scrum, who’ve all been streaky, trip over themselves enough to fall short of the Mets staggering to the finish line. Except right now it’s the Braves staggering with the Mets tripping over themselves enough to fall short of the 3rd wildcard in the Braves’ hands.
At least the Mets aren’t the Pirates, who are spiraling out of the wildcard scrum in a cold streak that’s verging on unrecoverable.